“If you don’t feel deeply confused about AGI risk, something’s wrong” by Dave Banerjee

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Recorded22 Feb 2026

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Epistemic status: I've been thinking about this for a couple months and finally wrote it down. I don't think I'm saying anything new, but I think it's worth repeating loudly. My sample is skewed toward AI governance fellows; I've interacted with fewer technical AI safety researchers, so my inferences are fuzzier there. I more strongly endorse this argument for the governance crowd. I've had 1-on-1's with roughly 75 fellows across the ERA, IAPS, GovAI, LASR, and Pivotal fellowships. These are a mix of career chats, research feedback, and casual conversations. I've noticed that in some fraction of these chats, the conversation gradually veers toward high-level, gnarly questions. "How hard is alignment, actually?" "How bad is extreme power concentration, really?" Near the end of these conversations, I usually say something like: "idk, these questions are super hard, and I struggle to make progress on them, and when I do try my hand at tackling them, I feel super cognitively exhausted, and this makes me feel bad because it feels like a lot of my research and others' research are predicated on answers to these questions." And then I sheepishly recommend Holden's essays on minimal-trust investigations and learning by writing. And [...] ---Outline:(01:35) The thing(02:40) Why this happens(05:29) Why it matters(07:00) What should you do?(09:21) Concluding thoughts The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration. --- First published: February 21st, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wWArLinjvJqozJT8f/if-you-don-t-feel-deeply-confused-about-agi-risk-something-s --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

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