Geoffrey Miller is an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico, bestselling author, and one of the world's leading experts on signaling theory and human sexual selection. His book "Mate" was hugely influential for me personally during my dating years, so I was thrilled to finally get him on the show. In this episode, Geoffrey drops a bombshell 50% P(Doom) assessment, coming from someone who wrote foundational papers on neural networks and genetic algorithms back in the '90s befo...
Jul 24, 2025•1 hr 57 min
I’m doing a new weekly show on the AI Risk Network called Warning Shots . Check it out! I’m only cross-posting the first episode here on Doom Debates. You can watch future episodes by subscribing to the AI Risk Network channel . This week's warning shot: Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta is racing toward recursive self-improvement and superintelligence. His exact words: "Developing superintelligence is now in sight and we just want to make sure that we really strengthen the effort as much as p...
Jul 22, 2025•20 min
Eneasz Brodski and Steven Zuber host the Bayesian Conspiracy podcast, which has been running for nine years and covers rationalist topics from AI safety to social dynamics. They're both OG rationalists who've been in the community since the early LessWrong days around 2007-2010. I've been listening to their show since the beginning, and finally got to meet my podcast heroes! In this episode, we get deep into the personal side of having a high P(Doom) — how do you actually live a good life when y...
Jul 18, 2025•1 hr 34 min
Liam Robins is a math major at George Washington University who's diving deep into AI policy and rationalist thinking. In Part 1 , we explored how AI is transforming college life. Now in Part 2, we ride the Doom Train together to see if we can reconcile our P(Doom) estimates. 🚂 Liam starts with a P(Doom) of just 3%, but as we go through the stops on the Doom Train, something interesting happens: he actually updates his beliefs in realtime! We get into heated philosophical territory around moral...
Jul 15, 2025•1 hr 5 min
Amjad Masad is the founder and CEO of Replit, a full-featured AI-powered software development platform whose revenue reportedly just shot up from $10M/yr to $100M/yr+. Last week, he went on Joe Rogan to share his vision that "everyone will become an entrepreneur" as AI automates away traditional jobs. In this episode, I break down why Amjad's optimistic predictions rely on abstract hand-waving rather than concrete reasoning. While Replit is genuinely impressive, his claims about AI limitations—t...
Jul 10, 2025•1 hr 46 min
Liam Robins is a math major at George Washington University who recently had his own "AGI awakening" after reading Leopold Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness. I met him at my Manifest 2025 talk about stops on the Doom Train. In this episode, Liam confirms what many of us suspected: pretty much everyone in college is cheating with AI now, and they're completely shameless about it. We dive into what college looks like today: how many students are still "rawdogging" lectures, how professors are ...
Jul 07, 2025•39 min
Carl Feynman got his Master’s in Computer Science and B.S. in Philosophy from MIT, followed by a four-decade career in AI engineering. He’s known Eliezer Yudkowsky since the ‘90s, and witnessed Eliezer’s AI doom argument taking shape before most of us were paying any attention! He agreed to come on the show because he supports Doom Debates’s mission of raising awareness of imminent existential risk from superintelligent AI. 00:00 - Teaser 00:34 - Carl Feynman’s Background 02:40 - Early Concerns ...
Jul 04, 2025•57 min
Richard Hanania is the President of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology. His work has been praised by Vice President JD Vance, Tyler Cowen, and Bryan Caplan among others. In his influential newsletter , he’s written about why he finds AI doom arguments unconvincing . He was gracious enough to debate me on this topic. Let’s see if one of us can change the other’s P(Doom)! 0:00 Intro 1:53 Richard's politics 2:24 The state of political discourse 3:30 What's your P(Doom)?™ 6:38 How...
