Doom Debates!

We took Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares’s new book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, on the streets to see what regular people think.

Do people think that artificial intelligence is a serious existential risk? Are they open to considering the argument before it’s too late? Are they hostile to the idea? Are they totally uninterested?

Watch this episode to see the full spectrum of reactions from a representative slice of America!

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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 🙏

Welcome to the Doom Debates + Wes Roth + Dylan Curious crossover episode!

Wes & Dylan’s host a popular YouTube AI news show that’s better than mainstream media. They interview thought leaders like Prof. Nick Bostrom, Dr. Mike Israetel — and now, yours truly!

This episode is Part 2, where Wes & Dylan come on Doom Debates to break down the latest AI news.

In Part 1, I went on Wes & Dylan’s channel to talk about my AI doom worries:

The only reasonable move is to subscribe to both channels and watch both parts!

Timestamps

00:00 — Cold open

00:45 — Introducing Wes & Dylan & hearing their AI YouTuber origin stories

05:38 — What’s Your P(Doom)? ™

10:30 — Living with high P(doom)

12:10 — AI News Roundup: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies Reactions

17:02 — AI Redlines at the UN & risk of AGI authoritarianism

26:56 — Robot ‘violence test’

29:20 — Anthropic gets honest about job loss impact

32:43 — AGI hunger strikes, the rationale for Anthropic protests

41:24 — Liron explains his proposal for a safer future, treaty & enforcement debate

49:23 — US Government officials ignore scientists and use “catastrophists” pejorative

55:59 — Experts’ p(doom) predictions

59:41 — Wes gives his take on AI safety warnings

1:02:04 — Wrap-up, Subscribe to Wes Roth and Dylan Curious

Show Notes

Wes & Dylans’s channel — https://www.youtube.com/wesroth

If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares — https://ifanyonebuildsit.com

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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 🙏

I’m excited to announce the launch of Doom Hut, the official Doom Debates merch store!

This isn’t just another merch drop. It’s a way to spread an urgent message that humanity faces an imminent risk from superintelligent AI, and we need to build common knowledge about it now.

What We’re Offering

The Doom Hut is the premiere source of “high P(doom) fashion.” We’ve got t-shirts in men’s and women’s styles, tall tees, tote bags, and hats that keep both the sun and the doom out of your eyes.

Our signature items are P(doom) pins. Whether your probability of doom is less than 10%, greater than 25%, or anywhere in between, you can represent your assessment with pride.

Our shirts feature “Doom Debates” on the front and “What’s your P(doom)?” on the back. It’s a conversation starter that invites questions rather than putting people on the defensive.

Why This Matters

This is crunch time. There’s no more time to beat around the bush or pretend everything’s okay.

When you wear this merch, you’re not just making a fashion statement. You’re signaling that P(doom) is uncomfortably high and that we need to stop building dangerous AI before we know how to control it.

People will wonder what “Doom Debates” means. They’ll see that you’re bold enough to acknowledge the world faces real threats. Maybe they’ll follow your example. Maybe they’ll start asking questions and learning more.

Supporting the Mission

The merch store isn’t really about making money for us (we make about $2 per item sold). The show’s production and marketing costs are funded by donations from viewers like you. Visit doomdebates.com/donate to learn more.

Donations to Doom Debates are fully tax-deductible through our fiscal sponsor, Manifund.org. You can also support us by becoming a premium subscriber to DoomDebates.com, which helps boost our Substack rankings and visibility.

Join the Community

Join our Discord community here! It’s a vibrant space where people debate, share memes, discuss new episodes, and talk about where they “get off the doom train.”

Moving Forward Together

The outpouring of support since we started accepting donations has been incredible. You get what we’re trying to do here—raising awareness and helping the average person understand that AI risk is an imminent threat to them and their loved ones.

This is real. This is urgent. And together, we’re moving the Overton window. Thanks for your support.

Eliezer Yudkowsky can warn humankind that If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies and get on the New York Times bestseller list, but he won’t get upvoted to the top of LessWrong.

According to the leaders of LessWrong, that’s intentional. The rationalist community thinks aggregating community support for important claims is “political fighting”.

Unfortunately, the idea that some other community will strongly rally behind Eliezer Yudkowsky’s message while LessWrong “stays out of the fray” and purposely prevents mutual knowledge of support from being displayed, is unrealistic.

Our refusal to aggregate the rationalist community beliefs into signals and actions is why we live in a world where rationalists with double-digit P(Doom)s join AI-race companies instead of AI-pause movements.

We let our community become a circular firing squad. What did we expect?

