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Into the Impossible With Brian Keating · 3 min · Oct 23, 2026
Rushing AI could squander humanity’s control
Max Tegmark compares AI development to losing a winning chess position by rushing moves. He argues safety checks can slow releases while preserving AI’s potential.
Max Tegmark is an MIT physics professor, cosmologist and author.
Brian Keating, Host · Host, Into the Impossible With Brian Keating
About this segment
Max Tegmark compares AI development to losing a winning chess position by rushing moves. He argues safety checks can slow releases while preserving AI’s potential.
From “Max Tegmark: We’re Building A Replacement Species”, Oct 23, 2026. Watch the full episode
Answers “Is AI dangerous?” See all 26 answers
Answers “Should AI be regulated?” See all 12 answers
Thanks. We'll look at and fix what's off.
“I think what I'm unhappy about that we're doing now is not that we're developing technology, but just that we're rushing it recklessly.”
Takeaways
- Treat advanced AI development as a one-shot game, not a speed contest.
- Rushing could cost humanity its control of the future.
- Independent safety review can slow releases while research continues.
In this episode
Full episode- 11:24AI labs can keep the public in the dark4:13
- 21:22Superintelligent AI could become a self-replicating species5:13
- 48:09Formal verification could make AI-generated tools trustworthy4:22
- 2:15The Navier–Stokes result does not solve the million-dollar problem7:50
- 27:52Safety rules could sharply lower Max’s AI risk estimate3:18
45:23Rushing AI could squander humanity’s control2:37
Transcript
Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.
- 45:31
and helps that civilization flourish rather than destroy it. I think what I'm unhappy about that we're doing now is not that we're developing technology, but just that we're rushing it recklessly. Do you play chess? Yeah, not well. My nine-year-old can beat me. Okay, but suppose you're playing against a really strong player and you're up a queen. and have three hours left on the chess clock you know one way you can still lose this one game is if you start rushing your moves you somehow act like you have only one minute left on the clock and then you blunder this piece you blunder that piece and suddenly you're lost right i feel that this is exactly what humanity is doing right now you know we've learned after being on the planet for hundreds of thousands of years that we have a one game we aren't we don't have to worry
- 46:30
about getting eaten by tigers or starving to death or having a life expectancy of 29 years because through studying science and technology we've become so much more empowered that we can be the captains of our own ship i see the whole human history is growing empowerment right if we were to follow this now by suddenly building a replacement species and losing control to it we've just blundered the one game that's what irks me so if we simply start treating ai companies like other companies we have some binding safety standards it will make us play that make our moves more slowly and deliberately companies will release things when they can convince some panel of independent experts with no money in the game that this is more good than bad so progress continues but now you're playing careful chess we will win the one game and then we can have a future
- 47:18
where we're free from diseases and poverty and if you want to go and help life spread out through space and do cool things and the biggest CB polarization experiment you could ever imagine you know You can have all that, right? This is the one. And the reason I am working so hard to change this better path for AI is not because I'm afraid of death. It's because I think we have a because I don't want to squander this amazing upside that we can have.