The Opera Game

In 1858, chess prodigy Paul Morphy played the most famous game in history, in an opera box in Paris, mid-performance. He announced his victory to the crowd before anyone could see how he'd win. Because he could see the board in a way no one else could, he knew for certain he'd already won just a few moves into the game.That unknowability is the worst fear of AI doomers: that we're building something that has already won, and we'll never know how.This episode was supposed to be about the literal mechanics of AI killing us. It turned out to be about something stranger: why the people building this technology appear to genuinely believe it might destroy the world — and why that belief hasn't stopped a single one of them.Justin Sinclair writes for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists — the group who calibrates the Doomsday Clock, currently set at 85 seconds to midnight, the closest it's ever been to the apocalypse. Malo Bourgon is CEO of MIRI, the organization that coined the term "AI alignment." Ted Tremper spent two and a half years making a documentary about this, interviewing over 140 people — including three of the five frontier model AI CEOs.Their collective verdict on whether AI will actually cause the apocalypse: maybe. And somehow, that's the most terrifying answer they could have given.The Opera Game is the third episode of an investigation into humanity's oldest fear, and whether artificial intelligence has finally given us reason to take it seriously.We hope you enjoy this episode of our second season of Suspicious Minds. Be sure to follow here, and subscribe to our newsletter for updates: https://agoricmedia.substack.comA Wondermind and Agoric Media ProductionSocials: Agoric Mediahttps://www.instagram.com/agoricmedia/https://www.youtube.com/@agoricmediahttps://www.tiktok.com/@agoricmediahttps://agoricmedia.substack.com/www.agoricmedia.comWondermindhttps://www.instagram.com/officialwondermind/https://www.wondermind.com/Host and Creator: Sean King O’Gradyhttps://www.instagram.com/seankingogrady/https://seankingogrady.substack.com/Guests:- Ian Gold, PhD - Professor and Chair of Philosophy and Professor of Psychiatry, McGill and co-author of Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness: https://amzn.to/4upyA8U- Malo Bourgon - CEO, Machine Intelligence Research Institute - https://intelligence.org/team/malo-bourgon/- Justin Sinclair, PhD - Clinical Psychologist, Writer for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists - https://www.drjustinsinclair.com/background.html- Ted Tremper - Film Producer - https://www.focusfeatures.com/the-ai-doc-or-how-i-became-an-apocaloptimist- Johann Hari - author, Stolen Focus: https://amzn.to/4vAL2mVOther works mentioned in this episode: Empire of AI by Karen Hao: https://amzn.to/4uKwekfIf Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares: https://amzn.to/49gpPW1The Techno Optimist