Where Do YOU Get Off the Doom Train? Live Debate at Manifest 2026

Producer Ori takes over hosting duties in this special episode, a live recording from Manifest 2026.He takes attendees for a ride on The Doom Train, the series of claims involved in arguing that P(Doom) is high. Every stop is a place where people get off before reaching that conclusion.The crowd at Manifest is a mix of forecasters, rationalists, and AI researchers with a wide range of P(Doom) positions. Even without me or Eliezer in the room, there are plenty of Yudkowskians to push back on the accelerationist claims.Watch along and decide where YOU get off, or if you ride all the way to doomtown with us. Also, grab the Doom Train framework down below so you can get to the crux of disagreement in your own AI x-risk conversations.Timestamps00:00:00 — Cold Open00:00:25 — Liron Introduces Producer Ori’s Manifest Session00:02:30 — Previewing the Doom Train™ Stops00:03:38 — Audience P(Doom) Poll00:05:00 — Stop 1: AGI Isn’t Coming Soon00:10:43 — Stop 2: AI Can’t Go Far Beyond Human Intelligence00:15:05 — Stop 3: AI Won’t Be a Physical Threat00:18:14 — Stop 4: Intelligence Yields Moral Goodness00:21:38 — Will ASI Behave Because Alien ASIs Are Watching?00:26:01 — Stop 5: We Have a Safe AI Development Process00:28:33 — Stop 6: AI Capabilities Will Rise at a Manageable Pace00:30:08 — Stop 7: AI Won’t Try to Conquer the Universe00:34:22 — Stop 8: Superalignment Is a Tractable Problem00:38:01 — Stop 9: Once We Solve Superalignment, We’ll Enjoy Peace00:41:14 — Stop 10: Unaligned ASI Will Spare Us00:47:35 — Stop 11: AI Doomerism Is Bad Epistemology00:49:02 — Bonus Stops and Wrap-UpThe Doom Train FrameworkStops on the Doom TrainAGI isn’t coming soon* No consciousness* No emotions* No creativity — AIs are limited to copying patterns in their training data, they can’t “generate new knowledge”* AIs aren’t even as smart as dogs right now, never mind humans* AIs constantly make dumb mistakes, they can’t even do simple arithmetic reliably* LLM performance is hitting a wall — GPT 4.5 is barely better than GPT 4.1 despite being larger scale* No genuine reasoning* No microtubules exploiting uncomputable quantum effects* No soul* We’ll need to build tons of data centers and power before we get to AGI* No agency* This is just another AI hype cycle, every 25 years people think AGI is coming soon and they’re wrongArtificial intelligence can’t go far beyond human intelligence* “Superhuman intelligence” is a meaningless concept* Human engineering already is coming close to the laws of physics* Coordinating a large engineering project can’t happen much faster than humans do it* No individual human is that smart compared to humanity as a whole, including our culture, corporations, and other institutions. Similarly no individual AI will ever be that smart compared to the sum of human culture and other institutions.AI won’t be a physical threat* AI doesn’t have arms or legs, it has zero control over the real world* An AI with a robot body can’t fight better than a human soldier* We can just disconnect an AI’s power to stop it* We can just turn off the internet to stop it* We can just shoot it with a gun* It’s just math* Any supposed chain of events where AI kills humans is far-fetched science fictionIntelligence yields moral goodness* More intelligence is correlated with more morality* Smarter people commit fewer crimes* The orthogonality thesis is false* AIs will discover moral realism* If we made AIs so smart, and we were trying to make them moral, then they’ll be smart enough to debug their own morality* Positive-sum cooperation was the outcome of natural selectionWe have a safe AI development process* Just like every new technology, we’ll figure it out as we go* We don’t know what problems need to be fixed until we build the AI and test it out* If an AI causes problems, we’ll be able to turn it off and release another version* We have safeguards to make sure AI doesn’t get uncontrollable/unstoppable* If we accidentally build an AI that stops accepting our shutoff commands, it won’t manage to copy versions of itself outside our firewalls which then proceed to spread exponentially like a computer virus* If we accidentally build an AI that escapes our data center and spreads exponentially like a computer virus, it won’t do too much damage in the world before we can somehow disable or neutralize all its copies* If we can’t disable or neutralize copies of rogue AIs, we’ll rapidly build other AIs that can do that job