Dean recorded this episode as he was preparing to attend the India AI Impact Summit — the fourth iteration of an annual gathering that has transformed from an intimate AI Safety Summit with heads of state to something resembling a tech industry trade show. The shift in branding, from “safety” to “action” to “impact,” reflects a broader vibe shift in how elites talk about AI risk, and Dean worries that we may have overcorrected.
Dean argues that the mainstream AI governance community is focused on the wrong priorities. While policymakers worldwide draft hundreds of bills on algorithmic discrimination and mental health chatbots, they’re ignoring the genuinely urgent questions about automated AI R&D and catastrophic risk. He supports SB53, California’s new responsible scaling policy law, but thinks the real gap is verification — we need something like financial auditing for AI safety commitments, not Twitter fights over whether OpenAI followed its own responsible scaling policy. The alternative, a Josh Hawley-style licensing regime run by the Department of Energy, strikes Dean as repeating the FDA’s mistakes.
We also discuss a viral video clip of Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) grilling a Waymo executive about Philippines-based remote operators. Tim argues there are legitimate reasons to prefer U.S.-based operators for safety-critical roles. The episode closes with a question that haunts both of us: are we too wealthy and comfortable to tolerate the messiness of another industrial revolution?
