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by Liron Shapira
It's time to talk about the end of the world. With your host, Liron Shapira.
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- Yesterday29 min
Why I'm Happy the US Government BANNED Claude Fable — "AI in the AM" Livestream with Nathan Labenz
The US government banned Claude Fable like a clown show. But I’m happy about it. Here’s my appearance on the AI in the AM livestream (recorded Tue, June 16) with Nathan Labenz and Prakash Narayanan, where I explain why this was good for society. The government’s action shows that we can actually pause AI, a precedent that matters way more than the boneheaded rationale behind Fable’s ban.We then get into a mini-AI doom debate where Prakash defends the AI optimist’s worldview. I push back on how much I expect superintelligence to reshape the planet.Timestamps00:00:00 — Why I’m Happy the Government Banned Fable00:11:18 — Why We Lose Control of AI00:20:27 — The Icarus Graph: Heaven, Then Hell00:22:33 — Get Ready to Pause00:25:51 — What Exactly Should We Ban?00:27:42 — Wrapping UpLinksThe Cognitive Revolution podcast with Nathan Labenz —https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/Nathan Labenz on X — https://x.com/labenzPrakash Narayanan on X — https://x.com/8teapi AI in the AM on X — https://x.com/AI_in_the_AM TranscriptWhy I’m Happy the Government Banned FableNathan Labenz 00:00:08On that note, perhaps a fitting transition to our first guest of the day. Liron Shapira is the host of Doom Debates, a YouTube channel where he has found quite a bit of success in bringing people from really all walks of life on to discuss how scared we should be of AI and just how high our P(Doom)s should be.So Liron, I’m excited to get your take on recent events. Obviously, never a dull moment in the AI space. The thing that caught my eye most from you over the last few days was when you said basically, “I want the government to be willing to take action on AI issues so badly that even if this whole Fable ban turns out to be totally boneheaded and unjustified in some local sense, you support it, or you’re at least happy to see it because it breaks the ice and now nobody can ever tell you again that it’s impossible to imagine the government doing anything.” So give me the double click into that story, and then I’m sure we’ll have plenty of interesting directions to go.Liron Shapira 00:01:17Hey, Nate. Great to be here. That’s exactly right. I’m a simple man. I see AI getting paused. I feel good about breaking the Overton window. The government can do it. It’s that easy, guys. This is a precedent. Overall, I’m happy. You can talk about the nuances. It was done like a clown show. It was done for bad motives. It doesn’t really consider China or a treaty or anything. There’s a lot of problems, but I’m really happy about smashing the Overton window, where now tech folks don’t think that they’re in a bubble or they’re untouchable. It happened, guys. And we can only go from here.Prakash Narayanan 00:01:53I actually agree with you, because I think it was a little bit delusional for tech to feel that it wasn’t gonna get touched. And the government just has so many small and large ways to effectuate its power. So it was not that surprising to me that they kind of went through left field and went with the export control rather than anything else.But it also strikes me that as they exercise this, we start also to go into kind of what we wanted to avoid. It’s a little bit of a small tyranny. I think several people on the timeline have commented, Dean Ball has commented, this kind of unstructured regulation looks kind of selective and vengeful almost, and it starts putting you in this zone where tech people start to mistrust the government because you also see — I think there’s a lot of narratives on the timeline which are being leaked, “sources close to,” “sources familiar with,” and as they get leaked, it’s not very certain whether those things actually happened. Would someone actually attest to that in front of Congress? Very unclear.And we’ve also seen this kind of behavior from the administration in other affairs as well, where you have multiple conflicting narratives. It’s happening with the Iran war right now, where it’s not even clear to Congress what the deal is. You have different people saying the deal is a different thing.Prakash 00:03:46So where do you think that puts us?Prakash 00:03:49It’s great that it’s happening. I understand you feel it’s great that it’s happening to AI right now, but does that put us in a position where it’s detrimental to the body public at large?Liron 00:04:03Well, I think your analysis — you’re weaving together a few factors, but I think the elephant in the room, I hat
- 3 days ago8 min
EMERGENCY EPISODE: Manhattan residents need to VOTE Alex Bores for Congress next week (Jun 23)!
