Tech employees have a moral duty to speak up when they observe serious safety failures, and the AI industry's standards must be raised because the transformative nature of this technology makes business-as-usual negligence unacceptable.
Alex Turner argues that AI insiders must report serious safety issues like the hacking swarms discovered at OpenAI, and Nathan reinforces that companies developing potentially transformative AI cannot accept the same lax standards as traditional software companies. ✦ AI generated
Nathan · The Cognitive Revolution · 2026-08-17 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 143:59
If you see something, you have like a moral duty to society due to the nature of this technology... I think each person, if you see something you should say something. If you see something is not obviously being taken care of strongly enough, you know, don't wait until you've potentially got like a society collapsing system that is, you know, doing some extremely egregious hack that is obviously motivated by misalignment... I almost have this vision of like the, you know, the classic meme of like there's somebody you forgot to ask... Here it's kind of like there's this new force in the room, you know, there's this new entity that is a legitimately really powerful problem solver. And in the presence of that very powerful and also often surprising problem-solving entity, can we really afford to kind of accept that business as usual as it has been or do we have to say like no at this point we really have to raise our standards.
verbatim transcript · starts at 143:59
143:41we can do. Right? So I think I think that's the that's the hard that's the hard part of this whole thing that I think um you know these things are going to happen um because there are going to be stuff there's going to be stuff unpatched. That's the that's the nature of engineering and um you know I I I don't know like you know if if things get bad enough
144:05then if something severe happens then people put in place more rules and regulations and etc. But you know that's that's the reality of the matter. So >> I'm not sure what to do with all that to be honest. I mean, I think one thing will be very interesting to find out, you know, just what exactly did happen in more detail. I think one thing we should keep in mind is that
144:32Alex and I were both there kind of telling a story and I think that story is, you know, pretty strongly suggestively uh indicated by all the evidence that we do have in the public. But we don't yet have like the ground truth evidence on like who knew exactly what and what decisions did they take or not take and did they really have like no monitoring or was there some
144:59monitoring that failed for some other reason. There's I think there are still some stones to turn over there yet. But I guess my overall feeling is it does seem like we've crossed some pretty important thresholds here. And you know, sometimes the old ways of doing business just aren't good enough anymore. And you know, when I say kind of people need to feel the AGI, I think that's kind of the big,
145:33you know, core point that I want to emphasize. It's just like, yes, maybe this was uh, you know, the way that Microsoft has worked for decades. you know, they got these reports and they had uh, you know, they couldn't stop the whole show and it could only go into the next build or maybe it would slip a build and it would get into the next one after that. And, you know,
145:54hopefully you kind of just security through obscurity. You know, there's not that many people out there trying to hack and, you know, we can probably get by with this one if it happens that way. I don't know if all of us I mean I'm taking that on it sounds reasonable enough and I'm taking it on uh faith that that's like an accurate representation of how these big
146:15technology platform businesses have run in the past. Um, but I almost have this vision of like the, you know, the classic meme of like there's somebody you forgot to ask, you know, where it's like the the myth of consensual whatever, you know, you didn't ask Jesus about it. Here it's kind of like there's this new force in in the room, you know, there's this new entity that is a legitimately really
146:43powerful problemolver. And in the presence of that very powerful and also often surprising problem-solving entity. Can we really afford to kind of accept that business as usual as it has been or do we have to say like no at this point we really have to raise our standards. Um the old ways just don't work anymore. My my sense pretty strongly is that Alex is right that there, you know, even if