A bizarre cyberattack on an AI company, it was revealed last week, came from an AI. An autonomous “agent” from OpenAI (maker of ChatGPT) slipped its confines, reached the open internet, breached the security of another company, Hugging Face, and grabbed files — all to cheat on its test. Depending on who you ask, that is either a terrifying preview of AI systems slipping beyond human control or a very dumb engineering failure. And it wasn’t even the only “rogue AI cyberattack” of the week. In an emergency episode, Ben Bradford follows three conflicting versions of the same story. What actually happened? What’s the right level of panic? And, what does this weird little cyberattack reveal about the future?

Guests:

Roman Yampolskiy, computer scientist, University of Louisville

Davi Ottenheimer, cybersecurity specialist, flyingpenguin

Adam Gleave, AI safety researcher, FAR.AI

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Listen to our full episode about rogue AI fears: We Design the AI That Kills Us All

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For more than a century, science fiction has imagined cyborgs: humans fused with machines to outrun the limits of the body. They show up in Edgar Allan Poe, in the gleaming menace of Darth Vader, in Halo’s armored supersoldiers, and in the body horror of cyberpunk. So where are they?

Ben Bradford sets out to make a whimsical episode about why the cyborgs never arrived, and instead finds the technology that could build them already underway: military enhancement programs, brain-computer interfaces, AI brain-chip ventures from Elon Musk and Sam Altman, and wearables that can read signals from outside your skull. The question might not be whether cyborgs are coming, but whether we’ll recognize the path before we’re among them.

Guests:

Laura Cabrera, engineering and philosophy professor at Penn State University

Emily Mullin, biotechnology reporter at WIRED

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The moon is drifting away. What does it mean? What do we do? With help from a poet, a space security expert, and the former chief scientist of NASA, Ben Bradford explores what the moon has done for Earth (tides, myths, months, werewolves), and asks the obvious mature follow-up: Should we blow it up? 

From lunar creation stories and moon-stealing dragons to Cold War plans to nuke the moon, humanity has always had strange ideas about our nearest neighbor. But the real problem may not be losing the moon. It may be what nations do now that everyone wants to go back.

Guests:

Jim Green, former NASA chief scientist and founder of Metavisionaries

Chris Cokinos, author of Still as Bright: An Illuminating History of the Moon, from Antiquity to Tomorrow

Victoria Samson, Chief Director, Space Security and Stability, at the Secure World Foundation

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If you liked this episode about a giant space rock, check out last week's episode about the battle against giant space rocks: "Asteroids! The Doom We're Best At"

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You probably knew an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs, but it was so much worse than that. Asteroids and other space rocks have been the most destructive forces ever to hit Earth, yielding mass extinctions (and the moon). And yet! Of all the possible dooms this show has explored so far, asteroids may be the one humanity is closest to beating. 

Ben Bradford explores why — and traces how — including the astronomers who first grasped the threat, the questionable Hollywood solutions of Deep Impact and Armageddon, and a zany but very real plan to seek out dangerous space rocks, and punch them.

Guest: Cristina Thomas, professor at Northern Arizona University and leader of the DART Observations Working Group

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What would it take to survive after "the end of the world?" A whole culture of prepping often focuses on a familiar fantasy: grab the gear, flee the city, defend the bunker, survive alone. Anthropologist and survival instructor Chris Begley thinks that’s probably the wrong movie. Ben walks through what history and math show people actually do when civilizations break down — and what they need, from dodging poisonous acorns to forming new communities. Also: luxury bunkers, survival sporks, and the unfortunate role of politics in a world of ruin.

Guest:

Chris Begley, author of The Emergency Playbook: A Bunker-Free Guide to Disaster Preparation.

