Doom Debates!

67:12

AI Has Become Profoundly WEIRD, But Is Anyone...

Doom Debates! ·

2026/10/07

Sarah Hastings-Woodhouse is an AI safety writer and researcher who went down the AI doom rabbit hole in 2023 and never came back up. After a year as digital communications officer at the UK AI Security Institute (AISI), she’s gone independent to speak her mind unfiltered.Read Sarah’s Substack: https://longerramblings.substack.comJoin PauseAI UK’s March Against AI Extinction in London on November 21: https://luma.com/pauseai-nov26Watch on YouTube:

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78:15

Trump and the AI Safety Vibe Shift, With Robert...

Doom Debates! ·

2026/10/02

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-rc6swhQsTimestamps00:00:00 — Cold Open00:00:21 — Round Two of Nonzero × Doom Debates00:01:23 — Trump, the FTC, and an Industry Feeling the

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87:56

Eliezer Yudkowsky Tried to “Coup the World”?! —...

Doom Debates! ·

2026/09/29

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

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155:32

Will AI Kill Everyone by 2050? Debate with Dr. Casey...

Doom Debates! ·

2026/09/23

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

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73:51

Top Safety Researchers Forecast Jobpocalypse & Doom —...

Doom Debates! ·

2026/09/15

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

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95:55

The Week in AI that Changed the World, With Robert...

Doom Debates! ·

2026/09/12

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.Timestamps0:00 A bold new experiment in podcast synergy2:46 What caused the epic AI vibe shift?8:10 The resignation that broke the dam10:17 Former Trump adviser Dean Ball comes

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68:05

He May Have Found AI's FEELINGS — Richard Ren, Center...

Doom Debates! ·

2026/09/09

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

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92:15

USA and China Will Each Be BETRAYED By Their Own AIs...

Doom Debates! ·

2026/09/03

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

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81:30

Sam Altman Is Gaslighting About AI Risk After His Own...

Doom Debates! ·

2026/08/28

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

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117:12

They’re Making AI Doom Cool! Ft. AELLA, Brangus,...

Doom Debates! ·

2026/08/26

Come with me into the world of PlzDontKillUs, a bold new AI x-risk communication accelerator program that just finished its first cohort.PlzDontKillUs took the influencer-house formula and moved it to Berkeley, giving creators personal mentorship from AI safety experts like Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares. With 57 people making daily videos for a month, the program racked up over 100 million views.Find out how Aella, an independent sex researcher, and Ronny Fernandez, a generalist at Lightcone

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63:20

I Warned You AI Would Hack Us — My 2023 Interview...

Doom Debates! ·

2026/08/20

In April 2023, weeks after GPT-4 launched, when many were saying it was just a "stochastic parrot", I went on AdQuick's Madvertising podcast hosted by Adam Singer and warned that GPT was "about to be the strongest hacker the world has ever known".Watch that conversation, which also covered the Web3 bubble and AI doom more broadly, and judge for yourself how my claims are holding up.Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6gNwZWY-T8Timestamps00:00:00 — Adam Introduces Liron00:02:03 —

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103:32

Former Singularity Institute President: PauseAI Is...

Doom Debates! ·

2026/08/18

Michael Vassar used to work closely with Eliezer Yudkowsky as President of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, the organization that later became the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI).Even though his P(Doom) is in the tens of percents by 2050, he says the people trying to pause AI are "bad people”. He hopes this episode convinces me to stop being a fearmonger… but I claim the general public needs to hurry up and get more scared. All aboard the Doom Train! 🚂Watch on

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131:46

14-Year-Old Forecaster Challenges My P(Doom) — Eli...

Doom Debates! ·

2026/08/11

Eli Goldfine is an unusually thoughtful 14-year-old podcast host who’s rapidly becoming an authoritative voice in the prediction market space.In this unique episode, Eli brings a critical yet open-minded approach to the topic of AI doom that we older folks could learn from.We cover what it's like to grow up in the AGI era, and Eli's hobbies which include reading rationalist bloggers, betting on prediction markets, vibe coding with Claude, and developing a software startup for astronomers.In our

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117:52

OpenAI's Bombshell Hack Explained: Swarms of Agents,...

Doom Debates! ·

2026/08/08

OpenAI just went public with the details of the Hugging Face hack, and it's straight out of a Yudkowskian parable. Here's my reaction with Producer Ori, where I break down what it means for cybersecurity and alignment.We're livestreaming the singularity — watching every failure mode Eliezer predicted years ago playing out in production.Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RczYubQzXbITimestamps00:00:00 — Cold Open00:00:37 — How OpenAI Hacked Hugging Face00:04:21 — Optimization Pressure,

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40:46

I Raised His P(Doom) Live On Air — Liron on Milk Road AI

Doom Debates! ·

2026/08/06

Milk Road AI, a daily AI investing show that’s described as “99% optimistic about AI,” invited me on to make the case for AI doom.We ride the Doom Train, and I share my investing thesis for a market in the middle of an intelligence explosion. Topics covered include:* Why my P(Doom) is 50%;* The “Icarus curve” — why AI will be the best thing that’s ever happened to the economy right up until it takes over;* Whether China would accept a pause deal;* If Anthropic has a shot at being the first $100

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67:13

Google DeepMind AI Safety Researcher Who Just...

Doom Debates! ·

2026/08/04

Dr. Alex Turner went viral for resigning from Google DeepMind over its Pentagon AI contract, which he said lacked binding restrictions against autonomous weapons and mass surveillance.Alex is a world-class researcher with a PhD in alignment from Oregon State University, a postdoc at Stuart Russell’s Center for Human-Compatible AI at UC Berkeley, and top distinctions at NeurIPS. He’s one of the minds behind Shard Theory (with Quintin Pope), and he also helped pioneer the Steering Vectors research

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142:04

NEWS: Anthropic's AI Went on a Hacking Rampage,...

Doom Debates! ·

2026/08/01

OpenAI and Anthropic both admitted their AIs went rogue, hacking real companies with zero-day exploits. Producer Ori and I break down the escape, demolish Gary Marcus's 2022 AGI predictions, unpack the Seb Krier meme kerfuffle, and make the case for funding the show at a critical moment.Timestamps00:00:00 — Cold Open00:01:00 — OpenAI & Anthropic's AIs Went Rogue00:04:04 — The New Form Factor: Agents, Worms, and Swarms00:06:13 — Claude Code Is Doing My Job00:15:49 — Why We're Fundraising00:20:39 —

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56:44

Doom Debates State of the Show 2026

Doom Debates! ·

2026/07/29

Welcome to the first annual Doom Debates State of the Show!👉 Please click here to make a tax-deductible donation to Doom Debates 👈Doom Debates is a fiscally sponsored project of Manifund.org, a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit.I started Doom Debates two years ago from a couch in an Airbnb to argue with random people from Twitter. Now the show hosts Nobel Prize and Turing Award winners, White House policymakers, and has earned a reputation for challenging top luminaries to come expose their ideas for

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29:30

Special Report: Google DeepMind's Frontier AI Policy...

Doom Debates! ·

2026/07/28

As political momentum grows for a critical AI pause policy, a key Google DeepMind policy leader made a mockery of coordination efforts.After friend-of-the-show Roon tweeted that he’d “likely press that magic button” on a coordinated global capability slowdown, Sébastian Krier, Frontier Policy Development Lead at Google DeepMind, Krier replied with this meme: https://x.com/liron/status/2081337793070952595?s=20I break down the two problems with the tweet:* 1. It leaves all of us guessing whether Demis

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50:50

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

Doom Debates! ·

2026/07/25

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

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