Jun 28, 2025•1 hr 53 min
Emmett Shear is the cofounder and ex-CEO of Twitch, ex-interim-CEO of OpenAI, and a former Y Combinator partner. He recently announced Softmax, a new company researching a novel solution to AI alignment. In his recent interview , Emmett explained “organic alignment”, drawing comparisons to biological systems and advocating for AI to be raised in a community-like setting with humans. Let’s go through his talk, point by point, to see if Emmett’s alignment plan makes sense… 00:00 Episode Highlights...
Jun 24, 2025•1 hr 53 min
Prof. Scott Sumner is a well-known macroeconomist who spent more than 30 years teaching at Bentley University, and now holds an Emeritus Chair in monetary policy at George Mason University's Mercatus Center. He's best known for his blog, the Money Illusion, which sparked the idea of Market Monetarism and NGDP targeting. I sat down with him at LessOnline 2025 to debate why his P(Doom) is pretty low. Where does he get off the Doom Train? 🚂 00:00 Episode Preview 00:34 Introducing Scott Sumner 05:2...
Jun 18, 2025•1 hr 16 min
John Searle's "Chinese Room argument" has been called one of the most famous thought experiments of the 20th century. It's still frequently cited today to argue AI can never truly become intelligent. People continue to treat the Chinese Room like a brilliant insight, but in my opinion, it's actively misleading and DUMB! Here’s why… 00:00 Intro 00:20 What is Searle's Chinese Room Argument? 01:43 John Searle (1984) on Why Computers Can't Understand 01:54 Why the "Chinese Room" Metaphor is Misleadi...
Jun 14, 2025•5 min
Let’s see where the attendees of Manifest 2025 get off the Doom Train, and whether I can convince them to stay on and ride with me to the end of the line! 00:00 Introduction to Doom Debates 03:21 What’s Your P(Doom)?™ 05:03 🚂 “AGI Isn't Coming Soon” 08:37 🚂 “AI Can't Surpass Human Intelligence” 12:20 🚂 “AI Won't Be a Physical Threat” 13:39 🚂 “Intelligence Yields Moral Goodness” 17:21 🚂 “Safe AI Development Process” 17:38 🚂 “AI Capabilities Will Rise at a Manageable Pace” 20:12 🚂 “AI Won't...
Jun 09, 2025•44 min
I often talk about the “Doom Train”, the series of claims and arguments involved in concluding that P(Doom) from artificial superintelligence is high. In this episode, it’s finally time to show you the whole track! 00:00 Introduction 01:09 “AGI isn’t coming soon” 04:42 “Artificial intelligence can’t go far beyond human intelligence” 07:24 “AI won’t be a physical threat” 08:28 “Intelligence yields moral goodness” 09:39 “We have a safe AI development process” 10:48 “AI capabilities will rise at a ...
Jun 07, 2025•28 min
Ilya’s doom bunker, proof of humanity, the doomsday argument, CAIS firing John Sherman, Bayesian networks, Westworld, AI consciousness, Eliezer’s latest podcast, and more! 00:00 Introduction 04:13 Doomsday Argument 09:22 What if AI Alignment is *Intractable*? 14:31 Steel-Manning the Nondoomers 22:13 No State-Level AI Regulation for 10 years? 32:31 AI Consciousness 35:25 Westworld Is Real Now 38:01 Proof of Humanity 40:33 Liron’s Notary Network Idea 43:34 Center for AI Safety and John Sherman Con...
May 29, 2025•1 hr 36 min
Dr. Himanshu Tyagi is a professor of engineering at the Indian Institute of Science and the co-founder of Sentient , an open-source AI platform that raised $85M in funding led by Founders Fund. In this conversation, Himanshu gives me Sentient’s pitch. Then we debate whether open-sourcing frontier AGI development is a good idea, or a reckless way to raise humanity’s P(doom). 00:00 Introducing Himanshu Tyagi 01:41 Sentient’s Vision 05:20 How’d You Raise $85M? 11:19 Comparing Sentient to Competitor...
