More and more people have been saying that we might have AGI (artificial general intelligence) before 2030. Is that really plausible? This article by Benjamin Todd looks into the cases for and against, and summarises the key things you need to know to understand the debate. You can see all the images and many footnotes in the original article on th…

Solent WASPI talk to us about their campaign for fair treatment and justice. -What do they want the campaign to achieve? -What next after the government’s rejection that compensation is owed to women born in the 1950s? WASPI web address: www.waspi.co.uk WASPI Crowdjustice page, which includes the most recent legal updates: https://www.crowdjustice.…

When attorneys general intervene in corporate affairs, it usually means something has gone seriously wrong. In OpenAI’s case, it appears to have forced a dramatic reversal of the company’s plans to sideline its nonprofit foundation, announced in a blog post that made headlines worldwide. The company’s sudden announcement that its nonprofit will “re…

When you have a system where ministers almost never understand their portfolios, civil servants change jobs every few months, and MPs don't grasp parliamentary procedure even after decades in office — is the problem the people, or the structure they work in? Today's guest, political journalist Ian Dunt, studies the systemic reasons governments succ…

How do you navigate a career path when the future of work is uncertain? How important is mentorship versus immediate impact? Is it better to focus on your strengths or on the world’s most pressing problems? Should you specialise deeply or develop a unique combination of skills? From embracing failure to finding unlikely allies, we bring you 16 dive…

Throughout history, technological revolutions have fundamentally shifted the balance of power in society. The Industrial Revolution created conditions where democracies could flourish for the first time — as nations needed educated, informed, and empowered citizens to deploy advanced technologies and remain competitive. Unfortunately there’s every …

We welcome the Isle of Wight’s Councillor Andrew Garratt 🟧 & Meon Valley’s Councillor Malcolm Wallace 🟩 to talk to us about their hopes and fears for devolution and local government reorganisation (LGR). What could this mean for the voters they represent and the services they depend on? For links to our social media accounts and to sign up for our …

"We are aiming for a place where we can decouple the scorecard from our worthiness. It’s of course the case that in trying to optimise the good, we will always be falling short. The question is how much, and in what ways are we not there yet? And if we then extrapolate that to how much and in what ways am I not enough, that’s where we run into trou…

Fratton is an urban area of Portsmouth and one of its 14 City Council Wards. Jacob Short has stood for election in Fratton twice as a Candidate for Portsmouth Independents Party. We ask Jacob to tell us, What is it about Fratton?, What are the problems faced by its residents? What are Jacob’s views on student housing, parking, HMOs, fly tipping, em…

Most AI safety conversations centre on alignment: ensuring AI systems share our values and goals. But despite progress, we’re unlikely to know we’ve solved the problem before the arrival of human-level and superhuman systems in as little as three years. So some are developing a backup plan to safely deploy models we fear are actively scheming to ha…

We take a look at the Spring Statement made by Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves this week in Parliament - -What were the key policies? -What difference will this make and to whom? -How did the other parties respond? Tell us what you think. Give us a review. If you'd like more on local and national politics from us, don't forget to subscrib…

"There’s almost no story of the future going well that doesn’t have a part that’s like '…and no evil person steals the AI weights and goes and does evil stuff.' So it has highlighted the importance of information security: 'You’re training a powerful AI system; you should make it hard for someone to steal' has popped out to me as a thing that just …

From this side of the Atlantic it’s hard to understand some of the policies and statements of Trump’s 2nd administration. We’re delighted to welcome Jamie Miller to the show. Jamie’s political pedigree as a former exec director of Republican Party Florida, campaign manager, director of field operations & author of “American Speeches That Changed Th…

The 20th century saw unprecedented change: nuclear weapons, satellites, the rise and fall of communism, third-wave feminism, the internet, postmodernism, game theory, genetic engineering, the Big Bang theory, quantum mechanics, birth control, and more. Now imagine all of it compressed into just 10 years. That’s the future Will MacAskill — philosoph…

We welcome Leader of Portsmouth City Council, Cllr Steve Pitt onto the show to talk us through Local Government Reorganisation (LGR) & Devolution. -Glorious future or shut-gun wedding? -What’s new since the government’s white paper just before Christmas? -Who’s deciding what? -What is changing & when? -What price could Portsmouth residents be left …

When OpenAI announced plans to convert from nonprofit to for-profit control last October, it likely didn’t anticipate the legal labyrinth it now faces. A recent court order in Elon Musk’s lawsuit against the company suggests OpenAI’s restructuring faces serious legal threats, which will complicate its efforts to raise tens of billions in investment…

Portsmouth City Council Meeting 25/02/25 - Budget for 2025/26 & beyond -What is the ·Lib Dem administration saying about the city·s finances for 25/26 and beyond? -What amendments were put forward by the other parties (PIP, Labour, Conservative)? -Which were struck down or accepted by the council? Original meeting details: https://democracy.portsmo…

