One tricky thing about lengthy podcasts is that you cover a dozen issues, but when you give the episode a title you only get to tell people about one. With Christine Peterson’s interview I went with a computer security angle, which turned out to not be that viral a topic. But people who listened to the episode kept telling me how much they loved it. So I’m going to try publishing the interview in pieces, each focussed on a single theme we covered.

Christine Peterson co-founded the Foresight Institute in the 90s. In the lightly edited transcript below we talk about a community she was part of in her youth, whose idealistic ambition bears some similarity to effective altruism today. We also cover a controversy from that time about whether nanotechnology would change the world or was impossible. Finally we think about what lessons we can learn from that whole era.

Let’s dive deeper into the nanotechnology question, so in effective altruism, there’s a lot of interest in this issue of revolutionary technologies, and how they could transform society, but nanotechnology hasn’t gotten so much attention, perhaps because people just don’t think that it’s going to … They think that AI’s going to come sooner, or that perhaps biotechnologies are going to come sooner. Should we be more focused on it?

Read the full article at 80000hours.org