Zershaaneh Qureshi

speaker

853 appearances 6 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 17 Sep

Zershaaneh Qureshi’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 — 6 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.

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80,000 Hours Podcast · #248 – Jasmine Sun on what the people building AI really believe · 21 Jul 2026 podcast

Now, if that sounds interesting to you, Jasmine's got a sub stack that I highly recommend checking out.

And she's also a guest contributor for The Atlantic.

Jasmine, thank you so much for joining us.

Thanks for having me.

So you wrote this opinion piece recently for the New York Times, which opened with this really striking observation that most people you know in AI think that the median person is screwed.

Now, I'm assuming what you mean by that is sort of on the more moderate end of things, people are anticipating serious short-term disruption, things like job displacement and so on.

But for some people, in some cases, people are talking about more extreme things like existential scale threats that affect all of humanity and the idea of a permanent underclass.

The people that you're talking to in these circles, you know, they talk about these things, but they don't really have a solution.

And yet they're still going ahead and building the technology.

Can you help us get into their heads a bit here?

Do they feel guilty or worried about the costs that they might impose on society if they mess things up?

You've also described coming across, and this is probably from a smaller subset of people, but some kind of nihilism about AI.

So this kind of idea that it actually doesn't matter if technology serves humans at all.

And I guess like a related idea that

Actually, maybe we should be handing over the reins of the future to AI and away from humans.

So in that sense, it's not just that it doesn't matter if technology doesn't serve humans.

It might actually be a good thing if it's sort of not serving humanity, but serving AI as our successor.

Can you tell us a bit more about those views and sort of how you see them influencing the AI scene these days?

For sure.

I think maybe I'm just a jaded person, but when I hear you talking about people expressing these nihilistic beliefs or these deterministic beliefs, in my head, I'm just like, but surely these people, they don't genuinely believe what they're saying.

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