Starcast
Join the waitlist
Suspicious Minds: AI and the Apocalypse
The Opera Game
Coming soon to iPhone. Already have it? “Listen in Starcast” takes you straight there.
On this episode
About this episode
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…