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

For example, that computer is now being used for some kind of humanitarian purpose by an international organization that they both kind of have people on the ground.

And everyone can expect what's going on.

Exactly.

But there are ways like that, where even if you don't know exactly how many chips they have and so on, you could at the very least do one-for-one swap-offs like this.

And that's the kind of thing you come up with one person just thinking for a while about.

about it.

I'm sure there's like, you know, much smarter approaches you could do as well.

And yeah.

So I do think that we just haven't spent much time at all thinking about like ways to verify once the Overton window is broad enough.

Yeah.

So that idea, I think now we're at the stage where at least maybe some of the people listening to this will think, oh yeah, I guess you could do that.

And maybe some other people will be thinking that's insane to destroy or to give away these GPUs to this, you know, neutral party.

But I think it's a kind of thing that you can now think of as like, yeah, I guess you could do that.

Whereas five or 10 years ago, you kind of couldn't even really think about that.

And as we get closer, I think just more and more things, you know, will start to seem like, well, hang on, if the alternative is that, you know, is that my children get killed, yeah, I guess I'm prepared to do this thing.

Like it didn't sound great at first, but now that you point out like seriously bad alternatives, is it better than that?

And that the answer will be like, yeah, it was way better than that.

Yeah.

I mean, this is another thing that goes back to that Yudkowsky kind of idea of an intelligence explosion that's completely automated and happens really quickly.

So because of that, he was imagining, you know, when he first started kind of ringing the alarm bells about AI risk, that it would happen, like it would take you from a

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