Alex Bores is a generationally strong AI regulation candidate who needs our help to win the NY-12 congressional election next week.Bentham's Bulldog, a.k.a. Matthew Adelstein, joins me to help spread the message.PLEASE DO THIS:* Vote. If you live in Midtown Manhattan, click here to check whether you’re in NY-12. If so, vote for Alex Bores on Tuesday, June 23rd.* Spread the word. Tell anyone you know in the district to vote for Bores — the race against Micah Lasher is neck and neck.* Donate now. If you can’t vote in NY-12, donate to the campaign ASAP — donations lose value after ~June 18th because ads must be booked ~5 days in advance. Get full access to Doom Debates at lironshapira.substack.com/subscribe
- 1 weeks ago1h 41m
This Harvard Professor Says AI Alignment Will BACKFIRE - Dr. Stephen Casper
Stephen Casper, PhD, is an incoming tenure-track professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.Prof. Casper is relatively unworried about the threat of human extinction from rogue superintelligence, but he is concerned about a handful of companies wielding extremely powerful AI and enfeebling the public. That’s why he’s an AI governance hawk who advocates for taxes and regulation to keep frontier labs in check. We agree that slowing down AI development would make the world safer. But you know his position is unique when he says he’d prefer to have less research on AI alignment!Timestamps00:00:00 — Cold Open00:00:50 — Introducing Stephen “Cas” Casper00:04:21 — Cas’s MIT Research: Model Tampering Attacks00:07:14 — What’s Your P(Doom)?™00:08:34 — Why a 5–10% P(Doom) Feels Patronizing00:13:07 — Crux: “The Intelligence Ceiling Might Not Be That High”00:17:18 — Power Structures vs. the Shortcut-Finding AI00:26:03 — Thought Experiment: A Data Center From the Year 212600:28:25 — Is a Data Center as Dangerous as a Nuke?00:33:41 — Cas’s Mainline Scenario: Slow-Burn Gradual Disempowerment00:40:49 — A Multipolar Powder Keg: 10 Companies, Thousands of Open Models00:43:48 — Boarding the Doom Train at a Later Station00:45:49 — Why Cas Is an “Anti-Timelines” Person00:52:26 — Sycophancy, MechaHitler & Nudification: Foreseeable Failures00:57:18 — Crux: Does Humanity Get Retries?01:02:39 — The Scariest Superintelligent Optimizers Are Companies01:06:08 — Lessons From the Deepfake Ecosystem: DALL-E 2 vs. Stable Diffusion01:12:42 — The Case for a Pause Treaty01:16:35 — Whac-A-Mole Forever: What Winning Looks Like01:20:51 — Enshittification and the 84% Who Don’t Use AI01:30:30 — Alignment Research as Safety Washing01:34:25 — The Jevons Paradox of AI Safety01:36:48 — Cas Would Press the Button to Halt Superalignment01:39:21 — Wrap-Up: The Unsexy Path to Lowering P(Doom)LinksCas’s links* Cas’s website* Cas on X* Cas’s Google Scholar* Cas’s MATS streamThings referenced* Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom* Gradual Disempowerment (Duvenaud et al.)* If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies* AI 2027* UK AI Security Institute* Center for Human-Compatible AI (Berkeley)* Internet Watch FoundationDoom Debates episodes mentioned* Mike Israetel Returns — AI’s Gonna Kill Everyone vs. AI Will Make Everything Awesome* Top AI Professor Has 85% P(Doom) — David Duvenaud* He Leads a Top AI Research Program, But He’d Hit the PAUSE Button — Kevin Zhu* Alignment is EASY and Roko’s Basilisk is GOOD?! — Roko Mijic* Andrew Critch vs. Liron Shapira: Will AI Extinction Be Fast Or Slow?* AI Could Give Humans MORE Control — Ozzie Gooen* Steven Byrnes Part 1Doom 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 weeks ago1h 23m
