Dan Williams is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Sussex and an Associate Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI) at the University of Cambridge.

You can find links and a transcript at www.hearthisidea.com/episodes/williams.

We discuss:

• If reasoning is so useful, why are we so bad at it?
• Do some bad ideas really work like ‘mind viruses’? Is the ‘luxury beliefs’ concept useful?
• What's up with the idea of a ‘marketplace for ideas’? Are people shopping for new beliefs, or to rationalise their existing attitudes?
• How dangerous is misinformation, really? Can we ‘vaccinate’ or ‘inoculate’ against it?
• Will AI help us form more accurate beliefs, or will it persuade more people of unhinged ideas?
• Does fact-checking work?
• Under transformative AI, should we worry more about the suppression or the proliferation of counter-establishment ideas?

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Tamay Besiroglu is a researcher working on the intersection of economics and AI. He is currently the Associate Director of Epoch AI, a research institute investigating key trends and questions that will shape the trajectory and governance of AI.

You can find links and a transcript at www.hearthisidea.com/episodes/besiroglu

In this episode we talked about open source the risks and benefits of open source AI models. We talk about:

• The argument for explosive growth from ‘increasing returns to scale’
• Does AI need to be able to automate R&D to cause rapid growth?
• Which theories of growth best explain the Industrial Revolution; and what do they predict from AI?
• What happens to human incomes under near-total job automation?
• Are regulations likely to slow down frontier AI progress enough to prevent this? Might AI go the way of nuclear power?
• Will AI hit on resource or power limits before explosive growth? Won't it run out of data first?
• Why aren't academic economists more interested in the prospect of explosive growth, if indeed it is so plausible?

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Jacob Trefethen oversees Open Philanthropy’s science and science policy programs. He was a Henry Fellow at Harvard University, and has a B.A. from the University of Cambridge.

You can find links and a transcript at www.hearthisidea.com/episodes/trefethen

In this episode we talked about open source the risks and benefits of open source AI models. We talk about:

• Life-saving health technologies which probably won't exist in 5 years (without a concerted effort) — like a widely available TB vaccine, and bugs which stop malaria spreading
• How R&D for neglected diseases works —
• How much does the world spend on it?
• How do drugs for neglected diseases go from design to distribution?
• No-brainer policy ideas for speeding up global health R&D
• Comparing health R&D to public health interventions (like bed nets)
• Comparing the social returns to frontier (‘Progress Studies’) to global health R&D
• Why is there no GiveWell-equivalent for global health R&D?
• Won't AI do all the R&D for us soon?

You can get in touch through our website or on Twitter. Consider leaving us an honest review wherever you're listening to this — it's the best free way to support the show. Thanks for listening!