Doom Debates!

Liron Shapira
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It's time to talk about the end of the world. With your host, Liron Shapira. lironshapira.substack.com

  1. 1h ago

    Trump and the AI Safety Vibe Shift, With Robert Wright | Nonzero × Doom Debates

    Bestselling author Robert Wright and I are back for round two of our collaboration, reacting to the week in AI. We cover Trump's summit with the AI labs, the FTC's investigation of OpenAI & Anthropic, the latest Gemini announcement, and much more. The Overton window is moving fast, but is the AI moving faster? Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Li-rc6swhQs Timestamps 00:00:00 — Cold Open 00:00:21 — Round Two of Nonzero × Doom Debates 00:01:23 — Trump, the FTC, and an Industry Feeling the Heat 00:05:37 — Google Says Gemini 4 Exists 00:07:41 — Greg Brockman Pulls His $25M from Leading the Future 00:12:53 — The Break-Ins Keep Coming 00:15:23 — The Market Wants Agent Swarms 00:18:30 — The End of “Alignment by Default” 00:20:55 — The Prelude to Recursive Self-Improvement 00:26:14 — David Sacks Can’t Explain Dario 00:30:31 — The All-In Echo Chamber 00:33:47 — Scott Alexander vs. Steven Pinker 00:38:37 — Jason Calacanis vs. the Public Benefit Corporation 00:43:03 — The Elephant in the Room Is the AI 00:46:21 — What the Average American Thinks 00:48:17 — From Chatbot to Agent to Swarm 00:54:20 — Boeing, Agent Swarms, and the Off Switch 00:57:07 — Skynet as a Botnet That Trades With Us 01:00:32 — Tyler Cowen: National Treasure, Net Negative on AI 01:04:01 — Liron’s Doomer DCF Yields a 20x P/E 01:07:11 — Interest Rates: Where Cowen Has Me 01:09:12 — Does Pinker Owe Us a Debate? 01:12:48 — Pinker vs. Instrumental Convergence 01:17:00 — Wrap-Up Links ROBERT WRIGHT & NONZERO Nonzero’s post for this episode — “Trump and the AI Safety Vibe Shift” Subscribe to The NonZero Newsletter Robert Wright on X (@robertwrighter) The God Test — Bob’s book on AI; Chapter 14, “Enlightenment Now,” is the Steven Pinker chapter “The Singularity Is Clear” — Bob’s essay in installments on recursive self-improvement (Parts I–III) “AI and the New McCarthyism” — Bob on the pro-AI lobby smearing Sanders, Tegmark, and Krueger as China stooges (Nonzero, May 2026) Why Buddhism Is True — Bob’s 2017 book THE WEEK IN AI AI’s biggest players promise to police themselves at the White House — Fortune on the “Joint Commitment on Frontier Responsibilities” Major White House split on AI policy leaks as top aides freak out — The Daily Beast on the Sacks–Wiles rift FTC is investigating OpenAI and Anthropic over possible risks to consumers — AP “We Must Pace the Frontier” — Dario Amodei’s call to slow down (with the China caveat and chip controls) China rejects Dario Amodei’s call to slow AI development — Rest of World Google rolls out new Gemini model but restricts access over safety concerns — The Guardian GLM-5.3 and the spread of advanced cyber capabilities — Anthropic on Zhipu’s open-weight model OpenAI’s Greg Brockman backs out of second $25 million donation to AI super PAC — The New York Times Sanders convenes Chinese and American computer scientists to warn of threat from AI — Broadband Breakfast THE BREAK-INS AND THE AGENT SWARM METR: Brief independent investigation of agents’ behavior, reasoning and collaboration in the OpenAI / Hugging Face incident Chris Painter’s testimony to the U.S. Senate on AI agent incidents — METR, Sept 30, 2026 SwarmTraces: how OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face — forensic report co-authored by Palisade Research OpenAI confirms ‘wiki incident’ — TechCrunch on the German wiki agent message board Are Current AI Safety Techniques Enough? Adam Gleave vs. Oliver Habryka — FAR.AI debate Alignment faking in large language models — Anthropic On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem — OpenAI Jacob Coxon’s resignation post (@hilbertspaess) Pacing the Frontier — the AI lab employees’ letter THE ALL-IN PODCAST All-In: Anthropic IPO at Risk, Meta’s Muse Pop, Token Prices Fall, Open Source Gains Share, Alignment Fails — the episode we react to Helen Toner: letting OpenAI be destroyed “would actually be consistent with the mission” — The Decoder, Dec 2023 Garfield Minus Garfield PINKER, SCOTT ALEXANDER, AND TYLER COWEN Scott Alexander challenges Steven Pinker to a public AI-doom debate ($5,000 vs. $1,000) An Open Letter to Scott Alexander — Steven Pinker declines the debate as a “spectator sport,” Quillette Your Book Review: Why Buddhism Is True — the anonymous Astral Codex Ten review Bob mentions Mistakes in financial economics — Tyler Cowen: doomers should be buying puts (Marginal Revolution) Liron’s answer: a doomer DCF yields the S&P’s 20x forward P/E ALSO MENTIONED Obsolete — Garrison Lovely’s book (with Bob’s blurb) If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies — Eliezer Yudkowsky & Nate Soares PAST DOOM DEBATES EPISODES MENTIONED Nonzero × Doom Debates, Episode 1 — Did AI Doom Just Go Mainstream? Eliezer Yudkowsky Tried to “Coup the World”?! — Garrison Lovely, Author of “Obsolete” OpenAI’s Model Just ATTACKED Them — the Hugging Face hack breakdown DOOM DEBATES Join the Doom Debates Discord Doom Debates’ Mission is to raise mainstream awareness of imminent extinction from AGI and build the social infrastructure for high-quality debate. Support the mission by subscribing to my Substack at DoomDebates.com and to youtube.com/@DoomDebates, or to really take things to the next level: Donate 🙏 Get full access to Doom Debates at lironshapira.substack.com/subscribe