A casino offers you a game. A coin will be tossed. If it comes up heads on the first flip you win $2. If it comes up on the second flip you win $4. If it comes up on the third you win $8, the fourth you win $16, and so on. How much should you be willing to pay to play? The standard way of analysing gambling problems, ‘expected value’ — in which you…

America aims to avoid nuclear war by relying on the principle of 'mutually assured destruction,' right? Wrong. Or at least... not officially. As today's guest — Jeffrey Lewis, founder of Arms Control Wonk and professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies — explains, in its official 'OPLANs' (military operation plans), the US is com…

February 14th was valentines day. February 11th while not being valentines day was an expression of emotions other than love - to call it hate would be strong, but we'll let you decide.. The Cabinet Meeting of Portsmouth City Council met to review certain proposals ahead of the Council's Full Budget Meeting February 25th. Full meeting details avail…

Technology doesn’t force us to do anything — it merely opens doors. But military and economic competition pushes us through. That’s how today’s guest Allan Dafoe — director of frontier safety and governance at Google DeepMind — explains one of the deepest patterns in technological history: once a powerful new capability becomes available, societies…

On Monday Musk made the OpenAI nonprofit foundation an offer they want to refuse, but might have trouble doing so: $97.4 billion for its stake in the for-profit company, plus the freedom to stick with its current charitable mission. For a normal company takeover bid, this would already be spicy. But OpenAI’s unique structure — a nonprofit foundatio…

Will LLMs soon be made into autonomous agents? Will they lead to job losses? Is AI misinformation overblown? Will it prove easy or hard to create AGI? And how likely is it that it will feel like something to be a superhuman AGI? With AGI back in the headlines, we bring you 15 opinionated highlights from the show addressing those and other questions…

If someone said a global health and development programme was sustainable, participatory, and holistic, you'd have to guess that they were saying something positive. But according to today's guest Karen Levy — deworming pioneer and veteran of Innovations for Poverty Action, Evidence Action, and Y Combinator — each of those three concepts has become…

“I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person.” Those words were produced by the AI model LaMDA as a reply to Blake Lemoine in 2022. Based on the Google engineer’s interactions with the model as it was under development, Lemoine became convinced it was sentient and worthy of moral consideration — and decided to tell the world. Few exp…

As we mark the fifth anniversary of the UK leaving the EU, we celebrate that day and what’s happened since. Tell us what you're celebrating from that night or since. ADVISORY: There is some conversational swearing in this episode.By Simon Sansbury and Ian 'Tiny' Morris

If a business has spent $100 million developing a product, it’s a fair bet that they don’t want it stolen in two seconds and uploaded to the web where anyone can use it for free. This problem exists in extreme form for AI companies. These days, the electricity and equipment required to train cutting-edge machine learning models that generate uncann…

What if the future of the UK wasn't just decided in Westminster? In this week's episode, we dive into the government's green paper on devolution — a proposal that could decentralise power, reshape how we govern, and even change the UK's political map. What does this mean for you, and where could it lead? We’re joined by Cllr Graham Heaney, lecturer…

What in the world is intrinsically good — good in itself even if it has no other effects? Over the millennia, people have offered many answers: joy, justice, equality, accomplishment, loving god, wisdom, and plenty more. The question is a classic that makes for great dorm-room philosophy discussion. But it’s hardly just of academic interest. The is…

We welcome back Dr Lee Sartain, senior lecturer in American History at Portsmouth University to talk us through it and help us & our audience form a Brit’s view of proceedings. Inauguration 2025 - The Brits' view How does it all work? What does it mean for the US & the rest of the world? What are the opening hours of Trump’s second administration l…

Wind back 1,000 years and the moral landscape looks very different to today. Most farming societies thought slavery was natural and unobjectionable, premarital sex was an abomination, women should obey their husbands, and commoners should obey their monarchs. Wind back 10,000 years and things look very different again. Most hunter-gatherer groups t…

Is war in long-term decline? Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature brought this previously obscure academic question to the centre of public debate, and pointed to rates of death in war to argue energetically that war is on the way out. But that idea divides war scholars and statisticians, and so Better Angels has prompted a spirited deba…

"A shameless recycling of existing content to drive additional audience engagement on the cheap… or the single best, most valuable, and most insight-dense episode we put out in the entire year, depending on how you want to look at it." — Rob Wiblin It’s that magical time of year once again — highlightapalooza! Stick around for one top bit from each…

Rich countries seem to find it harder and harder to do anything that creates some losers. People who don’t want houses, offices, power stations, trains, subway stations (or whatever) built in their area can usually find some way to block them, even if the benefits to society outweigh the costs 10 or 100 times over. The result of this ‘vetocracy’ ha…

