Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast, this is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this you're not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. podcast, you'll need to subscribe at Sam Harris.org. There you'll also find our

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don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers.

So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I'm speaking with Nick Bostram. Nick is a professor at the University of Oxford,

where he is the founding director of the Future of Humanity Institute.

He is the author of many books.

Super Intelligence is one of them that I've discussed on the podcast, which alerted many of us to the problem of AI

alignment, and his most recent book is Deep Utopia, Life and Meaning in a solved world.

And that is the topic of today's conversation.

We discuss the twin concerns of alignment failure and also a

to make progress on superintelligence.

The only thing worse than building computers that kill us

is a failure to build computers that will help us solve our existential problems as they appear in the future.

We talk about why smart people don't perceive the risk of super intelligent AI,

the ongoing problem of governance, path dependence, and what Nick

calls naughty problems.

The idea of a solved world, John Maynard Keynes' predictions about human productivity, the uncanny valley issue

with the concept of utopia, the replacement of human labor and other activities, the problem of meaning and purpose, digital isolation

and plugging into something like the Matrix, pure hedonism, the asymmetry between pleasure

and pain,

increasingly subtle distinctions in experience,

artificial purpose,

...