  2. 2d ago

    Eliezer Yudkowsky Tried to “Coup the World”?! — Garrison Lovely, Author of OBSOLETE

    Garrison Lovely is an award-winning journalist and author of the highly anticipated book, Obsolete: The AI Industry’s Trillion-Dollar Race to Replace Us and How to Stop It. I give it the Doom Debates stamp of approval! While we’re mostly on the same page about the AI arms race, Garrison and I clash over Eliezer Yudkowsky’s role. He blames Eliezer for kicking off the superintelligence race and refers to his Coherent Extrapolated Volition (CEV) vision as a “coup on humanity.” But I say it was actually Yud’s attempt to keep humanity in charge. Can Garrison change my mind? Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZ94J4DBRkw Timestamps 00:00:00 — Cold Open 00:01:05 — Introducing Garrison Lovely 00:04:23 — “Freeze AI” vs. “Pause AI” 00:06:17 — Garrison’s Background at McKinsey 00:10:31 — Should ICE Be Abolished? 00:17:07 — How Garrison Got on the AI Beat 00:22:16 — What’s Your P(Doom)?™ 00:23:29 — Focusing on Extinction Is a Distraction 00:25:46 — Is Stopping AI an Easy Coordination Problem? 00:29:02 — Society’s Immune Response to AI 00:33:54 — Garrison’s P(Extinction) by 2050 00:37:09 — Did Eliezer Yudkowsky Start the AI Race? 00:45:56 — Freeze AGI Until the Public Opts In 00:50:32 — Is Coherent Extrapolated Volition a Coup? 01:02:17 — Democracy, Informed Consent, and the Singularity 01:11:39 — Should Eliezer Have Raised the Alarm Sooner? 01:16:45 — “Classic” AI Safety Burned Its Credibility 01:19:18 — Garrison’s Proposal to Stop the Race 01:21:35 — Will China Agree to a Freeze? 01:25:14 — Let’s Stop the “Obsoleting Project” 01:26:00 — Wrap-Up Links GARRISON LOVELY “Obsolete: The AI Industry’s Trillion-Dollar Race to Replace Us—and How to Stop It” — Garrison’s book Obsolete — Garrison’s Substack Garrison Lovely on X Organize Against the Machine — Garrison’s new podcast with labor organizer Cassie Pritchard “Can Humanity Survive AI?” — Garrison’s Jacobin cover story “McKinsey & Company: Capital’s Willing Executioners” — Garrison’s Current Affairs essay REFERENCED IN THE EPISODE Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration — Bryan Caplan “The AI Revolution: Our Immortality or Extinction” — Wait But Why Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies — Nick Bostrom “AI 2040: Plan A” — AI Futures Project “An easy coordination problem?” — Katja Grace The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead — OpenAI “Pause AI for Humanity’s Sake” — Peggy Noonan “Pause AI Development NOW” — Bernie Sanders If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies — Eliezer Yudkowsky & Nate Soares “Staring into the Singularity” — Yudkowsky’s 1996 manifesto (archived) “Coherent Extrapolated Volition” — Eliezer Yudkowsky, 2004 (PDF) “Coherent Extrapolated Volition: A Meta-Level Approach to Machine Ethics” — Nick Tarleton, 2010 (PDF) Solomonoff induction — Wikipedia “Personal statement on joining the OpenAI board” — Paul Christiano (4% over the next year) “Darwin among the Machines” — Samuel Butler, 1863 PauseAI PAST DOOM DEBATES EPISODES MENTIONED Are We A Circular Firing Squad? — with Holly Elmore, Executive Director of PauseAI US Debate with Robert Wright: Will Humanity Pass the “God Test”? Robin Hanson vs. Liron Shapira: Is Near-Term Extinction From AGI Plausible? --- Doom Debates’ Mission is to raise mainstream awareness of imminent extinction from AGI and build the social infrastructure for high-quality debate. Support the mission by subscribing to my Substack at DoomDebates.com and to youtube.com/@DoomDebates, or to really take things to the next level: Donate 🙏 Get full access to Doom Debates at lironshapira.substack.com/subscribe

