From New York Times opinion, I'm Ross Douthat, and this is Interesting Times.

The age of AI is already with us.

The big question is how far and fast the revolution goes.

My guest today represents the very far, extremely fast perspective.

He was a researcher at OpenAI who quit because he thought the company was acting recklessly.

And he's the co-author of a new forecast, which predicts that within just a few short years,

we might be living in a post-work pleasure dome under the rule of oligarchs

managing a machine god. Or, we might all be dead. I'm personally skeptical that the danger

we're facing is quite this immediate and dire. I suspect that there are more limits on AI's

capacities than my guest guest scenario envisions.

But it's important to hear from insiders who take these possibilities seriously

because many people deeply involved in AI work believe that they're bringing this future to life

and assume that they're working and we're living in the shadow of a possible

apocalypse. So Daniel Kokotelo, Herald of the Apocalypse, welcome to interesting times.

Thanks for that introduction, I suppose, and thanks for having me.

So Daniel, I read your report pretty quickly, not at AI speed, not at super intelligent

speed, when it first came out.

And I had about two hours of thinking a lot of pretty dark thoughts about the future.

And then, fortunately, I have a job that requires me to care about

tariffs and, you know, who the new Pope is. And I have a lot of kids who demand things of me.

And so I was able to sort of compartmentalize and set it aside. But this is currently your job,

right, I would say. Yes. You're thinking about this all the time. How does your psyche feel day to day if you have a reasonable expectation that the world is

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