Bretton Goods Pradyumna Prasad

I spoke with Devashish Dhar, the author of the excellent book India's Blind Spot which talks about India's urbanisation crisis and solutions to it. We talk about


Why does India have a much lower reported rate of urbanisation than the rest of the world?
Explaining the global bias against cities
“Extremely high levels of traffic is caused by poor land policy”
Why are there so many floods in Indian cities?
How to climate-proof Indian cities
“India’s biggest unfulfilled promise is local government”



and much more!


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I interviewed one of the most interesting thinkers today, Tyler Cowen.



We talked about


Why there are such few Singaporean famous people
What Singapore can do to get more weird
Why he's sceptical of an AI-driven singularity
What happens to kids in a post-GPT world
What happens to public intellectuals in a post-GPT world
Why he's optimistic on Kenyan economic growth

And so much more!






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I spoke to Rohit Krishnan the author of the blog Strange Loop Canon about why he is sceptical about the idea that AI will kill us all



We talked about


Why he’s sceptical of AI regulation proposals


Why AI “timelines” are not as meaningful as you think


AI deployment is harder than you think!


The value of incrementalism in AI policy


Why he thinks instrumental convergence is unlikely to happen




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I spoke to Soham Sankaran who runs PopVax, an Indian mRNA vaccine company. Their goal is to build low-cost broadly-protective vaccines to protect against the entire sarbecovirus species. Read Soham's experience here (https://chronicles.popvax.com/p/three-meetings-and-six-million-funerals) as a complement to this episode. Also check out their jobs page (https://jobs.popvax.com/) for opportunities.



This episode includes


How he started PopVax and (went bankrupt in the process)
Why there hasn't been a successful Indian mRNA vaccine yet
Why developing countries can't afford drugs for rare diseases
What they're doing to fix it
Their biggest constraints


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I talked to Dwarkesh Patel of the Lunar Society Podcast about many topics. We talked about:




Why do AI researchers and rationalists disagree about existential risk?


What would happen if Robert Moses ran San Francisco?


Is localism overrated?


What does Effective Altruism get right and wrong?


Which politicians would he like to interview




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I spoke to Trevor Chow about existential risks from AI and techniques to align artificial intelligence with human goals. Specifically we talked about


An introduction to existential risk from Artificial Intelligence
Existing methods for alignment of AI models
Why RLHF might fail in large language models
Whether interpretability research might scale?
New methods being developed to make larger models safer
Regulatory frameworks for the future of AI


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