Brian Christian is a bestselling author with a particular knack for accurately communicating difficult or technical ideas from both mathematics and computer science.

The 80,000 Hours team found his new book The Alignment Problem to be an insightful and comprehensive review of the state of the research into making advanced artificial intelligence useful and reliably safe, and we thought he'd be a great person to introduce the problem.

This episode first broadcast on the regular 80,000 Hours Podcast feed on March 5, 2021. Some related episodes include:

• #44 – Dr Paul Christiano on how OpenAI is developing real solutions to the 'AI alignment problem', and his vision of how humanity will progressively hand over decision-making to AI systems
• #3 – Dr Dario Amodei on OpenAI and how AI will change the world for good and ill
• #31 – Prof Allan Dafoe on defusing the political and economic risks posed by existing AI capabilities
• #47 – Catherine Olsson & Daniel Ziegler on the fast path into high-impact ML engineering roles

Series produced by Keiran Harris.