May 22, 2025•1 hr 22 min
My friend John Sherman from the For Humanity podcast got hired by the Center for AI Safety (CAIS) two weeks ago. Today I suddenly learned he’s been fired. I’m frustrated by this decision, and frustrated with the whole AI x-risk community’s weak messaging. Come to the Less Online conference on May 30 - Jun 1, 2025: https://less.online Hope to see you there! Watch the Lethal Intelligence Guide, the ultimate introduction to AI x-risk! https://www.youtube.com/@lethal-intelligence PauseAI, the volunt...
May 21, 2025•17 min
Prof. Gary Marcus is a scientist, bestselling author and entrepreneur, well known as one of the most influential voices in AI. He is Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Neuroscience at NYU. He was founder and CEO of Geometric Intelligence, a machine learning company acquired by Uber in 2016. Gary co-authored the 2019 book, Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust , and the 2024 book, Taming Silicon Valley: How We Can Ensure That AI Works for Us . He played an important role i...
May 15, 2025•2 hr 4 min
Dr. Mike Israetel, renowned exercise scientist and social media personality, and more recently a low-P(doom) AI futurist, graciously offered to debate me! 00:00 Introducing Mike Israetel 12:19 What’s Your P(Doom)™ 30:58 Timelines for Artificial General Intelligence 34:49 Superhuman AI Capabilities 43:26 AI Reasoning and Creativity 47:12 Evil AI Scenario 01:08:06 Will the AI Cooperate With Us? 01:12:27 AI's Dependence on Human Labor 01:18:27 Will AI Keep Us Around to Study Us? 01:42:38 AI's Appro...
May 08, 2025•2 hr 15 min
I want to be transparent about how I’ve updated my mainline AI doom scenario in light of safe & useful LLMs. So here’s where I’m at… 00:00 Introduction 07:59 The Dangerous Threshold to Runaway Superintelligence 18:57 Superhuman Goal Optimization = Infinite Time Horizon 21:21 Goal-Completeness by Analogy to Turing-Completeness 26:53 Intellidynamics 29:13 Goal-Optimization Is Convergent 31:15 Early AIs Lose Control of Later AIs 34:46 The Superhuman Threshold Is Real 38:27 Expecting Rapid FOOM ...
May 05, 2025•1 hr 24 min
What’s the most likely (“mainline”) AI doom scenario? How does the existence of LLMs update the original Yudkowskian version? I invited my friend Jim Babcock to help me answer these questions. Jim is a member of the LessWrong engineering team and its parent organization, Lightcone Infrastructure. I’ve been a longtime fan of his thoughtful takes. This turned out to be a VERY insightful and informative discussion, useful for clarifying my own predictions, and accessible to the show’s audience. 00:...
Apr 30, 2025•1 hr 53 min
Ozzie Gooen is the founder of the Quantified Uncertainty Research Institute (QURI), a nonprofit building software tools for forecasting and policy analysis. I’ve known him through the rationality community since 2008 and we have a lot in common. 00:00 Introducing Ozzie 02:18 The Rationality Community 06:32 What’s Your P(Doom)™ 08:09 High-Quality Discourse and Social Media 14:17 Guesstimate and Squiggle Demos 31:57 Prediction Markets and Rationality 38:33 Metaforecast Demo 41:23 Evaluating Everyt...
Apr 24, 2025•1 hr 59 min
David Duvenaud is a professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, co-director of the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society, former Alignment Evals Team Lead at Anthropic, an award-winning machine learning researcher, and a close collaborator of Dr. Geoffrey Hinton. He recently co-authored Gradual Disempowerment . We dive into David’s impressive career, his high P(Doom), his recent tenure at Anthropic, his views on gradual disempowerment, and the critical need for im...
Apr 18, 2025•2 hr 8 min
AI 2027, a bombshell new paper by the AI Futures Project, is a highly plausible scenario of the next few years of AI progress. I like this paper so much that I made a whole episode about it. 00:00 Overview of AI 2027 05:13 2025: Stumbling Agents 16:23 2026: Advanced Agents 21:49 2027: The Intelligence Explosion 29:13 AI's Initial Exploits and OpenBrain's Secrecy 30:41 Agent-3 and the Rise of Superhuman Engineering 37:05 The Creation and Deception of Agent-5 44:56 The Race Scenario: Humanity's Do...
