Harry Lloyd in the philosophy department can do this.

Sam Altman is far from the only problematic speaker invited to Lighthaven. 

Just seeing this now -- sorry for the late reply!

It's open access. Here is the copyright information from the book. Is this license good enough for the kind of audio adaptation you're thinking of? (There's a permissions department at Oxford that you can contact if you're not sure -- they direct to https://plsclear.com/Home/Index I think)

This is an open access publication, available online and distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), a copy of which is available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Subject to this license, all rights are reserved.

Glad to be working with Kuhan!

There's not very much evidence for existential risk from biological causes. I've had a very hard time getting anyone to even tell me what they are concerned about, and when they do it is not very plausible.

Good question! I'm assuming just the .pdf, which is what Oxford University Press does for most academic books. But I will check and let you know if they're doing an epub.

Since the book is open access, I'm not sure if they secured the pdfs. If they didn't you could try a converter?

Ilan and Shakked Noy have a nice piece on one aspect of this, "The Short-Termism of ‘Hard’ Economics." It's forthcoming in Essays on longtermism, hopefully within a month or two. They argue that preferences for methodological hardness in economics make it difficult to publish longtermist research within economics. 

To be fair, economics as a field is widely regarded as one of the strongest and most successful in academia right now. There are definitely challenges, of which Bob and the Noy's identify some, but I don't want to give the impression that academics are too down on economics as a field. They've been killing it since the mid-20th century.

I also don't think economists are crazy to think that their top journals are sometimes more rigorous than leading interdisciplinary journals, which can be a bit more headline-chasing and often don't give authors enough words to be fully rigorous.

Honestly I agree. Titotal’s work is fabulous (and I’m happy to use that adjective) but it’s usually not a good idea to put someone’s hackles up when you want to tell them they are wrong.

I downvoted this because of the skepticism of academic rigor and the weakness of the quantum physics analogy. 

Quantum physics is a paradigmatic example of a major theoretical advance developed by academics and accepted by academics after rigorous testing. The reason why these standards were applied is that there were (and still are) any number of theories in fundamental physics which turn out to be false, and it is important to use reasons and evidence to determine whether they are true. 

I am happy to see academics within the nascent AI safety space working towards more traditional and rigorous academic standards. These standards exist for a good reason and I have every expectation that they will continue to serve us well.

Please come back. I can't say that we agree on very much, but you are often a voice of reason and your voice will be missed.