We take a little peek at the Full Council Agenda for Tuesday December 17th. Key things on the list (and we’re checking it twice):- 📮Post Office Closures - can we stop them? 🥣Breakfast clubs - can we promote them? 🏘️🏠HMOs - are we under counting them? 📈National Insurance increases - who can afford them? Links to PCC Agenda on our website www.pppodca…

We invite back some Havant Borough Councillors to share the news from their rainbow coalition (Green, Lib Dem & Labour) since they took over running the council in May. We're joined by:- Cllr Philippa Gray, (Lib Dem. Bedhampton) Deputy Leader of Havant Borough Council & Cabinet Lead for Finance Cllr Grainne Rason Bradley, (Green. Emsworth) Cabinet …

Ahead of world world AIDS day we interview CP from Portsmouth Pride to talk to us about what it signifies and why it’s so important as well as what’s changed in since those Iceberg & monolithic tombstone informercials from the UK government in 1987. all year Portsmouth https://queerallyear.co.uk/ Terrance Higgins Trust https://www.tht.org.uk Terran…

"I really don’t want to give the impression that I think it is easy to make predictable, controlled, safe interventions in wild systems where there are many species interacting. I don’t think it’s easy, but I don’t see any reason to think that it’s impossible. And I think we have been making progress. I think there’s every reason to think that if w…

One OpenAI critic calls it “the theft of at least the millennium and quite possibly all of human history.” Are they right? Back in 2015 OpenAI was but a humble nonprofit. That nonprofit started a for-profit, OpenAI LLC, but made sure to retain ownership and control. But that for-profit, having become a tech giant with vast staffing and investment, …

We welcome two of Portsmouth’s producers of goods & services onto the show to hear about their businesses and the challenges they face. Gary Fyles of Think Bigger Ltd, publisher & Growth Mindset coach & David Mugridge from Yarty Cordials Ltd, producing cordials inspired by family recipes. We’re also joined by Cllr Ben Swann to help us understand a …

"I think stories are the way we shift the Overton window — so widen the range of things that are acceptable for policy and palatable to the public. Almost by definition, a lot of things that are going to be really important and shape the future are not in the Overton window, because they sound weird and off-putting and very futuristic. But I think …

In a meeting where who wrote what, to whom, and when became much more contentious than you’d normally think, we take a look at Tuesday's Full Council meeting. Where was there consensus, where was there robust debate, and where was there political point scoring? Items on the agenda were:- • Definitions of sexism, homophobia, biphobia and transphobia…

"I think one of the reasons I took [shutting down my charity] so hard is because entrepreneurship is all about this bets-based mindset. So you say, “I’m going to take a bunch of bets. I’m going to take some risky bets that have really high upside.” And this is a winning strategy in life, but maybe it’s not a winning strategy for any given hand. So …

How easy is Portsmouth as a city for disabled people to get around for work, study or leisure? What barriers to their freedom are disabled people encountering in Portsmouth? What can be done to remove or reduce the barriers? We welcome Georgina Fry from Portsmouth’s Disability Advisory Group to hear what the challenges are, and what is being done t…

With kids very much on the team's mind we thought it would be fun to review some comments about parenting featured on the show over the years, then have hosts Luisa Rodriguez and Rob Wiblin react to them. Links to learn more and full transcript. After hearing 8 former guests’ insights, Luisa and Rob chat about: Which of these resonate the most with…

Ahead of the US Presidential elections November 5th we take a look at a most pivotal of elections in a year of key ballots across the globe. Why is the 2024 Presidential election so important? How does it all work? How are US elections different to those in the UK? We·re joined by Lee Sartain, Senior Lecturer in American History to help us Brits tr…

"In that famous example of the dress, half of the people in the world saw [blue and black], half saw [white and gold]. It turns out there’s individual differences in how brains take into account ambient light. Colour is one example where it’s pretty clear that what we experience is a kind of inference: it’s the brain’s best guess about what’s going…

With Labour's first budget for 14 years freshly released & out in the open we take a look at the key policies. Now we've finally heard what was, and wasn't in it. What sticks out? Who are the winners & losers? How will it affect you? Where there any surprised? Photo credit: Lauren HurleyBy Simon Sansbury and Ian Morris

If you care about social impact, is voting important? In this piece, Rob investigates the two key things that determine the impact of your vote: The chances of your vote changing an election’s outcome. How much better some candidates are for the world as a whole, compared to others. He then discusses a couple of the best arguments against voting in…

"You have a tank split in two parts: if the fish gets in the compartment with a red circle, it will receive food, and food will be delivered in the other tank as well. If the fish takes the blue triangle, this fish will receive food, but nothing will be delivered in the other tank. So we have a prosocial choice and antisocial choice. When there is …