66 episodes

Discussions with CSPI scholars and leading thinkers in science, technology, and politics.

www.cspicenter.com

CSPI Podcast CSPI

    • Science
    • 4.7 • 38 Ratings

Discussions with CSPI scholars and leading thinkers in science, technology, and politics.

www.cspicenter.com

    The Threat of AI Regulation with Brian Chau

    The Threat of AI Regulation with Brian Chau

    Brian Chau writes and hosts a podcast at the From the New World Substack, and recently established a new think tank, the Alliance for the Future.
    He joins the podcast to discuss why he’s not worried about the alignment problem, where he disagrees with “doomers,” the accomplishments of ChatGPT versus DALL-E, the dangers of regulating AI until progress comes to a halt in the way it did with nuclear power, and more. With his background in computer science, Brian takes issue with many of those who write on this topic, arguing that they think in terms of flawed analogies and know little about the underlying technology. The conversation touches on a previous CSPI discussion with Leopold Aschenbrenner, and the value of continuing to work on alignment.
    Brian’s view is that AI doomers are making people needlessly pessimistic. He believes that this technology has the potential to do great things for humanity, particularly when it comes to areas like software development and biotech. But the post-World War II era has seen many examples of government hindering progress, and AFF is dedicated to stopping that from happening with artificial intelligence.
    Listen to the conversation here, or watch the video here.
    Links
    Donate to AFF
    AFF manifesto
    Brian on diminishing returns to machine learning, and discussing AI with Marc Andreessen
    Vaswani et al. on transformers
    Limits of current machine learning techniques


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    • 1 hr 12 min
    Ideology, Trade, and War | Andrew Roberts & Richard Hanania on Napoleon

    Ideology, Trade, and War | Andrew Roberts & Richard Hanania on Napoleon

    Andrew Roberts (website, follow on X) is a historian, Visiting Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and a member of the House of Lords. He joins the podcast to talk about his Napoleon: A Life.
    The conversation begins with a discussion of different counterfactuals regarding ways in which Napoleon might have been able to stay in power, which leads to Roberts explaining his view that the wars of the era could be understood at least in part as resulting from a rejection of free trade. Other topics include:
    * Meritocracy as a guiding principle of the French Revolution and a justification for Napoleon’s regime
    * Napoleon’s personal magnetism and why men were willing to follow him
    * The relationship with Josephine, and whether or not it influenced any of his political decision
    * Whether Napoleon was in fact the greatest general of his time
    See also Hanania’s audio review of the Ridley Scott film, and Roberts’ reviews in Commentary and The Times. For an edited transcript of this conversation, see here.


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    • 47 min
    Heading Towards the Fiscal Cliff | Brian Riedl & Richard Hanania

    Heading Towards the Fiscal Cliff | Brian Riedl & Richard Hanania

    Brian Riedl is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, focusing on budget, tax, and economic policy. His previous jobs include chief economist to Senator Rob Portman (R-OH), and positions on the Marco Rubio and Mitt Romney presidential campaigns.
    He joins the podcast to talk about the financial future of the United States, with a special focus on entitlements. Medicare is projected to run out by 2031, and Social Security only two years later. Because of politicians kicking the can down the road for so long, this will mean that the federal government will at that point have to either implement massive benefit cuts for seniors or significantly raise taxes across the board.
    Brian talks about his experience in Washington, the history of negotiations over the debt, and what politicians say when you bring up these facts. We appear to be in an undesirable equilibrium, where everyone’s incentive is to ignore the issues involved, while the status quo is leading us towards disaster. Despite liberals wanting to tax the rich and conservatives calling for a cut to foreign aid and non-entitlement forms of domestic spending, the numbers for such proposals don’t add up. We will either get entitlement spending under control, or become taxed at the level of Europeans.
    In one important way, we will actually be worse off than Europe, because their welfare states pay for services and benefits that go to families across a wide section of the population. We are potentially building a US welfare state that will have high taxes primarily to funnel money to the elderly. The fact that older Americans are richer than those who will be supporting them makes the future we are moving towards even more absurd.
    Links
    Brian Riedl: chart book on spending, report on the limits of taxing the rich, CNN op-ed on interest rates, NYT op-ed on Biden’s promises on entitlements
    Brian’s X page, Manhattan Institute website


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    • 54 min
    No Need to Argue. Just Build | Niklas Anzinger & Richard Hanania