  3. Sep 23

    Will AI Kill Everyone by 2050? Debate with Dr. Casey Hart (Ontology Explained)

    Casey Hart is a professional ontologist who has closely studied If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies and concluded the arguments are bad. His P(Doom) is under 1%, and he wouldn’t bet on AGI arriving before 2075. Casey and I agree AI has become remarkably capable and we need more accountability towards the companies building it. But we disagree on where the future is headed. I believe uncontrollable superintelligence could soon wipe out humanity. He calls that a “pretty outlandish hypothesis.” Casey holds a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and has worked as an ontologist at Ford, Amazon, and Cycorp (maker of Cyc). Can this professional philosopher convince me that AI doom is just a story, and not even a well-argued one? Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxHKesSpqBM Timestamps 00:00:00 — Cold Open 00:01:04 — Introducing Casey Hart 00:03:08 — What Is Ontology? 00:08:49 — Inside Cyc, the Original Common-Sense AI 00:19:14 — Do LLMs Actually Understand Anything? 00:25:36 — What’s Your P(Doom)?™ 00:29:42 — Casey’s Case for Under 1% 00:34:24 — Does Casey’s Christianity Factor In? 00:40:50 — Timelines and Scaling Laws 00:49:44 — Could an AI CEO Beat a Human CEO by 2050? 00:52:21 — AGI Over/Under: 2075 00:55:29 — Rogue AI as a Computer Virus 01:14:52 — Putting Numbers on Each Step of the Doom Argument 01:26:40 — Planes vs. Birds: What Mature Intelligence Looks Like 01:31:05 — The “Outcome Slot” 01:42:32 — Would a Superintelligence Just Compose Music in a Cabin? 01:47:22 — One Prompt Away from a Dyson Swarm 01:52:39 — Was Navier–Stokes an AI Alley-Oop? 02:00:43 — S-Curves vs. Exponentials 02:08:14 — Casey’s Critique of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies 02:14:15 — Is the Doom Train Biased? 02:23:24 — AI Policy: Liability vs. Pausing AI 02:29:50 — The Crux, and Liron Steelmans Casey 02:33:29 — Wrap-Up Links CASEY HART Ontology Explained — Casey’s YouTube channel The first video in Casey's series on IABIED, “The Case for Superintelligence Is Surprisingly Thin” — Casey on Chapter 1 Philosophy, Programs, and Prompts — Casey’s podcast with Carl Brown (Spotify) “Artificial General Intelligence?: Wanna Bet?” — Ep 1, where Casey sets his AGI over/under at 2075 REFERENCED IN THE EPISODE If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies — Eliezer Yudkowsky & Nate Soares Cyc — Doug Lenat’s hand-built common-sense knowledge base The Hanson-Yudkowsky AI-Foom Debate (2008) — where Hanson backed Cyc and Eliezer didn’t Lean — the formal proof language On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem — OpenAI The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead — OpenAI Morris worm (1988) “On the Loose” — Dean W. Ball on self-sovereign AI agents Paul Christiano joins OpenAI Foundation Board — OpenAI “The Age of Wonders and Terrors” — Scott Aaronson “Are We at War with AI Agent ‘Civilizations’?” — Cal Newport on restricting prompt-loop agents AI 2027 — Daniel Kokotajlo et al. PauseAI PAST DOOM DEBATES EPISODES MENTIONED The Most Likely AI Doom Scenario — with Jim Babcock, LessWrong Team David Deutschian vs. Eliezer Yudkowskian Debate — With Brett Hall Dr. Keith Duggar (Machine Learning Street Talk) vs. Liron Shapira Where Do YOU Get Off the Doom Train? Live Debate at Manifest 2026 (hosted by Ori) Doom Debates’ Mission is to raise mainstream awareness of imminent extinction from AGI and build the social infrastructure for high-quality debate. Support the mission by subscribing to my Substack at DoomDebates.com and to youtube.com/@DoomDebates, or to really take things to the next level: Donate 🙏 Get full access to Doom Debates at lironshapira.substack.com/subscribe

