Doom Debates!

California's SB 1047 bill, authored by CA State Senator Scott Wiener , is the leading attempt by a US state to regulate catastrophic risks from frontier AI in the wake of President Biden's 2023 AI Executive Order . Today’s debate: Holly Elmore , Executive Director of Pause AI US, representing Pro- SB 1047 Greg Tanaka , Palo Alto City Councilmember, representing Anti- SB 1047 Key Bill Supporters: G...

Today I’m reacting to David Shapiro’s response to my previous episode , and also to David’s latest episode with poker champion & effective altruist Igor Kurganov . I challenge David's optimistic stance on superintelligent AI inherently aligning with human values. We touch on factors like instrumental convergence and resource competition. David and I continue to clash over whether we should pause A...

Maciej Ceglowski is an entrepreneur and owner of the bookmarking site Pinboard . I’ve been a long-time fan of his sharp, independent-minded blog posts and tweets. In this episode, I react to a great 2016 talk he gave at WebCamp Zagreb titled Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People . This talk was impressively ahead of its time, as the AI doom debate really only heated up in the last few...

Today I’m reacting to David Shapiro’s latest YouTube video: “ Pausing AI is a spectacularly bad idea―Here's why ”. In my opinion, every plan that doesn’t evolve pausing frontier AGI capabilities development now is reckless, or at least every plan that doesn’t prepare to pause AGI once we see a “warning shot” that enough people agree is terrifying. We’ll go through David’s argument point by point,...

John Sherman and I go through David Brooks’s appallingly bad article in the New York Times titled “ Many People Fear AI. They Shouldn’t. ” For Humanity is basically the sister podcast to Doom Debates. We have the same mission to raise awareness of the urgent AI extinction threat, and build grassroots support for pausing new AI capabilities development until it’s safe for humanity. Subscribe to it...

Dr. Richard Sutton is a Professor of Computing Science at the University of Alberta known for his pioneering work on reinforcement learning, and his “bitter lesson” that scaling up an AI’s data and compute gives better results than having programmers try to handcraft or explicitly understand how the AI works. Dr. Sutton famously claims that AIs are the “next step in human evolution”, a positive fo...

David Pinsof is co-creator of the wildly popular Cards Against Humanity and a social science researcher at UCLA Social Minds Lab. He writes a blog called “ Everything Is B******t ”. He sees AI doomers as making many different questionable assumptions, and he sees himself as poking holes in those assumptions. I don’t see it that way at all; I think the doom claim is the “default expectation” we oug...

Princeton Comp Sci Ph. D. candidate Sayash Kapoor co-authored a blog post last week with his professor Arvind Narayanan called "AI Existential Risk Probabilities Are Too Unreliable To Inform Policy". While some non-doomers embraced the arguments, I see it as contributing nothing to the discourse besides demonstrating a popular failure mode: a simple misunderstanding of the basics of Bayesian epist...

Martin Casado is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) who has strong views about AI. He claims that AI is basically just a buzzword for statistical models and simulations. As a result of this worldview, he only predicts incremental AI progress that doesn’t pose an existential threat to humanity, and he sees AI regulation as a net negative. I set out to understand his worldview around AI...

Tilek Mamutov is a Kyrgyzstani software engineer who worked at Google X for 11 years before founding his own international software engineer recruiting company, Outtalent. Since first encountering the AI doom argument at a Center for Applied Rationality bootcamp 10 years ago, he considers it a serious possibility, but he doesn’t currently feel convinced that doom is likely. Let’s explore Tilek’s w...

Dr. Mike Israetel is a well-known bodybuilder and fitness influencer with over 600,000 Instagram followers, and a surprisingly intelligent commentator on other subjects, including a whole recent episode on the AI alignment problem: Mike brought up many interesting points that were worth responding to, making for an interesting reaction episode. I also appreciate that he’s helping get the urgent to...

What did we learn from my debate with Robin Hanson? Did we successfully isolate the cruxes of disagreement? I actually think we did! In this post-debate analysis, we’ll review what those key cruxes are, and why I still think I’m right and Robin is wrong about them! I’ve taken the time to think much harder about everything Robin said during the debate, so I can give you new & better counterargument...

Robin Hanson is a legend in the rationality community and one of my biggest intellectual influences. In 2008, he famously debated Eliezer Yudkowsky about AI doom via a sequence of dueling blog posts known as the great Hanson-Yudkowsky Foom Debate. This debate picks up where Hanson-Yudkowsky left off, revisiting key arguments in the light of recent AI advances. My position is similar to Eliezer's:...

