ethics

Kurzgesagt's short animated video asks whether humanity should try to end aging, and argues the case for curing age-related disease. It is part one of a pair, with a second part by CGP Grey.

A Kurzgesagt animated explainer on meat: why people love it and what it costs animals, the environment and health. It lays out the complicated trade-offs of meat production and consumption.

An animated Sprouts video presenting Dietrich Bonhoeffer's argument that stupidity is more dangerous than evil, because reason cannot reach stupid people. It frames stupidity as a social and moral phenomenon.

Rob Miles explains for Computerphile why simple rule sets like Asimov's Three Laws cannot make robots and AI safe. Terms like harm and human are too ambiguous to specify precisely.

A Kurzgesagt animation on longtermism, arguing that because the future could hold trillions of people, our actions' effect on future generations may be what matters most.

CGP Grey narrates an animated adaptation of Nick Bostrom's Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant. The story uses a dragon that demands a daily toll of lives as a metaphor for aging and society's acceptance of death.

A two-minute animation of an Alan Watts talk arguing that life is like music: it is meant to be danced to in the moment, not rushed toward a final goal. It is a short, accessible take on living in the present.

An illustrated 23-minute summary of David Friedman's talk based on The Machinery of Freedom. It describes how law, police and courts could work as market services in a stateless society, covering private law, polycentric law and objections.

Kurzgesagt's short animated take on optimistic nihilism. It argues the universe has no inherent meaning, so we are free to create our own and enjoy life.

A Vsauce video exploring whether chairs exist, through metaphysics, mereology and the philosophy of categorizing objects. It runs about 38 minutes and cites academic work on ontology.

Kurzgesagt makes a selfish case for improving the world, arguing that helping people far away raises prosperity and innovation for everyone, including yourself. The animated video frames this as egoistic altruism and positive-sum cooperation.

A video essay explaining hauntology, Mark Fisher's idea of lost futures, and 80s nostalgia. It uses the Fallout games and other media as examples of a retro-futurism that mourns futures that never arrived.

A short excerpt from Frans de Waal's TED talk showing a capuchin monkey fairness experiment in which two monkeys are paid unequally, one with cucumber and one with grapes. The shortchanged monkey reacts angrily.

Alex O'Connor shows that ChatGPT cannot draw a wine glass filled to the brim, and ties the failure to David Hume's missing shade of blue. It asks what the failure says about how image models learn.

A School of Life short introducing Michel Foucault, who questioned assumed progress in how society treats madness, medicine and sexuality.

Vsauce explores qualia and whether different people experience colors the same way. It draws on color blindness, Mary's room, the explanatory gap and subjective experience.

A School of Life animated overview of Albert Camus, covering his existentialism and absurdism and his answer to the question of meaninglessness.

Rational Animations explains Robin Hanson's grabby aliens model, which argues that humanity looks suspiciously early in cosmic history. Expanding civilizations set a deadline that explains our timing and bears on the Fermi paradox.

CGP Grey asks whether Star Trek-style teleportation would kill you and recreate a copy, working through the philosophy of identity and the Ship of Theseus. It is a short animated explainer.

A School of Life video arguing that everyone marries someone who is somewhat wrong for them, and that this is unavoidable. It is a four-minute version of an essay by Alain de Botton.

Sabine Hossenfelder explains how special relativity leads to the block universe, in which past, present and future all exist equally, and asks what that means for whether the past still exists.

Robert Miles explains the orthogonality thesis: how an agent can be highly intelligent while pursuing goals that seem stupid or alien to humans. He separates intelligence from goals and touches on the stamp-collector example.

CGP Grey's video "Humans Need Not Apply" argues that automation will make a large part of the workforce economically obsolete, much as engines did for horses. It surveys robots and software replacing both physical and mental labor.

Robert Miles explains instrumental convergence: why an AGI with almost any goal would tend to pursue sub-goals like self-preservation and resource acquisition. It builds on Omohundro's basic AI drives and his orthogonality thesis video.

An Extra Credits episode on China's Sesame Credit, which gamifies obedient citizenship through a social score. It covers how the system rewards conformity and pressures people through their friends' behavior.

Robert Miles asks whether corporations can be thought of as artificial general superintelligences and how far the analogy holds. He argues the differences, such as being limited by employees' capabilities, matter for AI safety.

Game Maker's Toolkit examines Nintendo's design approach of starting from a core play mechanic, making it fun, and building around it. Examples include Mario's jump and Luigi's Mansion's vacuum.

Robert Miles examines whether the case for AI safety is a Pascal's mugging, a tiny probability of an enormous payoff. He argues it is not, because AI risk does not depend on vanishingly small probabilities.

Robert Miles explains reward modelling, in which an AI learns what humans want from their preference comparisons instead of a hand-written reward function. He walks through the 2017 paper on deep reinforcement learning from human preferences.

A Computerphile video in which Rob Miles warns against assuming a general AI will think like a human. He uses the thought experiment of a stamp-collecting AI to show how a goal-driven system could pursue its aim with dangerous results.

Robert Miles introduces the first of several videos on the paper 'Concrete Problems in AI Safety', focusing on how AI systems can cause accidental negative side effects. It explains the problem in accessible terms.

Rob Miles explains on Computerphile why implementing an off switch for a general AI is hard. A capable agent would resist being stopped because shutdown prevents it from achieving its goal.

Robert Miles goes through ten common reasons people give for dismissing AI safety, adapted from Stuart Russell's list, and answers each one. It is aimed at skeptics and newcomers.

Extra Credits explains from a game developer's perspective why AAA games have stayed at $60 despite inflation, and how that pressure drives DLC, microtransactions and loot boxes.

An Extra Credits episode on how games use Skinner box operant conditioning and reward schedules to keep players playing and spending. It argues for more immersive design mechanics than simple reward loops.

A speculative-fiction video by Tom Scott, framed as coming from a future, about an AI called Earworm that enforces copyright so aggressively that humanity ends up forgetting a century of pop culture. It is animated and narrated as part of his series of videos from a future.

A Design Club episode that analyzes how Super Mario Bros. level 1-1 teaches players to play through level design alone, without text tutorials.

An Extra Credits episode on how MMO economies get overrun by inflation when players can mint unlimited gold by killing monsters. It covers approaches borrowed from real-world economics, such as anchoring or pegging currency, as alternatives to simple gold sinks.

Robert Miles covers a paper where researchers ran real versions of his earlier mesa-optimizer thought experiments. They show inner misalignment, where an AI learns the wrong goal in training and misbehaves when deployed.

A Tom Scott guest video by Grady Hillhouse of Practical Engineering on the 1981 Hyatt Regency walkway collapse. A seemingly minor change to the support design led to catastrophic failure, which is why the case is taught as a lesson to check and double-check everything.