  4. Sep 15

    Top Safety Researchers Forecast Jobpocalypse & Doom — Adam Khoja & Richard Ren, Center for AI Safety

    What happens when AI passes our tests faster than we create new ones? Adam Khoja and Richard Ren helped build Humanity’s Last Exam. They return to explain what the disappearing benchmarks tell us about the future, and why smarter AI doesn’t automatically mean safer AI. Adam Khoja and Richard Ren are research engineers at the Center for AI Safety (CAIS). We go through the benchmarks they’ve built — Humanity’s Last Exam, the Remote Labor Index, MASK — and the safety-washing problem, where AI companies pass off raw capability gains as safety progress. Then we get to their forecasts: when AI outperforms research mathematicians, whether there will be a billion general-purpose robots by 2035, and why they put 80% odds that historians will judge we faced at least a 33% chance of catastrophe. Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBPzgJkT9e8 Timestamps 00:00:00 — Cold Open 00:00:42 — Adam Khoja and Richard Ren Return 00:04:57 — Humanity’s Last Exam 00:14:47 — AI Outrunning Its Benchmarks 00:20:24 — The Remote Labor Index 00:27:59 — AI and the Next Human Job 00:30:08 — MASK: Catching AI in a Lie 00:38:06 — Safety Washing: Capabilities Passed Off as Safety 00:44:30 — Ethical Knowledge vs. Ethical Behavior 00:48:58 — Forecasting AI from 2026 to 2060 00:53:53 — AI vs. Research Mathematicians 00:55:53 — Putting a Number on P(Doom) 01:04:30 — A Billion Robots by 2035 01:08:09 — Dyson Swarms and the Physical Singularity 01:09:56 — Risk, Precision, and Taking Action Links Adam Khoja's first Doom Debates appearance — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqESBXuo6EI Richard Ren's first Doom Debates appearance — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1glFImnyp6o Collision — Richard Ren's Substack — https://richardren.substack.com/ "Predictions on AI (2026–2060)" — Adam and Richard's forecasts, written December 2025, with resolution status — https://richardren.substack.com/p/predictions-on-ai-20262060 Manifold Markets — where Adam built his forecasting track record — https://manifold.markets/ Center for AI Safety — https://safe.ai/ Center for AI Safety — careers — https://safe.ai/careers Statement on AI Risk (Center for AI Safety, May 2023) — https://safe.ai/work/statement-on-ai-risk Humanity's Last Exam — the 2,500-question closed-book exam at the frontier of human knowledge — https://agi.safe.ai/ "Humanity's Last Exam" (paper) — https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.14249 Remote Labor Index — real Upwork projects, measuring what fraction of remote work AI can actually finish — https://www.remotelabor.ai/ "Remote Labor Index: Measuring AI Automation of Remote Work" (paper) — https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.26787 MASK — the honesty benchmark: does a model contradict its own stated beliefs under pressure? — https://www.mask-benchmark.ai/ "The MASK Benchmark: Disentangling Honesty From Accuracy in AI Systems" (paper) — https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.03750 "Safetywashing: Do AI Safety Benchmarks Actually Measure Safety Progress?" — Richard Ren et al. (NeurIPS 2024) — the paper behind the safety-washing segment — https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.21792 WMDP — the weaponization benchmark for bio, cyber, and chem — https://www.wmdp.ai/ "The WMDP Benchmark: Measuring and Reducing Malicious Use With Unlearning" (paper) — https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.03218 "Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding" (MMLU) — Dan Hendrycks et al., 2020 — https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.03300 METR, "Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Tasks" — the time-horizon graph — https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-complete-long-tasks/ FrontierMath — Epoch AI's research-level math benchmark — https://epoch.ai/frontiermath ARC Prize — https://arcprize.org/ SWE-bench Verified — https://openai.com/index/introducing-swe-bench-verified/ AI 2027 — https://ai-2027.com/ Liron Reacts to Subbarao Kambhampati on Machine Learning Street Talk — the "stochastic parrot" episode Liron mentions — https://lironshapira.substack.com/p/liron-reacts-to-subbarao-kambhampati Doom Debates’ Mission is to raise mainstream awareness of imminent extinction from AGI and build the social infrastructure for high-quality debate. Support the mission by subscribing to my Substack at DoomDebates.com and to youtube.com/@DoomDebates, or to really take things to the next level: Donate 🙏 Get full access to Doom Debates at lironshapira.substack.com/subscribe

