Will Marshall

speaker

244 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 31 Jul

Will Marshall’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.

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Freakonomics Radio · 683. In the New Space Race, Who Makes the Rules? · 31 Jul 2026 podcast

A baby learns through interacting with the physical world by having senses, eyes and ears and so on, and actuators, arms and legs and touch and so on.

And interacting with the world, it learns, it becomes intelligent and ultimately self-aware and conscious.

I think the same of AI.

We want it to care about life on the earth.

Well, people tend to care more about things they know more about.

My partner's into ornithology, and as we've learned more about birds, their calls, their marks, their different types, you don't just look at, oh, there's some birds over there.

I start going, oh, there's two robins, two what have you.

And

you care more about them intrinsically.

So I hope that as we train AI on all the beautiful deltas of the earth and the forests of the earth and the river systems and so on,

It will care more about the Earth, the humans, the rest of life on the Earth.

Now, that's very speculative, but I haven't seen a good thesis for how we ensure AI alignment.

And I think that's part of the puzzle, potentially.

You asked about the Fermi paradox.

Look, fundamentally, the Fermi paradox is the universe is really large, there's lots of opportunity for life, why haven't we seen the aliens yet?

Roughly speaking, I'll spare you the maths, there's about a thousand billion billion Earth-like planets, that is, planets that look like the Earth in terms of geology, liquid water and all that.

That's about a hundred billion Earth-like planets for every human on the Earth.

That's just a vast, vast number.

We've looked at loads and found lots of planets around nearby star systems, and none of them look as good as the Earth.

None of them have we found any signs of life yet.

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