Robin Hanson is one of the most original and relentlessly contrarian thinkers working at the intersection of economics, artificial intelligence, rationality, governance, and the long-term future. He is an economist at George Mason University, a former research associate at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, and the inventor or early developer of several influential ideas, including prediction markets, the Logarithmic Market Scoring Rule, Futarchy, and the Great Filter hypothesis. Before becoming an economist, he worked on artificial intelligence, Bayesian statistics, and related technologies at organizations including NASA and Lockheed. He is also the author of The Age of Em and co-author of The Elephant in the Brain.
In this episode of The Roman Forum, we range across almost everything Robin has spent his career thinking about. We revisit his famous debate with Eliezer Yudkowsky over whether artificial intelligence will “foom” into superintelligence, and ask whether fifteen years of subsequent AI progress has vindicated either side. Robin explains why he remains skeptical of a sudden intelligence explosion, while accepting a very different possibility: that advanced AI may eventually become humanity’s more powerful descendants and ultimately replace us.
We debate AI alignment, existential risk, rationality, cryonics, and what Robin believes the AI safety community is getting fundamentally wrong. His central challenge is provocative: perhaps we should stop thinking of future AIs primarily as alien rivals and start thinking of them as descendants. Whether that framing makes the future safer, more dangerous, or simply stranger is one of the central disagreements of this conversation.
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