
Roman Yampolskiy: AI Can't Be Controlled. We Need to Pause Now!
Roman Yampolskiy spent two decades trying to prove superintelligence can be controlled. He couldn't — and now says the proof runs the other way: not difficult, mathematically impossible.
If he's right, we're building the one machine we can never switch off, and the people building it are racing to do it faster.
Roman is a professor of computer science at the University of Louisville and one of the earliest researchers in AI safety.
We cover: why you're the squirrel in the human-AI intelligence gap, what the halting problem really says about predicting a smarter mind, why he calls all current AI safety "security theater," and the one button he'd press if he could.
In theory communism works too. In practice, no human verifies a billion-page proof.
CHAPTERS
00:00 The mind we can't switch off
01:34 You're the squirrel in this story
04:08 The thought AI may never have
08:18 We ran the test. It failed.
12:22 The trap we already locked ourselves in
16:10 Why AI still can't crack physics
21:54 Why toddlers are safe and teenagers aren't
23:06 The proof you can't predict a smarter mind
25:58 No system can vouch for itself
28:18 Does regulation just protect the oligarchs?
33:28 Is your mind more than a machine?
39:00 Do we owe AI anything?
43:00 The monster behind the smiley face
46:22 A perfect universe built just for you
49:50 What if we're the alien probes?
55:02 The one kind of AI that should scare you
58:22 The movement begging labs to stop
59:58 What do you tell your kids now?
01:07:58 The question he'd put to Sam Altman
01:15:48 The debate he's dying to have
01:19:50 What he'd tell his 20-year-old self
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Featured Guest — Roman Yampolskiy
The Roman Forum (YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/c/RomanYampolskiy?sub_confirmation=1
Twitter/X: https://x.com/romanyam
AI: Unexplainable, Unpredictable, Uncontrollable: https://www.romanyampolskiy.com/books/
📚 My books:
Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA
Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu
Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U
Galileo's Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un
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