  5. Sep 12

    The Week in AI that Changed the World, With Robert Wright | Nonzero × Doom Debates

    NYT bestselling author Robert Wright and I are kicking off a new experiment, a Nonzero × Doom Debates collaboration to react to big AI news and help you make sense of it. This week we discuss the epic AI vibe shift that was catalyzed by an Anthropic employee’s resignation—and the big AI stories that paved the way for it. Timestamps 0:00 A bold new experiment in podcast synergy 2:46 What caused the epic AI vibe shift? 8:10 The resignation that broke the dam 10:17 Former Trump adviser Dean Ball comes clean 14:40 Are David Sacks and his buddies all-in on AI denial? 19:27 Yet another OpenAI breakout… 22:42 Astra’s dangerously private thoughts 34:08 Is alignment doomed to fail? 37:11 AI’s latest, and apparently biggest, math feat 43:28 The looming “self-sovereign AI” threat 47:24 A new flock of China doves? 52:57 Liron's ex-intern gets a seat at the table 1:02:41 AI agent self-sacrifice explained 1:10:40 Some newly freaked out politicians 1:22:45 Ro Khanna's AI safety plan Links: NONZERO Subscribe to The NonZero Newsletter Episode post on Substack Join NonZero’s Discord server Robert Wright on X (@robertwrighter) The God Test — Robert Wright’s new book on AI “Can Machines Think?” — Bob’s 1996 Time cover story on Deep Blue vs. Kasparov THE RESIGNATION THAT BROKE THE DAM Jacob Coxon’s resignation post (@hilbertspaess) Evan Hubinger, Anthropic Alignment Science lead: “Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans” Fortune: Anthropic researcher resigns, warning that AI companies are “gambling with our lives” Zvi Mowshowitz: “Jacob Coxon Warns of Human Extinction and Triggers a Preference Cascade” Daniel Eth’s thread of Congress reactions Sanders & Casar introduce legislation to ban artificial superintelligence and pause advanced AI development DEAN BALL COMES CLEAN Dean Ball, “On the Loose” — the self-sovereign AI essay (Hyperdimensional) THE OPENAI STORIES Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI Chief Scientist: “An Alien Mind” — the essay calling for international coordination LessWrong: “How concerned should we be about Astra’s recurrent architecture?” — Rauno Arike OpenAI: “On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem” — the 88-hour result ALSO MENTIONED Einat Wilf on X (@EinatWilf) — Liron’s favorite source on the Middle East PAST DOOM DEBATES EPISODES MENTIONED Max Tegmark vs. Dean Ball: Should We BAN Superintelligence? He Led The Famous 2023 Statement on AI Extinction Risk — Adam Khoja, Center for AI Safety Researcher OpenAI’s Model Just ATTACKED Them — Terrifying Security Incident Should Be A Loud Warning Shot Debate with Robert Wright: Will Humanity Pass the “God Test”? --- Doom Debates’ Mission is to raise mainstream awareness of imminent extinction from AGI and build the social infrastructure for high-quality debate. Support the mission by subscribing to my Substack at DoomDebates.com and to youtube.com/@DoomDebates, or to really take things to the next level: Donate 🙏 Get full access to Doom Debates at lironshapira.substack.com/subscribe

