Doom Debates!

Max Tegmark is an MIT physics professor, science communicator, best-selling author, and the President and co-founder of the Future of Life Institute. There are few individuals who have done more to get the world leaders to come to a shared sense of reality about the extinction threat of AI. His endorsement of Eliezer’s book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies , states: "The most important book of...

It is Monday, September 15th and my interview with Eliezer Yudkowsky has dropped!!! 👉 WATCH NOW 👈 We had a very unique 2.5-hour discussion covering rationality topics, the AI doom argument, what the AI companies think they're doing, why they don't seem to understand the AI doom argument, what society is doing, how we can help. And of course, his book, "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies," which...

The Eliezer Yudkowsky interview premiere is tomorrow (Mon Sep 15) at 9am PT!!! 👉 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQtpSQmMNP0 👈 I can't believe it. We are entering the launch week for If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies - a new book by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares. This is a hell of a book. I highly recommend it. Everybody should pick it up. Honestly, if you haven't gone and bought that book...

In this special cross-post from Jona Ragogna’s channel , I'm interviewed about why superintelligent AI poses an imminent extinction threat, and how AI takeover is going to unfold. Newly exposed to AI x-risk, Jona asks sharp questions about why we’re racing toward superintelligence despite the danger, and what ordinary people can do now to lower p(doom). This is one of the most crisp explainers of...

Ladies and gentlemen, we are days away from the long-awaited release of Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares's new book, “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies”!!! Mon Sep 15 @9am PT: My Interview with Eliezer Yudkowsky We'll be kicking things off the morning of Monday, September 15th with a live watch party of my very special new interview with the one and only Eliezer Yudkowsky ! All of us will be in...

Louis Berman is a polymath who brings unique credibility to AI doom discussions. He's been coding AI for 25 years, served as CTO of major tech companies, recorded the first visual sighting of what became the dwarf planet Eris, and has now pivoted to full-time AI risk activism. He's lobbied over 60 politicians across multiple countries for PauseAI and authored two books on existential risk. Louis a...

Rob Miles is the most popular AI safety educator on YouTube, with millions of views across his videos explaining AI alignment to general audiences. He dropped out of his PhD in 2011 to focus entirely on AI safety communication – a prescient career pivot that positioned him as one of the field's most trusted voices over a decade before ChatGPT made AI risk mainstream. Rob sits firmly in the 10-90%...

Vitalik Buterin is the founder of Ethereum, the world's second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, currently valued at around $500 billion. But beyond revolutionizing blockchain technology, Vitalik has become one of the most thoughtful voices on AI safety and existential risk. He's donated over $665 million to pandemic prevention and other causes, and has a 12% P(Doom) – putting him squarely in...

Today I’m sharing my interview on Robert Wright’s Nonzero Podcast from last May. Rob is an especially sharp interviewer who doesn't just nod along, he had great probing questions for me. This interview happened right after Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike resigned from OpenAI in May 2024, continuing a pattern that goes back to Dario Amodei leaving to start Anthropic. These aren't fringe doomers; these...

Dr. Steven Byrnes, UC Berkeley physics PhD and Harvard physics postdoc, is an AI safety researcher at the Astera Institute and one of the most rigorous thinkers working on the technical AI alignment problem. Steve has a whopping 90% P(Doom), but unlike most AI safety researchers who focus on current LLMs, he argues that LLMs will plateau before becoming truly dangerous, and the real threat will co...

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 s...

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 superintellig...

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 ge...

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:...

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 rat...

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 w...

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 ris...

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 Int...

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 throu...

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...

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 Jo...

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...

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...

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...

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 Himan...