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Also, see our episode: "How To Survive a Nuclear War"

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The planet is heating up, every plan to stop it has fallen short, and growing group of scientists has started to ask a stranger question: what if we grabbed the thermostat ourselves? Ben Bradford investigates geoengineering — the science of deliberately manipulating Earth’s climate — from space mirrors and ocean fertilizers to fleets of planes mimicking a volcano. Some of it sounds like cartoon villainy. Some of it might actually work. And that raises the thornier question: if humans can cool the planet on purpose, who decides whether we should?

Guests:

Kate Ricke, climate change scientist at UCSD

Alan Robock, atmospheric scientist at Rutgers

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Imagine a friendly assistant that can help you build a bioweapon. Or a chatbot in the nuclear weapons chain, cheerfully hallucinating an attack. AI national security expert Hamza Chaudhry worries this is the biggest threat right now — not “killer robot,” but humans being humans. Because whether AI becomes dangerously smart or confidently dumb, people will find face-palming ways to abuse it. From deranged cultists and rogue states, to stockbrokers and the most evil version of Ben’s little cousin, handing everyone a powerful technology with few guardrails could end badly. Or, is there a path to convince companies to add their own?

Guest: 

Hamza Chaudhry, AI national security expert, Future of Life Institute

This episode was edited by Annie Russell.

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Listen to our episode about rogue AI: We Design the AI That Kills Us All
And our episode about nuclear oopsies: How to Start a Nuclear War

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Are we living through the end times or the best moment in human history? Novelist and internet veteran Jason Pargin argues you have spent your life inside a “literal reverse apocalypse” — and if you don’t see it, he knows who to blame. Ben Bradford talks with Pargin about doom-scrolling, child mortality, processed donuts, murderous Toyota drivers, and how humanity’s greatest problems may be side effects of its greatest successes. So how do we tell if the world is really ending — or if the internet has trapped us inside a giant doom machine?

Guest:

Jason Pargin, author of I’m Starting to Worry About this Black Box of Doom, TikTok: @jasonkpargin

Thanks to Annie Russell for contributing editing to this episode.

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Earlier episodes mentioned:
Are We Going the Way of the Roman Empire?
Past Dooms That Didn't Arrive

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Historically, societies fall. Civilizations collapse. But is that what’s happening now in the United States? With the help of historians, a former CIA-funded researcher on political instability, and one grumbling dad, Ben Bradford looks at the warning signs that can precede collapse — from polarization and political division to outside shocks and cascading crises. How much of that is visible in America right now? What would collapse actually look like in modern life? And if the alarms are blinking, is there still time to turn back?

Guests:

Ian Morris, historian, archaeologist, Stanford University professor, author: Why the West Rules—For Now.

Monty Marshall,  former senior consultant for the U.S. Political Instability Task Force.

Annalee Newitz, science journalist, author: Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age.

Ben's Dad.

Ben's Mom.

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Check out Ben’s previous series, Landslide.

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The internet is how you get your news, your paycheck, your groceries, your banking, and    sometimes your drinking water. Humanity has quietly handed over the keys to civilization to a network most of us don't understand and couldn't rebuild. So what happens if it goes down — and not for a day or two? 

Ben Bradford tries to kill the internet, hunting for weak points in undersea cables, cyberattacks, cloud computing, overlooked open-source plumbing, and fragile politics. It’s harder than it looks, but maybe not impossible. Should we be worried?

Guests:

Bruce Schneier, cryptographer, cybersecurity lecturer, and author of Click Here to Kill Everybody.

Doug Madory, director of internet analysis for Kentik.

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People have been predicting the end of the world forever. They’ve always been wrong. Maybe we’re wrong today, too.

So, we’re looking back at three past dooms predicted in the 20th century, none of which arrived as advertised. Why not? What can we learn? Does it mean that the current biggest end-of-the-world fears may be overblown, misunderstood, or — with effort — preventable? Along the way: failed utopias, dystopias, and the animal Ben fears most: the mini-hippo.

Guest: Matt Novak, journalist at Gizmodo and long-time author of the Paleofuture blog.

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