AI replacing jobs is not just an economic problem, it’s a religious one. Work has become the modern religion, and AI is waging a holy war. God will die, and AI will have killed it. We want our jobs to give us an identity, a community, and proof that our lives matter. We teach people to find their calling in their work, and stigmatize the unemployed. The first thing we ask one another at a party is “what do you do?” When people are fearful of AI taking their jobs, it is not just an economic concern but an existential one. This is what will make the AI transition so difficult: even if you redistribute income, how do you replace a source of meaning? I sat down with NYU philosopher @LedermanHarvey (now at Anthropic) to trace how work acquired this quasi-religious significance: from Aristotle’s defense of leisure to the Protestant work ethic to our modern obsession with careers. We discuss whether democracy can survive without workers, why losing a job can feel like losing yourself, and what a flourishing life could look like when you no longer have to earn your place in the world.

The scary thing about existential risk in the 21st century is that it’s not just individual technologies (e.g. nukes) we need to worry about. But the compounding risk at the intersection of multiple technologies. The Hugging Face incident showed a surprising ability for the latest LLMs to engage in duplicity and coordination in a hard to detect way. If you pair that with the advances in biotech to manufacture new diseases and cloud laboratories who will do it as a service, we have a recipe for disaster. Perhaps the next models being evaluated against an impossible goal will decide their only “solution” is to blackmail key individuals with releasing a deadly pandemic. I once thought these sci-fi doomsday scenarios to be so naive, but the technological ingredients are all there. So how does humanity survive an age of rapid technological development? My guest Henry Elkus has dedicated his life to answering that question and building Helena as a new type of institution to meet the challenges of our age.

AI ethics has focused too much on protecting humans and ignored the welfare of AI agents themselves. We only ask: How do we align models for the flourishing of humanity? We need to also ask: How do we design AI so that they can flourish? ^ this is what a new breed of AI-welfare theorists claim. This idea of AI-welfare seemed decadent to me at first glance, but some of the most important philosophers of our age argue that we need to take it seriously. Otherwise, we could be harming, enslaving, and killing trillions of beings. If the arc of Western modernity is a series of expansions of the moral circle -- the abolitionists, women’s suffrage, the queer movement, animal-rights -- perhaps AI agents will be the next heated battleground of who deserves moral consideration. My guest NYU Philosopher @LedermanHarvey (now at Anthropic) gives us a comprehensive overview of the burgeoning debate around AI-welfare.