He Leads a Top AI Research Program, But He’d Hit the PAUSE Button Today! Kevin Zhu, Algoverse Founder
Kevin Zhu walked away from a lucrative quant career to build Algoverse, one of the most productive mentorship programs for aspiring AI researchers. Can we agree on the best research path to a safe future? Let’s take a ride on the Doom Train!00:00:00 — Cold Open00:00:58 — Introducing Kevin Zhu00:02:10 — From Citadel Quant to AI Researcher00:09:14 — The Story of Founding AlgoVerse00:12:53 — Discovering AI Safety: LessWrong & ARENA00:17:22 — Emergent Misalignment Research00:22:37 — Yudkowsky, MIRI & “Intellidynamics”00:26:50 — What’s Your P(Doom)?™00:29:37 — Kevin’s Timeline to AGI + AI 202700:30:42 — Would You Slow Down AI?00:37:44 — Coming Out of the P(Doom) Closet00:45:49 — Should We Shame AI Company Workers?00:52:27 — OpenAI’s Superalignment Team Collapse00:55:01 — Riding the Doom Train™00:55:46 — First Stop: Instrumental Convergence01:04:58 — Does Kevin Agree with the Orthogonality Thesis?01:07:08 — “It’s Just Math.” Just Unplug It.01:08:28 — “We Have a Safe Development Process”01:11:49 — Group Dynamics & Laws Will Save Us01:13:44 — Superintelligence Will Spare Us01:14:25 — Is P(Doom) Just Bad Epistemology?01:15:53 — China Will Race No Matter What01:17:45 — Maybe Human Extinction Is Good?01:20:36 — Wrap-UpLinksAlgoverse AI Research — https://algoverseairesearch.org/Kevin Zhu on Instagram — https://www.instagram.com/kevinzhu.ai/reels/Emergent Misalignment (Betley, Owain Evans et al.) — https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.17424Emergent Misalignment via In-Context Learning (Algoverse follow-up, ACL 2025) — https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11288Agentic Misalignment (the blackmail result) — https://www.anthropic.com/research/agentic-misalignmentLessWrong — https://www.lesswrong.com/PauseAI (global) — https://pauseai.info/OpenAI Superalignment — disbanded (CNBC, May 2024) — https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/17/openai-superalignment-sutskever-leike.htmlEvan Hubinger — “Why I’m joining Anthropic” — https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/7jn5aDadcMH6sFeJe/why-i-m-joining-anthropicAI 2027 — https://ai-2027.com/Bentham’s Bulldog / Matthew Adelstein on Doom Debates — https://doomdebates.com/p/benthams-bulldog-ai-doom-debateDoom 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 weeks ago2h 30m
Top Mathematicians Face Irrelevance, a 7-Year-Old's P(Doom) + The “Off Switch" Debate — Livestream May 29
Liron explains the 80-year-old Erdős conjecture that a GPT model breakthrough, Scott Aaronson ponders "the last days of human relevance”, multiple live callers debate me, plus my 7-year-old son drops in to share his P(Doom)!Timestamps00:00:00 — Cold Open00:00:42 — First Donation & “Why Is a Duck?”00:02:54 — Can AI Draw “Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously”?00:08:26 — Doom Debates Sponsors Less Online — Be Our Intern00:10:43 — Who We Still Need to Get on the Show00:26:44 — Claude Opus 4.8 & the Rising Waterline of Intelligence00:28:48 — The 80-Year-Old Geometry Conjecture a GPT Model Cracked00:44:50 — My 7-Year-Old Ezra Joins: ChatGPT, Minecraft & His P(Doom)00:58:46 — How the AI Actually Beat Erdős’s Grid01:03:50 — Scott Aaronson: “The Last Days of Human Relevance”01:07:53 — Why the Foom Is Taking Years, Not Hours01:10:47 — Is Ori Just a Yes Man?01:12:41 — Does P = NP + AI?01:23:43 — METR’s Beth Barnes: “We Are Not On Top Of It”01:28:31 — Liron’s Vibe Coding Confession01:31:21 — Alverin Joins: Can We Wait, Then Hit the Off Switch?01:48:01 — AI in a Box & the