Toby Ord

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1,415 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 6 Aug

Toby Ord’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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80,000 Hours Podcast · #250 – Toby Ord on where AGI timelines go wrong · 6 Aug 2026 podcast

So it partly depends on the gradualness, but it will, I don't know whether that will quite be enough, but it will definitely make it easier and easier over time to see where this is heading, if it really is heading there.

Yeah, there's definitely a barrier.

But reading, say, Situational Awareness by Leopold Aschenbrenner a couple of years ago when that came out, it painted a very hawkish picture of America maintaining its advantage on AI and using that in order to be able to disarm and subjugate China, which might have seemed very attractive to hawkish people in the administration.

But if you think of it from China's perspective, suppose that there is a technology that will mean that you can unilaterally just disarm this other superpower and possibly have regime change and so on, and finally be able to get all of your policy objectives at this international level with them.

then China would be in a position where its nuclear arsenal, the value of it goes to zero at the time when that system's turned on.

If so, there's a strong incentive to threaten nuclear retaliation for them to even cross lines like approaching that level of power over them.

And so I think that this alternative strategy to having some kind of moratorium, the strategy of, no, no, we get there first and then we kind of lord it over them and use that to disarm them, I think doesn't really work because of this issue.

It's actually very similar to the situation when Ronald Reagan was doing the Star Wars program to defend against a missile defense shield against Soviet missiles.

Where again, once you turn on that shield, it sounds defensive, but once you have that shield, all of a sudden the value of the Soviet nuclear missiles goes to zero.

And so they're strongly incentivized to strike before you do that.

And so all of a sudden you're creating this kind of first strike incentive.

So I think that this is not a good strategy, actually, because it's failing to take into account what's the best response to this strategy, which is ultimately threatening nuclear war.

So I don't think that you can actually just seize this technology, at least not if your opponent's paying attention.

You could maybe only do it if they just don't realize that the option's available to them or something.

But that's usually when Rand or other senior people give strategic advice.

they assume like best response from the opponents.

They try to take this game theoretic approach of like, we're assuming that they're not an idiot.

What should you do?

Whereas I feel that in this case, it's a little bit like moving your queen somewhere where there is a kind of subtle way that the queen could get taken, but you just hope they don't see it.

And that's not how this advice normally actually works.

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