ethics

Bloomberg Technology interviews Google engineer Blake Lemoine about the experiments that led him to believe LaMDA was sentient and why he was placed on administrative leave. He also raises concerns about AI ethics at Google.

A 2023 University of Toronto conversation between Geoffrey Hinton and Fei-Fei Li on responsible AI development. They look back at the history of deep learning and ImageNet and discuss the ethics and risks of AI.

The full 1971 Dutch television debate between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault on human nature, with subtitles. They discuss creativity, knowledge, power and politics.

A two-minute clip of Richard Feynman explaining why he considers much of social science pseudoscience. He stresses how easy it is to fool yourself and how much care real knowledge takes.

Slavoj Zizek and Paul Holdengraber discuss surveillance and whistleblowers at the International Authors' Stage, ranging over Snowden, Assange, Pussy Riot and humor.

A short clip of Richard Feynman answering an interviewer's question about how magnets work, in which he explains why a why-question has no simple answer without a shared frame of reference.

Noam Chomsky talks with the University of Washington's Upon Reflection about how languages change over time, why a national language is a modern idea, and how language is a system of communication rooted in human nature.

Peter Robinson interviews Peter Thiel at the Hoover Institution about Thiel's essay The Straussian Moment. Thiel discusses how people trust the will more than the intellect and reason, and how the question of human nature has been abandoned.

Daniel Schmachtenberger discusses why the information ecology is damaged and what healthy public sensemaking would take. The conversation ties this to the meaning crisis and to improving discourse.

A 1952 filmed interview in which Romney Wheeler talks with philosopher Bertrand Russell at his home in Surrey. Russell discusses his outlook and reflects on how the world changed over the first half of the century.

Physicist Roger Penrose and philosopher William Lane Craig discuss the origin of the universe on the Unbelievable? show. Topics include Penrose's three realms of reality, conformal cyclic cosmology and whether fine tuning points to a creator.

Mike Wallace interviews Aldous Huxley in 1958 about the warnings in Brave New World, including mass persuasion, overpopulation and voluntary totalitarianism.

An interview with Nick Bostrom at Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute presenting his simulation argument: at least one of three propositions about posthuman civilizations and ancestor simulations must be true.

Gregory Chaitin is interviewed on Closer To Truth about whether mathematics is invented or discovered. He gives a nuanced view that ties the question to the nature of reality.

Lex Fridman interviews economist Richard Wolff, a Marxist, about Marxism, communism, capitalism and worker cooperatives. The conversation runs nearly three hours.

A five-minute clip in which Erich Fromm asks whether the purpose of work is just making money. He argues that white-collar workers end up selling their personality, relating to others the way goods relate to each other on a market, and he points to creative pleasure, participation and usefulness to society as what work could offer instead.

A two-minute 1981 interview clip in which Richard Feynman answers an artist friend who claims science takes the beauty out of a flower. Feynman argues that understanding adds to beauty and mystery.

A /noclip interview with Tarn Adams of Bay 12 Games about Dwarf Fortress: where the ASCII simulation came from, how it works, and the plans for its Steam release. It includes his telling of the famous bug in which cats were poisoned by alcohol.

An Ars Technica War Stories episode in which Richard Garriott and Starr Long describe Ultima Online's planned virtual ecology and how players wrecked it. Players slaughtered the animals and also broke the in-game economy.

FTC Chair Lina Khan sits down with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show to discuss the agency's work protecting consumers from unfair business practices. Topics include the FTC's antitrust lawsuit against Amazon, healthcare industry actions, and whether tech companies are racing to control AI.

Lex Fridman interviews chip architect Jim Keller about the future of computing, AI, life and consciousness. Topics include CPU design, branch prediction and why imperfect designs often win.

A five-hour Lex Fridman interview with John Carmack covering Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, programming, games and rockets.

Lucas Pope, creator of Return of the Obra Dinn, explains in Ars Technica's War Stories how localizing the game's logbook nearly sank the project.

IGN plays through the first episode of the original Doom with its creator John Romero providing commentary. Romero shares stories, design secrets and behind-the-scenes details about the levels, including E1M1.

A podcast episode in which GPT-4 red teamer Nathan Labenz describes using the model before release, finding it human-level but not human-like, and discussing its weaknesses and worrying capabilities. It closes with speculation about GPT-5.

A 42-minute CBS interview with Geoffrey Hinton at the Vector Institute in 2023, covering the history of neural networks and the present and future of AI. He discusses AGI timelines and whether language models truly understand.

Computerphile interviews AI safety researcher Rob Miles about ChatGPT: how it was trained with human feedback, why it tends to produce confident nonsense, and where it may or may not be dangerous.

Lex Fridman interviews Marcus Hutter of DeepMind about universal artificial intelligence, AIXI, Kolmogorov complexity, Solomonoff induction and the idea of intelligence as compression.

A Bankless podcast interview with Paul Christiano of the Alignment Research Center on the AI alignment problem and possible solutions. It also covers his views on how an AI takeover might unfold.

Dwarkesh Patel interviews Richard Sutton, reinforcement learning pioneer, Turing Award winner and author of The Bitter Lesson. Sutton argues LLMs are a dead end because they cannot learn on the job, and that continual learning from experience will require a new architecture.

Stripe's John Collison interviews Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei about growth to around $5 billion ARR, model economics, agentic AI and vitalism.

Lex Fridman's long interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman about GPT-4, ChatGPT, and the future of AI. Topics include models as reasoning engines, AI risk, and consciousness.

A Vanity Fair Summit conversation between Elon Musk and Sam Altman, moderated by Andrew Ross Sorkin. They discuss the future of technology, including AI and the simulation hypothesis.

A 2019 extended interview in which Connie Loizos talks with Sam Altman about his work, OpenAI's capped-profit structure, its mission toward safe artificial general intelligence, and criticisms the organization faces.

Dwarkesh Patel interviews OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever on time to AGI, what comes after generative models, data limits, alignment, and competing with Google. The title centers on whether next-token prediction could surpass human intelligence.

Part two of a StrictlyVC interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, focused on AI. He discusses regulation, commodification of AI, Google's reluctance to release its own models, and best- and worst-case futures.

A very long livestream in which Ron Gilbert and Frank Cifaldi look at the making of The Secret of Monkey Island, including its SCUMM source code, which they edit and recompile live.

Lex Fridman interviews OpenAI CEO Sam Altman about GPT-4, GPT-5, Sora, the OpenAI board saga, Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever, power and AGI. The conversation runs nearly two hours.

Dwarkesh Patel interviews Andrej Karpathy on why reinforcement learning is flawed, why AGI may blend into steady GDP growth, why self-driving took so long, and the future of education. The conversation runs about two and a half hours.