This episode is a comprehensive preparation session for my upcoming debate on AI doom with the legendary Robin Hanson. Robin’s P(doom) is

I’ve been studying Robin Hanson’s catalog of writings and interviews in preparation for our upcoming AI doom debate. Now I’m doing an exercise where I step into Robin’s shoes, and make the strongest possible case for his non-doom position! This exercise is called the Ideological Turing Test, and it’s based on the idea that it’s only productive to argue against someone if you understand what you’re...

Today I'm answering questions from listener Tony Warren. 1:16 Biological imperatives in machine learning2:22 Evolutionary pressure vs. AI training4:15 Instrumental convergence and AI goals6:46 Human vs. AI problem domains9:20 AI vs. human actuators18:04 Evolution and intelligence33:23 Maximum intelligence54:55 Computational limits and the future Follow Tony: https://x.com/Pove_iOS --- Doom Debates...

My guest Rob thinks superintelligent AI will suffer from analysis paralysis from trying to achieve a 100% probability of killing humanity. Since AI won’t be satisfied with 99.9% of defeating us, it won’t dare to try, and we’ll live! Doom Debates catalogues all the different stops where people get off the “doom train”, all the different reasons people haven’t (yet) followed the train of logic to th...

Today I’m debating the one & only Professor Steven Pinker!!! Well, I kind of am, in my head. Let me know if you like this format… Dr. Pinker is optimistic that AI doom worries are overblown. But I find his arguments shallow, and I’m disappointed with his overall approach to the AI doom discourse. Here’s the full video of Steven Pinker talking to Michael C. Moynihan on this week’s episode of “Hones...

RJ, a pseudonymous listener, volunteered to debate me. Follow RJ: https://x.com/impershblknight If you want to get the full Doom Debates experience, it's as easy as doing 4 separate things: 1. Join my Substack - https://doomdebates.com 2. Search "Doom Debates" to subscribe in your podcast player 3. Subscribe to YouTube videos - https://youtube.com/@doomdebates 4. Follow me on Twitter - https://x.c...

Danny asks: > You've said that an intelligent AI would lead to doom because it would be an excellent goal-to-action mapper.  A great football coach like Andy Reid is a great goal-to-action mapper.  He's on the sidelines, but he knows exactly what actions his team needs to execute to achieve the goal and win the game.  > But if he had a team of chimpanzees or elementary schoolers, or just players w...

Today I’m going to play you my debate with the brilliant hacker and entrepreneur, George Hotz. This took place on an X Space last August. Prior to our debate, George had done a debate with Eliezer Yudkowsky on Dwarkesh Podcast: Follow George: https://x.com/realGeorgeHotz Follow Liron: https://x.com/liron Get full access to Doom Debates at lironshapira.substack.com/subscribe

Chase Mann claims accelerating AGI timelines is the best thing we can do for the survival of the 8 billion people alive today. I claim pausing AI is still the highest-expected-utility decision for everyone. Who do you agree with? Comment on my Substack/X/YouTube and let me know! Follow Chase:https://x.com/ChaseMann Follow Liron:https://x.com/liron LessWrong has some great posts about cryonics: htt...

It’s a monologue episode! Robin Hanson’s blog: https://OvercomingBias.com Robin Hanson’s famous concept, the Great Filter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter Robin Hanson’s groundbreaking 2021 solution to the Fermi Paradox: https://GrabbyAliens.com Robin Hanson’s conversation with Ronny Fernandez about AI doom from May 2023: My tweet about whether we can hope to control superintelligent AI...

Welcome and thanks for listening! * Why is Liron finally starting a podcast? * Who does Liron want to debate? * What’s the debate format? * What are Liron’s credentials? * Is someone “rational” like Liron actually just a religious cult member? Follow Ori on Twitter: https://x.com/ygrowthco Make sure to subscribe for more episodes! Get full access to Doom Debates at lironshapira.substack.com/subscr...

Kelvin is optimistic that the forces of economic competition will keep AIs sufficiently aligned with humanity by the time they become superintelligent. He thinks AIs and humans will plausibly use interoperable money systems (powered by crypto). So even if our values diverge, the AIs will still uphold a system that respects ownership rights, such that humans may hold onto a nontrivial share of capi...