Timestamps

00:00:00 — Cold Open

00:00:32 — Introducing Holly Elmore, Exec. Director of PauseAI US

00:03:12 — “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies”

00:10:07 — What’s Your P(Doom)™

00:12:55 — Liron’s Review of IABIED

00:15:29 — Encouraging Early Joiners to a Movement

00:26:30 — MIRI’s Communication Issues

00:33:52 — Government Officials’ Reviews of IABIED

00:40:33 — Emmett Shear’s Review of IABIED

00:42:47 — Michael Nielsen’s Review of IABIED

00:45:35 — New York Times Review of IABIED

00:49:56 — Will MacAskill’s Review of IABIED

01:11:49 — Clara Collier’s Review of IABIED

01:22:17 — Vox Article Review

01:28:08 — The Circular Firing Squad

01:37:02 — Why Our Kind Can’t Cooperate

01:49:56 — LessWrong’s Lukewarm Show of Support

02:02:06 — The “Missing Mood” of Support

02:16:13 — Liron’s “Statement of Support for IABIED”

02:18:49 — LessWrong Community’s Reactions to the Statement

02:29:47 — Liron & Holly’s Hopes for the Community

02:39:01 — Call to Action

SHOW NOTES

PauseAI US — https://pauseai-us.org

PauseAI US Upcoming Events — https://pauseai-us.org/events

International PauseAI — https://pauseai.info

Holly’s Twitter — https://x.com/ilex_ulmus

Referenced Essays & Posts

* Liron’s Eliezer Yudkowsky interview post on LessWrong — https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kiNbFKcKoNQKdgTp8/interview-with-eliezer-yudkowsky-on-rationality-and

* Liron’s “Statement of Support for If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies” — https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aPi4HYA9ZtHKo6h8N/statement-of-support-for-if-anyone-builds-it-everyone-dies

* “Why Our Kind Can’t Cooperate” by Eliezer Yudkowsky (2009) — https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7FzD7pNm9X68Gp5ZC/why-our-kind-can-t-cooperate

* “Something to Protect” by Eliezer Yudkowsky — https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SGR4GxFK7KmW7ckCB/something-to-protect

* Center for AI Safety Statement on AI Risk — https://safe.ai/work/statement-on-ai-risk

OTHER RESOURCES MENTIONED

* Stephen Pinker’s new book on mutual knowledge, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows... — https://stevenpinker.com/publications/when-everyone-knows-everyone-knows-common-knowledge-and-mysteries-money-power-and

* Scott Alexander’s “Ethnic Tension and Meaningless Arguments” — https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/04/ethnic-tension-and-meaningless-arguments/

PREVIOUS EPISODES REFERENCED

Holly’s previous Doom Debates appearance debating the California SB 1047 bill — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUP3GywD0yM

Liron’s interview with Eliezer Yudkowsky about the IABI launch — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQtpSQmMNP0

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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 🙏

Ex-Twitch Founder and OpenAI Interim CEO Emmett Shear is one of the rare established tech leaders to lend his name and credibility to Eliezer Yudkowsky’s warnings about AI existential risk.

Even though he disagrees on some points, he chose to endorse the new book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies:

“Soares and Yudkowsky lay out, in plain and easy-to-follow terms, why our current path toward ever-more-powerful AIs is extremely dangerous.”

In this interview from the IABED launch party, we dive into Emmett’s endorsement, why the current path is so dangerous, and what he hopes to achieve by taking a different approach at his new startup, Softmax.

Watch the full IABED livestream here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRITRf-jH1g

Watch my reaction to Emmett’s talk about Softmax to see why I’m not convinced his preferred alignment track is likely to work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBN1E1fvh2g

ATTENTION DOOM DEBATES LISTENERS:

We interrupt our usual programming to request that you consider supporting the show.

Do you want your family, children & friends to continue living life through these next 10-20 years and beyond? Want to experience the good future where we benefit from research advances that make us healthier, happier, wiser, and longer-lived? Want our descendants to continue flourishing for trillions of millennia?

I sure as hell do. I’m thrilled and inspired by the grand future within our reach… Sadly, I’m VERY worried that artificial intelligence may soon cause human extinction, leaving the future permanently devoid of the incredible potential value it once had.

I want to safeguard humanity’s chance at participating in the expansive future. I want to swerve away from a premature “GAME OVER” ending. That’s why I started Doom Debates.

The Mission

Doom Debates’s mission is twofold:

* Raise awareness of AI existential risk

* Raise the quality of discourse that people can engage with and trust

The mission is achieved when the average person realizes AI is life-threatening.

