Will AI Actually Kill Us All? Sam Harris with Eliezer Yudkowsky & Nate Soares (Making Sense #434)

Sam Harris September 16, 2025
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Sam Harris

@samharrisorg

About

Sam Harris is the host of the widely acclaimed Making Sense podcast and the creator of the Waking Up app, which offers a modern approach to living a more examined life through in-depth mindfulness training and secular wisdom. He is also a neuroscientist, philosopher, and author of five New York Times bestsellers, including The End of Faith, The Moral Landscape, Free Will, Lying, and Waking Up. Sam’s work spans a broad range of topics—neuroscience, moral philosophy, religion, political polarization, rationality—but generally focuses on how a deeper understanding of ourselves and the world can transform the way we live. Sam has practiced meditation for over 30 years, studying with Tibetan, Indian, Burmese, and Western teachers in both the United States and abroad. He holds a degree in philosophy from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA.

Video Description

You can find the full episode—and all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast—on YouTube by becoming a channel member here: https://www.youtube.com/@samharrisorg/join You can also subscribe at samharris.org/subscribe. There, you'll get access to full-length episodes of the podcast, and Sam's Substack, where you can engage with the Making Sense community. We offer partial scholarships for those who cannot afford the full subscription price. Sam Harris speaks with Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares about their new book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: The Case Against Superintelligent AI. They discuss the alignment problem, ChatGPT and recent advances in AI, the Turing Test, the possibility of AI developing survival instincts, hallucinations and deception in LLMs, why many prominent voices in tech remain skeptical of the dangers of superintelligent AI, the timeline for superintelligence, real-world consequences of current AI systems, the imaginary line between the internet and reality, why Eliezer and Nate believe superintelligent AI would necessarily end humanity, how we might avoid an AI-driven catastrophe, the Fermi paradox, and other topics. Eliezer Yudkowsky is a founding researcher in the field of AI alignment and the co-founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. With influential work spanning more than twenty years, Yudkowsky has played a major role in shaping the public conversation about smarter-than-human AI. He appeared on Time magazine's 2023 list of the 100 Most Influential People in AI, and has been discussed or interviewed in The New Yorker, Newsweek, Forbes, Wired, Bloomberg, The Atlantic, The Economist, the Washington Post, and other outlets. Website: https://ifanyonebuildsit.com/ X: @ESYudkowsky Nate Soares is the President of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. He has worked in the AI alignment field for over a decade, and previously held positions at Microsoft and Google. Soares is the author of a substantial body of technical and semi-technical writing on AI alignment, including foundational work on value learning, decision theory, and power-seeking incentives in smarter-than-human AIs. Website: https://ifanyonebuildsit.com/ X: @So8res Become a channel member for full-length episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@samharrisorg/join Subscribe to the YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=samharrisorg Follow Sam on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/samharrisorg/ Follow Sam on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Samharrisorg/ For more information about Sam Harris: https://www.samharris.org

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