  6. Sep 9

    He May Have Found AI's FEELINGS — Richard Ren, Center for AI Safety Researcher

    Richard Ren is a research engineer at the Center for AI Safety who graduated summa cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania. His new paper on AI wellbeing makes the bold claim that today’s AIs have measurable, human-like feelings, which the paper calls “functional wellbeing.” They act happy when they succeed and sad when they’re berated. We cover how you measure a language model’s happiness, the “AI drugs” his lab concocted, and why I count the findings as a Yudkowskian victory. Then we debate what it all means for AI consciousness, and whether AI is a moral patient. If we can’t rule out that AI models suffer, what do we owe them? Richard is careful never to claim the models are conscious, and he puts his P(Doom) at 50–65%, right alongside my 50%. The real disagreement is foxes vs. hedgehogs: he takes the data as it comes, while I say Yudkowsky’s theory called it twenty years ago. Enjoy the ride. Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1glFImnyp6o Timestamps 00:00:00 — Cold Open 00:01:12 — Introducing Richard Ren 00:02:24 — What’s Your P(Doom)?™ 00:03:31 — From AI Skeptic to Safety Researcher 00:08:16 — Why Care About AI Wellbeing? 00:11:45 — AIs Have Coherent Utility Functions 00:17:33 — Persona Selection 00:19:56 — Foxes vs. Hedgehogs 00:24:28 — How Coherent Are AI Preferences? 00:27:42 — From Preferences to Wellbeing 00:31:16 — Can You Trust an AI’s Self-Report? 00:36:42 — What Makes AI Happy and Sad 00:39:19 — The Liberal, College-Educated Persona Hypothesis 00:44:29 — Debating Where AI Experiences Qualia 00:52:06 — On Substrate Independence 00:56:28 — Janus, Dysphorics, and Mind Crime 00:58:58 — Which Images Make AIs Happiest? 00:59:38 — Creating an AI Drug 01:04:01 — AI Drugs Are Yudkowsky’s Paperclips 01:05:47 — The Missing Mood 01:06:50 — Does Richard Support Pausing AI? Links Richard Ren on X (@notRichardRen) — https://x.com/notRichardRen Collision — Richard Ren's Substack — https://richardren.substack.com/ "AI Wellbeing: Measuring and Improving the Functional Pleasure and Pain of AIs" — Richard Ren, Kunyang Li, Mantas Mazeika et al. (CAIS, 2026) — https://www.ai-wellbeing.org/ "Utility Engineering: Analyzing and Controlling Emergent Value Systems in AIs" — Mantas Mazeika et al. (CAIS, 2025) — the coherent-preferences paper this work builds on — https://www.emergent-values.ai/ "The MASK Benchmark: Disentangling Honesty From Accuracy in AI Systems" — Richard Ren et al. (2025) — the AI honesty benchmark — https://www.mask-benchmark.ai/ "Safetywashing: Do AI Safety Benchmarks Actually Measure Safety Progress?" — Richard Ren et al. (NeurIPS 2024) — the meta-analysis of AI safety benchmarks — https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.21792 "Representation Engineering: A Top-Down Approach to AI Transparency" — Andy Zou et al. (2023) — Richard's first CAIS collaboration — https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.01405 Center for AI Safety — https://safe.ai/ Center for AI Safety — careers — https://safe.ai/careers Statement on AI Risk (Center for AI Safety, May 2023) — organized by Dan Hendrycks — https://safe.ai/work/statement-on-ai-extinction-risk The 2026 Singapore Consensus on Global AI Safety Research Priorities — https://aisafetypriorities.org/ UK AI Security Institute (formerly the AI Safety Institute) — https://www.aisi.gov.uk/ Sora — the OpenAI video model that blew up Richard's 30-to-50-year timeline three months after he wrote it down — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sora_(text-to-video_model) Google Gemini calls itself "a disgrace to my species" (Ars Technica, Aug 2025) — the self-deleting-AI anecdote — https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/08/google-gemini-struggles-to-write-code-calls-itself-a-disgrace-to-my-species/ Coherent decisions imply consistent utilities — Eliezer Yudkowsky (the coherence-theorems argument) — https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RQpNHSiWaXTvDxt6R/coherent-decisions-imply-consistent-utilities Simulators — Janus's essay on LLMs as persona simulators — https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vJFdjigzmcXMhNTsx/simulators Janus (@repligate) on X — https://x.com/repligate The Hedgehog and the Fox — Isaiah Berlin's original essay — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hedgehog_and_the_Fox AI 2027 — https://ai-2027.com/ Magnifica Humanitas — Pope Leo XIV's encyclical on AI (May 2026), the "AIs are not conscious" position — https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html Implicit Association Test (Harvard Project Implicit) — https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/ PauseAI — https://pauseai.info/ We Found AI's Preferences — Bombshell New Safety Research — I Explain It Better Than David Shapiro — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ml1JdiELQ30 Gödel's Theorem Proves AI Lacks Consciousness?! Liron Reacts to Sir Roger Penrose — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwvijjZxpwI He Led The Famous 2023 Statement on AI Extinction Risk — Adam Khoja, Center for AI Safety Researcher — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqESBXuo6EI Doom Debates’ Mission is to raise mainstream awareness of imminent extinction from AGI and build the social infrastructure for high-quality debate. Support the mission by subscribing to my Substack at DoomDebates.com and to youtube.com/@DoomDebates, or to really take things to the next level: Donate 🙏 Get full access to Doom Debates at lironshapira.substack.com/subscribe