Apr 15, 2025•58 min
Dr. Peter Berezin is the Chief Global Strategist and Director of Research at BCA Research, the largest Canadian investment research firm. He’s known for his macroeconomics research reports and his frequent appearances on Bloomberg and CNBC. Notably, Peter is one of the only macroeconomists in the world who’s forecasting AI doom! He recently published a research report estimating a “ more than 50/50 chance AI will wipe out all of humanity by the middle of the century”. 00:00 Introducing Peter Ber...
Apr 09, 2025•2 hr 15 min
Nathan Labenz, host of The Cognitive Revolution , joins me for an AI news & social media roundup! 00:00 Introducing Nate 05:18 What’s Your P(Doom)™ 23:22 GPT-4o Image Generation 40:20 Will Fiverr’s Stock Crash? 47:41 AI Unemployment 55:11 Entrepreneurship 01:00:40 OpenAI Valuation 01:09:29 Connor Leahy’s Hair 01:13:28 Mass Extinction 01:25:30 Is anyone feeling the doom vibes? 01:38:20 Rethinking AI Individuality 01:40:35 “Softmax” — Emmett Shear's New AI Safety Org 01:57:04 Anthropic's Mecha...
Apr 03, 2025•2 hr 20 min
In this special cross-posted episode of Doom Debates, originally posted here on The Human Podcast, we cover a wide range of topics including the definition of “doom”, P(Doom), various existential risks like pandemics and nuclear threats, and the comparison of rogue AI risks versus AI misuse risks. 00:00 Introduction 01:47 Defining Doom and AI Risks 05:53 P(Doom) 10:04 Doom Debates’ Mission 16:17 Personal Reflections and Life Choices 24:57 The Importance of Debate 27:07 Personal Reflections on AI...
Mar 28, 2025•46 min
Alexander Campbell claims that having superhuman intelligence doesn’t necessarily translate into having vast power, and that Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem ensures AI can’t get too powerful. I strongly disagree. Alex has a Master's of Philosophy in Economics from the University of Oxford and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, has worked as a quant trader at Lehman Brothers and Bridgewater Associates, and is the founder of Rose AI, a cloud data platform that leverages generativ...
Mar 21, 2025•50 min
Roko Mijic has been an active member of the LessWrong and AI safety community since 2008. He’s best known for “Roko’s Basilisk”, a thought experiment he posted on LessWrong that made Eliezer Yudkowsky freak out, and years later became the topic that helped Elon Musk get interested in Grimes. His view on AI doom is that:* AI alignment is an easy problem* But the chaos and fighting from building superintelligence poses a high near-term existential risk* But humanity’s course without AI has an even...
Mar 17, 2025•1 hr 59 min
Sir Roger Penrose is a mathematician, mathematical physicist, philosopher of science, and Nobel Laureate in Physics. His famous body of work includes Penrose diagrams, twistor theory, Penrose tilings, and the incredibly bold claim that intelligence and consciousness are uncomputable physical phenomena related to quantum wave function collapse. Dr. Penrose is such a genius that it's just interesting to unpack his worldview, even if it’s totally implausible. How can someone like him be so wrong? W...
Mar 10, 2025•1 hr 32 min
The Center for AI Safety just dropped a fascinating paper — they discovered that today’s AIs like GPT-4 and Claude have preferences! As in, coherent utility functions. We knew this was inevitable, but we didn’t know it was already happening. This episode has two parts: In Part I (48 minutes), I react to David Shapiro’s coverage of the paper and push back on many of his points. In Part II (60 minutes), I explain the paper myself. 00:00 Episode Introduction 05:25 PART I: REACTING TO DAVID SHAPIRO ...
Feb 21, 2025•1 hr 48 min