Until the average person on Earth sees unaligned, uncontrollable superintelligent AI as life-threatening — that is, an imminent threat to their life and to everything they hold dear — it won’t be feasible for leaders to drive major decisive action to protect us from extinction from superintelligent AI. That’s why raising mainstream awareness of AI x-risk is Doom Debates’s point of highest leverage.

Encouragingly, surveys already show that mainstream opinion is already on our side about the level and severity of AI x-risk. What’s missing is urgency. Moving the average person’s opinion from “worried, but in an abstract long-term way” to “alarmed, in an urgent way” creates grassroots demand for drastically better AI policy, and drastically better-informed policymakers.

We needed this shift to happen yesterday; it feels late to have to drive it now. But we have no choice.

By providing high-quality interviews and debates with mainstream appeal, we’ll make millions of people realize as soon as possible: “Hey, P(doom) is too damn high RIGHT NOW. And we need to do something about it URGENTLY!”

One Weird Trick You Can Do To Help

If you care about the show’s mission, the #1 way you can help right now is by donating some of your hard-earned cash money 🙏.

Spending on production & marketing accelerates the show’s growth, which achieves our mission faster (hopefully before it’s too late). Read on for more details.

Where Does The Money Go?

I don’t make money from Doom Debates. My “real job” is running an online relationship coaching service, and my passion project is making this show. Any income from Doom Debates, i.e. viewer donations and ad revenue, is fully reinvested into production and marketing.

* Producer Ori

Thanks to a generous viewer donation, I’ve hired a full-time producer: Ori Nagel.

Ori is a rockstar who I’ve known for many years, and he collaborated with me behind the scenes throughout the show’s first year (he’s also in the first episode) before officially joining Doom Debates as our Producer. I hired him away from the media & outreach team at ControlAI, where he 10x’d their growth on social media channels.

You may have noticed the show has already started getting better at editing & thumbnails, putting out more episodes and clips, and landing more prominent guests. We’re getting more done across the board because 1 hour of Ori’s time working on everything except hosting the show = same output as 1 hour of my time.

But it’s not all smooth sailing — now that Doom Debates is Ori’s full-time job, he apparently needs to “get paid every month” 🤷‍♂️, so I’m appealing to you to help Ori stay on the job. Help us keep delivering faster progress toward the mission.

* Paid Marketing

The key to the show’s growth isn’t marketing; it’s the content. To date, we’ve had robust organic growth with minimal marketing spend. Audience size has been doubling every 3 months, and we’re seeing a snowball effect where bigger audiences attract higher-quality guests and vice versa. We’re also happy to see that the show has unusually high engagement and long-term viewer retention.

That said, investing in marketing lets us pull forward the same viewership we’d eventually get from organic growth. We’ll soon invest in YouTube ads to go beyond the pace of organic growth. We also keep spending opportunistically on marketing initiatives like sponsoring the Manifest conference and giving away T-shirts.

Donation Tiers

SUBSTACK SUPPORTERS

You can donate as little as $10/month by subscribing to the DoomDebates.com Substack, which shows your support and raises our profile on their leaderboard. I’ll send you a free Doom Debates T-shirt and P(Doom) pin so you can represent the show. Early supporters say the T-shirt is great at starting AI x-risk conversations in a non-confrontational way. 😊

MISSION PARTNERS

If you’re serious about lowering P(Doom) and you have the money to spare, $1k+ is the level where you start to move the needle for the show’s budget. This is the level where you officially become a partner in achieving the show’s mission — a Mission Partner.

A donation in the $thousands meaningfully increases our ability to execute on all the moving parts of a top-tier show:

* Guest booking: Outreach to guests who are hard to get, and constant followup

* Pre-production: E.g. preparing elaborate notes about the guest’s positions

* Production: E.g. improving my studio

* Post-production: Basically editing

* Marketing: Making clips, TikTok shorts, YouTube ads, conference sponsorships, etc

If you think that’s worthwhile:

Please click here to Donate via PayPal

To donate crypto or if you have questions, email me.

Of course, some donation amounts are *extra* meaningful to accelerating the mission. If you’re able and willing to donate $25,000 or $100,000, that’s going to be, let’s see… 25x or 100x more impactful! For my well-off fans, I’d say funding us up to the next $million at the current margin is high positive impact per dollar.

Q: What if I’m not doing any AI x-risk activism? Is it good enough if all I do is donate money to other people who are working on it more directly?

A: YES! You’re putting your time & energy into making money to fund the show, just as I’m putting my time & energy into making it. Unlike the 99.9% of people who deny the crisis, ignore it, or passively/hopelessly worry about it, you’re stepping up to actively help the situation. You’ve identified “Making the average person see AI as life-threatening” as a leverage point. Now you’re taking a straight shot to lower P(Doom)!