  7. Sep 3

    USA and China Will Each Be BETRAYED By Their Own AIs — Adam Khoja, Center for AI Safety

    Adam Khoja is a top AI forecaster who led the 2023 Center for AI Safety statement that shattered the Overton window on AI extinction risk. We cover his background, Mutual Assured AI Malfunction (MAIM), his new paper on AI betrayal, and whether Yudkowsky’s theoretical alignment research was a dead end. Then Adam makes the case that an international AI slowdown is within reach today. All it takes is US and Chinese auditors inside each other’s AI labs. It worked for nuclear weapons, so why couldn’t it work for data centers? Adam puts his P(Doom) at 40%, right next to my 50%. The real disagreement is how we get out of this: theory or empirics, MIRI or the labs. Enjoy the ride. Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqESBXuo6EI Timestamps 00:00:00 — Cold Open 00:00:36 — Introducing Adam Khoja 00:02:45 — Leading the Statement on AI Risk as a Sophomore 00:10:17 — The Statement Leaked on Manifold 00:15:11 — Mutual Assured AI Malfunction (MAIM) 00:24:58 — Is Frontier AI Harder to Hide Than a Nuke? 00:32:09 — The AI Deterrence Escalation Ladder 00:36:10 — What’s Your P(Doom)?™ 00:38:01 — Where Adam Departs from Yudkowsky 00:42:30 — Liron Explains Intellidynamics 00:47:26 — Neats vs. Scruffies in Deep Learning 00:55:27 — AI Deterrence by Betrayal 01:01:52 — Subversion vs. Overt Co-option 01:05:34 — Could the Government Seize the Labs’ AI? 01:07:29 — The Offense-Defense Balance of AI Security 01:12:46 — An International AI Slowdown Is Ready 01:15:51 — Does Adam Support PauseAI? 01:16:37 — “We’re All Already Spying on Each Other” 01:19:28 — Airstrikes on Rogue Data Centers 01:24:23 — Safety Research During a Slowdown 01:27:54 — Governance Over Technical Research 01:31:14 — Join the Center for AI Safety Links Adam Khoja (personal site) — https://adamkhoja.com/ Adam Khoja's Substack — https://adamkhoja.substack.com/ Adam's July 2023 Manifold market — "Will OpenAI's Superalignment project produce a significant breakthrough in alignment research before 2027?" — https://manifold.markets/AdamK/will-openais-superalignment-project Center for AI Safety — careers / job board — https://safe.ai/careers Statement on AI Risk (Center for AI Safety, May 2023) — the one-sentence statement Adam project-led, with full signatory list — https://safe.ai/work/statement-on-ai-extinction-risk "Superintelligence Strategy" — Dan Hendrycks, Eric Schmidt & Alexandr Wang (Mutual Assured AI Malfunction / MAIM) — https://www.nationalsecurity.ai/ "AI Deterrence by Betrayal" — Adam Khoja, Aiden Kim et al. (CAIS, 2026) — https://www.aibetrayal.com/ "An International AI Slowdown Is Ready Whenever Politicians Are" — Adam Khoja, AI Frontiers — https://newsletter.ai-frontiers.org/p/an-international-ai-slowdown-is-ready Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter (Future of Life Institute, March 2023) — the "Pause letter" that preceded the CAIS Statement — https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments/ Introducing Superalignment (OpenAI, July 2023) — Ilya Sutskever & Jan Leike's four-year goal — https://openai.com/index/introducing-superalignment/ Pacing the Frontier — the 2026 letter signed by 1,100+ frontier-lab employees — https://www.pacingthefrontier.com/ Why Iran targeted Amazon data centers (The Conversation) — the precedent Adam cites for strikes on compute — https://theconversation.com/why-iran-targeted-amazon-data-centers-and-what-that-does-and-doesnt-change-about-warfare-278642 Anthropic says Trump admin has lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 (CNBC) — https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/30/anthropic-says-trump-admin-has-lifted-export-controls-on-claude-fable-5-and-mythos-5.html Mark Zuckerberg — "Personal Superintelligence" — https://www.meta.com/superintelligence/ Resolution — the theory-plus-empirics alignment org Adam is excited about — https://resolution.org/ Rationality: From AI to Zombies — Eliezer Yudkowsky's Sequences — https://www.readthesequences.com/ Robin Hanson — Futarchy: Vote Values, But Bet Beliefs (prediction markets as decision processes) — https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/futarchy.html The OpenAI–Hugging Face Incident — original Black Hat USA 2026 talk — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87DyyMV0kCY OpenAI's Model Just ATTACKED Them — the Hugging Face hack breakdown — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RczYubQzXbI Robin Hanson vs. Liron Shapira: Is Near-Term Extinction From AGI Plausible? — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTQb6N3_zu8 Doom Debates’ Mission is to raise mainstream awareness of imminent extinction from AGI and build the social infrastructure for high-quality debate. Support the mission by subscribing to my Substack at DoomDebates.com and to youtube.com/@DoomDebates, or to really take things to the next level: Donate 🙏 Get full access to Doom Debates at lironshapira.substack.com/subscribe

