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 · #246 – Sneha Revanur on how a small team of activists helped pass America's landmark AI safety laws · 8 Jul 2026 podcast

But nowadays, you're particularly concerned about existential scale risks from future, more advanced AI systems.

Can you talk us through how that happened?

A lot of people, though, who we come across who, like you, are anticipating that AI is going to get much more capable and pose these catastrophic risks.

So things like losing control over AI systems or AI sort of extremely concentrating power within society.

A lot of the people who are worried about these things are preoccupied.

particularly concerned about the prospect of shorter timelines.

So the thought here is that AI will advance rapidly enough that we might be in very serious trouble in just a few years.

Now, the politics world moves like notoriously slowly and unpredictably.

So I kind of want to know how confident you are that this legislative route that ENCODE is taking can actually be successful if we do get to AGI in just a few years, or if in fact your efforts are mostly targeting worlds where we have more time to act.

Yeah, it occurs to me that trying to tackle the AI issues that you care about, you could have taken a more conventional policy route for doing this.

So you could have worked in a government agency or become a congressional staffer or something like that.

And it does seem like there are some downsides to trying to change things from the outside through civil society.

You know, you don't get to be literally in the room when the details of a bill are being decided, for example.

So there are these state laws that you've helped to pass in California and New York as two examples, SB 53 and the RAISE Act.

I'm wondering whether you think

you'd have been able to shape these bills more effectively if you'd been, say, working as a staffer for the legislators behind them.

Yeah.

So then what do you think the downsides are of the route that you've taken versus a more conventional inside track route?

Yeah, it's interesting to hear you talk about this because it feels like quite a contrast from the ENCODE that was kind of set up in 2020.

Back then, you were this sort of extremely, like genuinely very grassroots outside organization.

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