Mission Partners are the show’s braintrust, collaborating in the private #mission-partners channel on our Discord server to steer the show’s direction. They can see non-public information and discussion about upcoming guests, as well as gossip like which AI company CEO surprisingly liked my spicy tweets.

We have a Mission Partners meeting once/month on Zoom to go over the latest updates, plans, and high-level strategy for those who are interested. Every Mission Partner is also credited on the show, unless you prefer to remain anonymous.

How Much Should YOU Donate?

The minimum donation for Mission Partners is a one-time $1,000, but if you can donate more than that and you believe in the mission, please consider scaling your donation according to your level of disposable income. The show’s expenses are over $100k/yr, so it’s extremely helpful if some of you can step up with a larger donation. Consider giving $10k, $100k, or whatever order of magnitude makes sense for you. Just stay within the maximum donation limit of $99 million.

A few months ago, a viewer stepped up and donated over $25,000, and it’s been a game changer. Ori came on board full time and we started moving twice as fast. We promoted the show at the Manifest conference, which led to recruiting a series of high-profile guests: Scott Sumner, Richard Hanania, Carl Feynman, culminating in an episode with Vitalik Buterin! And more unannounced guests in the pipeline.

If you’re ready to become a Mission Partner today:

Please click here to Donate via PayPal

To donate crypto or if you have questions, email me.

We’re seeing strong momentum after the first year of the show. The steady audience growth to date has been 100% organic:

Building a platform to raise the quality of mainstream x-risk discourse and inform the average person’s opinion is a realistically achievable mission. It’s just a matter of growing to the point where we can shape the conversation while there’s still time. To that end, building a team of Mission Partners who support the show financially and strategically is critical.

To everyone who believes in the Doom Debates mission, and believes in our ability to execute it, and acts on that belief by generously donating: THANK YOU! We won’t let you down.

Science communicator and poker champion Liv Boeree has been concerned about the existential risk of AI for nearly a decade.

In this conversation from my If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies launch party, Liv explains why even a 5% chance of AI extinction is unacceptable, why the industry often buries its head in the sand, and how advocates can actually make an impact.

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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 🙏

Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares just launched their world-changing book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. PLEASE BUY YOUR COPY NOW!!!

We had an unofficial launch party here on Doom Debates to celebrate the occasion with an incredible group of guests (see timestamps below). Highly recommend watching if you missed it!

Timestamps

* 00:00 — Cold Open

* 00:36 — Max Tegmark, MIT Physicist

* 24:58 — Roman Yampolskiy, Cybersecurity Professor

* 42:20 Michael of @lethal-intelligence

* 48:30 — Liv Boeree, Host of the Win-Win Podcast ( @LivBoeree )

* 1:10:44 — Michael Trazzi, Filmmaker who just went on a hunger strike against Google DeepMind (@TheInsideView)

* 1:27:21 — Producer Ori

* 1:43:53 — Emmett Shear, Founder of Twitch & Softmax

* 1:55:32 — Holly Elmore, Executive Director of PauseAI US

* 2:13:44 — Gary Marcus, Professor Emeritus of Psychology & Neural Science at NYU

* 2:36:13 — Robert Wright, Author of the NonZero Newsletter (@Nonzero)

* 2:55:50 — Roko Mijic, the Man Behind “Roko’s Basilisk”

* 3:19:17 — Rob Miles, AI Safety Educator (@RobertMilesAI)

* 3:48:31 — Doom Debates Robot Closes Out the Stream!

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

Max Tegmark is an MIT physics professor, science communicator, best-selling author, and the President and co-founder of the Future of Life Institute. There are few individuals who have done more to get the world leaders to come to a shared sense of reality about the extinction threat of AI.

His endorsement of Eliezer’s book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, states: "The most important book of the decade."

Max shared his sharp criticisms of AI companies yesterday on my unofficial IABI launch party livestream!

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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

It is Monday, September 15th and my interview with Eliezer Yudkowsky has dropped!!!

👉 WATCH NOW 👈

We had a very unique 2.5-hour discussion covering rationality topics, the AI doom argument, what the AI companies think they're doing, why they don't seem to understand the AI doom argument, what society is doing, how we can help. And of course, his book, "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies," which is officially launching tomorrow.

For now, go ahead and watch the Eliezer Yudkowsky interview, and please smash that like button. We gotta get this a lot of likes.

Thanks very much for being a Doom Debates watcher. We've also got a launch party coming up. I'll get back to you with more details on that soon.