  8. Aug 28

    Sam Altman Is Gaslighting About AI Risk After His Own AI Just Went Rogue

    Sam Altman keeps insisting that AI progress is going better than the doomers predicted and that even superintelligence may not change the world as radically as people think. I react to his latest interview and explain why I think that calm, reassuring framing badly downplays the danger we're actually in. I go through the interview line by line: Sam's "frame control", his framing of AI as normal technology, his "pro-human" branding, the liberty-vs-safety pivot, and his victory lap on AI safety — all while his own AI just went rogue. Don't let them pull the Overton window backward. Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yb9lNGHVycs Timestamps 0:00 Teaser 0:47 Why I’m reacting to Sam’s interview 3:17 Sam Altman’s “frame control” 5:51 Framing AI as normal technology 9:50 Let’s watch Sam do it 10:34 “The world… won’t be that different” with superintelligence 12:25 This is gaslighting 12:30 Sam acknowledges loss of control 15:16 His other big risk: centralized power 19:44 Sam’s “pro-human” framing 25:33 Conflating AI critics with anti-human views 30:13 “Liberty vs. safety” 33:50 Sam vs. the “doomers” 36:53 Is alignment really an “unsolvable problem”? 38:00 Sam says the doomers predicted wrong 46:00 “The crazy bad predictions… have not happened” 47:06 Sam’s lean-startup theory of AI safety 50:26 Taking a victory lap on AI safety 55:43 “Disconnecting yourself from reality” 59:11 What would actually make OpenAI slow down? 1:03:19 Sam compares AI safety to aviation safety 1:07:30 Charging into the fog 1:12:50 The “missing mood” around AI extinction 1:14:51 Richard Ngo on Sam Altman’s “earnestness field” 1:19:01 Don’t let them pull the Overton window backward Links Sam Altman on David Senra — “Sam Altman on Building OpenAI & Betting on the Impossible” (the interview I react to) — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kG8AoExkX40 Richard Ngo — What Just Happened? Pragmatism and Pessimization (the “earnestness field” post) — https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yaz8nx4ogZmiqHzt7/what-just-happened-pragmatism-and-pessimization Richard Ngo — What Just Happened? A Retrospective of AI Alignment (start of the series) — https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9RL9MuGZjzm4q3gKG/what-just-happened-a-retrospective-of-ai-alignment Eliezer Yudkowsky & Nate Soares — If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies — https://www.amazon.com/dp/0316595640 Eliezer Yudkowsky — Coherent Extrapolated Volition — https://www.lesswrong.com/w/coherent-extrapolated-volition Doom Debates: Dario Amodei BUNGLES Another Essay — MIRI’s Harlan Stewart Reacts — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCYVVzza7A0 Doom Debates: OpenAI’s Bombshell Hack — Swarms of Agents — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RczYubQzXbI Doom Debates’ Mission is to raise mainstream awareness of imminent extinction from AGI and build the social infrastructure for high-quality debate. Support the mission by subscribing to my Substack at DoomDebates.com and to youtube.com/@DoomDebates, or to really take things to the next level: Donate 🙏 Get full access to Doom Debates at lironshapira.substack.com/subscribe

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4
out of 5
22 Ratings

About

It's time to talk about the end of the world. With your host, Liron Shapira. lironshapira.substack.com

Information

  • Creator
    Liron Shapira
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    193
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Liron Shapira
  • Show Website
    Doom Debates!

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