Phil Trammell is an economics postdoc at Stanford University’s Digital Economy Lab, working on questions related to economic growth and AI. He discusses:

• Why Piketty’s thesis about runaway inequality was likely wrong about the past but right about the future

• How full automation turns capital and labour into gross substitutes

• Why catch-up growth between rich and poor countries could end

• How the privatisation of returns is already concentrating wealth

• Why family dynasties and inheritance become far more important in a post-automation economy

• Whether autocratic regimes can outgrow democracies after AGI

• How to measure whether capital is becoming truly self-replicating — and what the data currently shows

Here’s a link to the full transcript.

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Sam Hammond is is Chief Economist at the Foundation for American Innovation. He discusses:

• How collapsing transaction costs could push towards privatised alternatives to government functions

• “Distributed denial of service” attacks against courts and regulators

• What happens when existing laws can be more perfectly enforced with AI

• Estonia’s government-as-API, as a model for AGI-era governance

• Whether 20th-century social democracy depends on 20th-century technology

• The UAE as a preview of post-scarcity governance

• Mormons, religion, and social scaffolding in secular societies

Here’s a link to the full transcript.

ForeCast is Forethought’s interview podcast. You can see all our episodes here.

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Rose Hadshar is a researcher at Forethought.

With Fin Moorhouse, she discusses the recently published “International AGI Project Series”:

• What could an international AGI project look like, and why might governments pursue one?

• Could the first AGI developer become a de facto world government?

• Comparing governance models: UN-led, single-government, private companies, and international coalitions

• The “Intelsat model” – treating AGI as commercial infrastructure rather than a weapon or science project

• Membership and voting structures that might make a US-led coalition viable

• Will MacAskill’s “AGI Convention” proposal

Here’s a link to the full transcript.

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Tom Davidson and Will MacAskill are both researchers at Forethought.

They discuss:

• What is the industrial explosion?

• Why the case for recursive self-improvement is stronger for physical industry than for software

• How fast the physical economy could grow, the case for weekly doubling times, and limits from natural resources

• Three phases of the industrial explosion: AI-directed human labour → autonomous replicators → atomically precise manufacturing

• Why authoritarian regimes might have a structural advantage in the industrial explosion — and whether they could lose the race to AGI, but win the race to industrial dominance

• Could a leading country outgrow the entire world to achieve decisive dominance?

• Why doubling your rival's GDP could mean 30 years of tech advantage — enough for military dominance

• Why does the industrial explosion get ~1% of the attention of the intelligence explosion?

Here’s a link to the full transcript.

ForeCast is Forethought’s interview podcast. You can see all our episodes here.

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Lukas Finnveden is a Research Analyst at Redwood Research.

We talked about:

• Making deals with early schemers

• Being honest with AIs

• Notes on cooperating with unaligned AIs

Here’s a link to the full transcript.

ForeCast is Forethought’s interview podcast. You can see all our episodes here.

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Rose Hadshar (Forethought) and Nora Ammann (ARIA) talk about power concentration, checks and balances, coups, and post-AGI political economy.

Prompted in part by Rose’s recent article for 80,000 Hours on ‘Extreme power concentration’.

Listen to the audio version:

You can read a full transcript here.

ForeCast is Forethought’s interview podcast. You can see all our episodes here.

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Joe Carlsmith is a writer, researcher, and philosopher. He works at Anthropic on the character/constitution/spec for Claude. Before that, he was a senior advisor at Open Philanthropy (now Coefficient Giving).

We talked about:

• The stakes of AI moral status

• Can goodness compete?

You can read a full transcript here.

ForeCast is Forethought’s interview podcast. You can see all our episodes here.

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David Duvenaud is an associate professor at the University of Toronto. He recently organised the workshop on ‘Post-AGI Civilizational Equilibria’ , and he is a co-author of ‘Gradual Disempowerment’. He recently finished an extended sabbatical on the Alignment Science team at Anthropic.

You can read a full transcript here.

ForeCast is Forethought’s interview podcast. You can see all our episodes here.

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Raymond Douglas is a researcher focused on the societal effects of AI. In this episode, we discuss Gradual Disempowerment.

You can read a full transcript here.

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Cullen O’Keefe is Director of Research at the Institute for Law & AI. In this episode, we discuss ‘Law-Following AI: designing AI agents to obey human laws’.

You can read a full transcript here.

ForeCast is Forethought’s interview podcast. You can see all our episodes here.

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Tom Davidson is a Senior Research Fellow at Forethought. In this episode, he discusses concrete mitigations against AI-enabled coups.

Listen to Tom’s appearance on the 80,000 Hours podcast here, and read the original paper here.

You can read a full transcript here.

ForeCast is Forethought’s interview podcast. You can see all our episodes here.

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Will MacAskill discusses his new research series ‘Better Futures’.

You can read a full transcript here.

ForeCast is Forethought’s interview podcast. You can see all our episodes here.

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Peter Salib is an assistant professor of law at the University of Houston, and Simon Goldstein is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Hong Kong. We discuss their paper ‘AI Rights for Human Safety’.

You can read a full transcript here.

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Toby Ord is a Senior Researcher at Oxford University.

We discuss the ‘scaling paradox’, inference scaling and its implications, ways to interpret trends in the length of tasks AI agents can complete, and some unpublished thoughts on lessons from scientific moratoria for the development of AGI.

You can read a full transcript here.

ForeCast is Forethought’s interview podcast. You can see all our episodes here.

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Lizka Vaintrob discusses ‘AI Tools for Existential Security’, co-authored with Owen Cotton-Barratt.

You can read a full transcript here.

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Tom Davidson discusses ‘Will AI R&D Automation cause a Software Intelligence Explosion?’, co-authored with Daniel Eth.

You can read a full transcript here.

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Will MacAskill discusses ‘Preparing for the Intelligence Explosion’, co-authored with Fin Moorhouse.

You can read a full transcript here.

ForeCast is Forethought’s interview podcast. You can see all our episodes here.

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In this first episode of ForCast, Rose Hadshar discusses ‘Intelsat as a Model for International AGI Governance’, co-authored with Will MacAskill.

You can read a full transcript here.

ForeCast is Forethought’s interview podcast. You can see all our episodes here.

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