Sep 27, 2026 · 1 hr 9 min · 11 segments
Is AI going to kill us all? It sounds like a crazy question, and maybe it is a crazy question. But a lot of serious people are taking it seriously, and since it’s been in the news recently, I thought…
Ian LeslieHost
Why should people like us, by which I mean people who are not technologists, I mean, you're pretty informed about the technology, probably more than me, but obviously you don't work for a lab, you're not an AI engineer.
I think there's a kind of rule of thumb that we have in a society, which is that reality decomposes into different domains like climate change and vaccines and economics etc and the way to learn about the world is just listen to the experts in that domain and i think people have taken that basic model and assumed that it applies to all of these huge questions about ai in some cases i think it's kind of obvious that doesn't really make sense because the questions are about the impact of AI on society, on the economy, on culture and so on.
So if you think about the Industrial Revolution, most of the big questions about the Industrial Revolution weren't about steam engines or the spinning journey and so on.
So most of the big questions were about social and political change, like, you know, revolutions and... adjusting to industrialization and so on.
And if you think about the great thinkers that grappled with the changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution, for the most part, they weren't technologists in a narrow sense of that term.
Not to say that Insights and expertise about the relevant technologies is irrelevant.
A lot of the questions about that also go way beyond the specific details of the technology, and in fact most of the major arguments long precede the development of AI as it exists today.
So we'll probably get into this, but when we're thinking about whether AI poses this huge existential risk, in the future from specifically misaligned rogue AI, you quickly get into debates about the nature of intelligence, about how it is that intelligence relates to power, about motivation, about what kinds of processes mediate between the development of a technology and its impacts in the real world.
And I think those are issues where a wide range of different kinds of expertise is going to be relevant.
Now, that's not to say that people who have really deep technical expertise when it comes to AI might not have some very special kinds of insights.
I think in some cases they clearly do, and you certainly shouldn't dismiss what they say.
Why should people like us, by which I mean people who are not technologists, I mean, you're pretty informed about the technology, probably more than me, but obviously you don't work for a lab, you're not an AI engineer.
I think there's a kind of rule of thumb that we have in a society, which is that reality decomposes into different domains like climate change and vaccines and economics etc and the way to learn about the world is just listen to the experts in that domain and i think people have taken that basic model and assumed that it applies to all of these huge questions about ai in some cases i think it's kind of obvious that doesn't really make sense because the questions are about the impact of AI on society, on the economy, on culture and so on.
So if you think about the Industrial Revolution, most of the big questions about the Industrial Revolution weren't about steam engines or the spinning journey and so on.
So most of the big questions were about social and political change, like, you know, revolutions and... adjusting to industrialization and so on.
And if you think about the great thinkers that grappled with the changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution, for the most part, they weren't technologists in a narrow sense of that term.
Not to say that Insights and expertise about the relevant technologies is irrelevant.
A lot of the questions about that also go way beyond the specific details of the technology, and in fact most of the major arguments long precede the development of AI as it exists today.
So we'll probably get into this, but when we're thinking about whether AI poses this huge existential risk, in the future from specifically misaligned rogue AI, you quickly get into debates about the nature of intelligence, about how it is that intelligence relates to power, about motivation, about what kinds of processes mediate between the development of a technology and its impacts in the real world.
And I think those are issues where a wide range of different kinds of expertise is going to be relevant.
Now, that's not to say that people who have really deep technical expertise when it comes to AI might not have some very special kinds of insights.
I think in some cases they clearly do, and you certainly shouldn't dismiss what they say.
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