    No Need to Argue. Just Build | Niklas Anzinger & Richard Hanania

    Niklas Anzinger is the founder and General Partner of Infinita, the first Próspera-based VC fund, which invests in founders overcoming regulatory capture in crypto, biotech and hardware through network states and startup cities. He’s also one of the 100 or so residents of Próspera.
    This was quite an optimistic conversation. The title of the podcast comes from the last thing Niklas said, which was that you don’t actually need attention or to talk about grand projects, but just to show the world what you can do.
    Niklas is part of the charter city movement, which seeks to build hubs of innovation and progress while bringing the rule of law and economic development to poorer regions of the world. In this eventful conversation, Richard and Niklas touch on
    * The mechanics of governance in Próspera
    * Getting around red tape and becoming a hub of medical innovation
    * Amenities and quality of life in the city
    * Upcoming conferences and events
    Despite a new government in Honduras that is hostile to charter cities, Niklas is optimistic that they will be able to continue operating. He and Richard also talk about potential medical breakthroughs that Próspera might help bring about, like bacteria that remove cavities from your mouth, and a currently available gene therapy that may make your muscles and bones stronger.
    Links
    Niklas on X, his Substack, RSS for his podcast
    The Ultimate Guide to Próspera
    Alex Ugorji on X
    Próspera website
    Ciudad Morazán
    Infinita Manifesto
    Scott Alexander on Próspera, Part I and Part II
    Mark Lutter on the CSPI podcast
    Marc Andreessen, The Techno-Optimist Manifesto
    Documentary on medical tourism in Próspera; DW report, with appearance from Niklas
    Upcoming Events
    Nov 3-5: Crypto Futurism & Legal Engineering 2023 - A Próspera Builders’ Summit
    Nov 17-19: DeSci & Longevity Biotech 2023 - A Próspera Builders' Summit
    Jan 6-Mar 1: Vitalia - Starting the Frontier City of Life


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    • 57 min
    Propaganda and Power | Chris Rufo & Richard Hanania

    Propaganda and Power | Chris Rufo & Richard Hanania

    Chris Rufo joins the podcast to talk about his new book, America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything.
    Rufo begins by talking about his background and his theory of political change. The conversation then shifts to his new book, the strengths of Ron DeSantis as an administrator, and finally what he’s doing on the board of the New College of Florida. Topics include:
    * Where did all of the crazy ideas that seem to have taken over institutions in the last few years come from?
    * What took conservatives so long to wake up to the problem?
    * Did Rufo end up liking the intellectuals he was studying?
    * What are the connections between left-wing ideas and civil rights law?
    * How do conservatives reach “good liberals” within institutions?
    See the transcript of the conversation at the Richard Hanania Newsletter.
    Listen in podcast form or watch the conversation on YouTube.
    Links:
    * Richard Hanania, The DeSantis Revolution
    * Politico profile on the relationship between Rufo and DeSantis
    * Rufo, America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything.
    * Rufo video on the trans movement and “nullification” surgery, discusses his theory of political change
    * Hanania, The Origins of Woke (forthcoming book)
    * Robert Rector on black-white gaps
    * The Atlantic giving Rufo his due


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    • 1 hr 20 min
    AI Alignment as a Solvable Problem | Leopold Aschenbrenner & Richard Hanania

    AI Alignment as a Solvable Problem | Leopold Aschenbrenner & Richard Hanania

    In the popular imagination, the AI alignment debate is between those who say everything is hopeless, and others who tell us there is nothing to worry about.
    Leopold Aschenbrenner graduated valedictorian from Columbia in 2021 when he was 19 years old. He is currently a research affiliate at the Global Priorities Institute at Oxford, and previously helped run Future Fund, which works on philanthropy in AI and biosecurity.
    He contends that, contrary to popular perceptions, there aren’t that many people working on the alignment issue. Not only that, but he argues that the problem is actually solvable. In this podcast, he discusses what he believes some of the most promising paths forward are. Even if there is only a small probability that AI is dangerous, a small chance of existential risk is something to take seriously.
    AI is not all potential downsides. Near the end, the discussion turns to the possibility that it may supercharge a new era of economic growth. Aschebrenner and Hanania discuss fundamental questions of how well GDP numbers still capture what we want to measure, the possibility that regulation strangles AI to death, and whether the changes we see in the coming decades will be on the same scale as the internet or more important.
    Listen in podcast form here, or watch on YouTube.
    Links:
    * Leopold Aschenbrenner, “Nobody’s on the Ball on AGI Alignment.”
    * Collin Burns, Haotian Ye, Dan Klein, and Jacob Steinhardt, “Discovering Latent Knowledge in Language Models Without Supervision.”
    * Kevin Meng, David Bau, Alex Andonian, and Yonatan Belinkov, “Locating and Editing Factual Associations in GPT.”
    * Leopold’s Tweets:
    * Using GPT4 to interpret GPT2 .
    * What a model says is not necessarily what’s it’s“thinking” internally.


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    • 1 hr 2 min

Customer Reviews

4.7 out of 5
38 Ratings

38 Ratings

MoonEmoji.jpg ,

good stuff

dudes rock

Astachelek ,

Excellent

Incisive minds on a variety of topics; heterodox thought with rigor. With the IDW having grown stale and needing to maintain their invites to the dinner party circuit, Richard is the antidote to that.

Skateedge ,

Learning something from this show

I don’t know much about statistics and social science but this is helping me divide what I read into different slices. I like the guests who haven’t finished their books, so they are not saying the same thing in 20 other podcasts.

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