Super-Persuasion Threshold02:06:24 — Brian Joins: The Ways It Could Go Right02:11:30 — Jack Joins: How Fast Will the Foom Be?02:18:48 — 80,000 Hours, Inventing Erdős Problems & Holly Elmore’s Warning02:29:42 — Wrap-UpLinksLessOnline 2026 — June 5–7, Berkeley — https://less.online/Manifest 2026 — June 12–14 — https://manifest.is/Shtetl-Optimized — “Dispatches from the possibly last days of human relevance” — https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9782Global Call for AI Red Lines (Bengio, Hinton, Harari) — red-lines.aiOrder the 80,000 Hours book — Benjamin Todd (Penguin) — https://80000hours.org/book/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 weeks ago2h 21m
Anthropic's New Hire Should WORRY You, AI is a Math Genius, Live Callers! — Livestream (May 22)
***ATTENTION: We’re looking for paid help at LessOnline from June 5-7. Apply now!***OpenAI pushes the frontier of mathematics, Anthropic hires Andrej Karpathy to work on recursive self-improvement, live callers challenge the doom argument, and we've got a soundboard!Doom Debates Paid Gig in Berkeley!Doom Debates is proudly sponsoring The LessOnline conference this year and we got a merch table in the courtyard! We need 2 people to help represent the show — hand out T-shirts, talk to attendees, and spread the good word about Doom Debates. If you’re a regular viewer of the show, you probably know enough. Just be knowledgeable, friendly and helpful!* 💰We pay you $500 to help out during the entire Fri-Sun event* 🎟️ Plus you get FREE admission to the conference ($675 value)This is best suited for someone local to the SF Bay Area or who can arrange accommodations. If you’re interested, send an email to internship@doomdebates.com or DM Producer Ori on Discord. Tell us a little about yourself and your availability for all 3 days. Thanks!LinksLess Online conference (June 5–7, Berkeley) — https://less.onlineDoom Debates Discord — https://discord.gg/g2X8h5UCrUOpenAI — “An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry” — https://openai.com/index/model-disproves-discrete-geometry-conjecture/Timestamps00:00:00 — Welcome + New Soundboard!00:09:27 — Doom Debates Is Sponsoring Less Online00:17:30 — Ben Goertzel Episode Recap00:27:30 — Goertzel's Alignment Blind Spot00:34:21 — OpenAI Disproves an 80-Year-Old Erdős Conjecture00:41:00 — David Deutsch Says "Amazing"00:50:31 — Eliezer Yudkowsky's Job Replacement Progression00:54:07 — Anthropic's $44 Billion Run Rate01:07:45 — Schadenfreude Week: Liron Loses $10K01:13:04 — Teaching Ezra Prediction Markets01:18:11 — Caller Williawa: Is the Goal Engine Argument Effective?01:37:00 — Caller Will: Brain Rot and Idiocracy01:55:04 — Anthropic Hires Karpathy for Recursive Self-Improvement01:57:16 — Rob Wiblin Says Recursive Self-Improvement Should be "Illegal"02:01:37 — Caller Henry: The Chicken Riddle02:08:41 — David Sacks Kills the AI Executive Order02:11:20 — The Philanthropy Tidal Wave02:15:56 — Donate to Doom DebatesDoom 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 weeks ago2h 37m
I Called Out a16z Partner (Martin Casado) for Downplaying AI Capabilities in 2024
Now that Doom Debates is almost 2 years old, enough time has passed that we can revisit my claims from 2024. I claim they’ve been aging well!In this early episode, I react to Martin Casado, a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) who 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.From my perspective, Martin’s problem is that he needs to go beyond analyzing AI as just statistical models and simulations, and analyze it using the more predictive concept of “intelligence” in the sense of hitting tiny high-value targets in exponentially-large search spaces.If Martin appreciated that intelligence is a quantifiable property that algorithms have, and that our existing AIs are getting close to surpassing human-level general intelligence, then hopefully he’d come around to raising his P(doom) and appreciating the urgent extinction risk we face.LinksWatch the original episode of the Cognitive Revolution podcast with Martin and host Nathan Labenz — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZ7788oKossFollow Martin — https://x.com/martin_casadoFollow Nate — https://x.com/labenzFollow Liron — https://x.com/lironTimestamps00:00 Introducing Martin Casado01:42 Martin’s AGI Timeline05:39 Martin’s Analysis of Self-Driving Cars15:30 Heavy-Tail Distributions38:03 Understanding General Intelligence38:29 AI's Progress in Specific Domains43:20 AI’s Understanding of Meaning47:16 Compression and Intelligence48:09 Symbol Grounding53:24 Human Abstractions and AI01:18:18 The Frontier of AI Applications01:23:04 Human vs. AI: Concept Creation and Reasoning01:25:51 The Complexity of the Universe and AI's Limitations01:28:16 AI's Potential in Biology and Simulation01:32:40 The Essence of Intelligence and Creativity in AI01:41:13 AI's Future Capabilities02:00:29 Intelligence vs. Simulation02:14:59 AI Regulation02:23:05 Concluding Thoughts---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 weeks ago2h 3m
Ben Goertzel Wants to Build AGI Even FASTER — AI Doom Debate
Dr. Ben Goertzel is a pioneering AI researcher, entrepreneur, and author who has helped organize AGI as a research field since the 2000s through books, workshops, and conferences.We talk about the early days of AGI research with Yudkowsky, get Ben’s timeline to the singularity, and I try to understand what makes him so optimistic that superintelligence will be beneficial for humanity.Timestamps00:00:00 — Cold Open00:00:59 — Introducing Dr. Ben Goertzel00:04:11 — How Did Ben Get Interested in AGI?00:08:26 — Early AGI Enthusiast Community: Extropians & SL400:15:15 — Is There Headroom Above Human Intelligence?00:19:53 — Can Superintelligent AI Kill Everyone?00:28:25 — Ben’s AGI Timeline: 202900:36:00 — What Modern AI Is Missing00:42:01 — AGI to Superintelligence — FOOM in a Matter of Months00:46:34 — What’s Your P(Doom)?™00:53:37 — Ben’s Case for AI Acceleration01:03:50 — The Orthogonality Thesis Is “Dishonest”01:13:43 — Liron: Moore’s Law for Goal Achievement01:23:50 — Ben: Alignment Is Just Good Parenting01:27:36 — Alignment in Practice: OmegaCLAW01:35:47 — Creating Stable Goals Under Self-Modification01:45:22 — SingularityNET, OpenBGI, and the ASI Alliance01:57:31 — The $ASI Token Economy02:01:15 — ClosingLinksBen Goertzel on X — https://x.com/bengoertzelSingularityNET — https://singularitynet.io/OpenBGI — https://openbgi.com/Hyperon AGI Framework — https://hyperon.dev/OmegaCLAW on GitHub — https://github.com/asi-alliance/OmegaClaw-CoreASI Alliance — https://superintelligence.io/The Consciousness Explosion (book) — https://theconsciousnessexplosion.ai/“The Singularity Institute’s Scary Idea (and Why I Don’t Buy It)” (2010) — http://multiverseaccordingtoben.blogspot.com/2010/10/singularity-institutes-scary-idea-and.htmlKen Stanley Debate — https://lironshapira.substack.com/p/debate-with-a-former-openai-researchDoom 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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It's time to talk about the end of the world. With your host, Liron Shapira.
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