AI Has Become Profoundly WEIRD, But Is Anyone Noticing? With Sarah Hastings-Woodhouse

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.com

Join PauseAI UK’s March Against AI Extinction in London on November 21: https://luma.com/pauseai-nov26

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDbHCKwuMrk

Timestamps

00:00:00 — Cold Open

00:00:41 — Introducing Sarah Hastings-Woodhouse

00:02:06 — How a Humanities Grad Got AGI-Pilled

00:08:40 — Whose Timelines Do You Trust?

00:11:32 — Joining the UK AI Security Institute

00:15:47 — What AISI Actually Does

00:19:23 — Verifying Anthropic’s Mythos Claims

00:21:59 — Leaving Government to Speak Freely

00:23:22 — What’s Your P(Doom)?™

00:25:37 — Yudkowsky, EA, and Keeping Your Identity Small

00:32:08 — Is Anthropic Doing Enough to Call for a Slowdown?

00:35:56 — Can You Do AI Safety from Second Place?

00:39:20 — Hugging Face and the Vibe Shift

00:44:02 — Is Everything Weird Yet?

00:48:27 — Prevent Recursive Self-Improvement, Don’t Ban It

00:52:28 — Build the Speed Dial, Not the Pause Button

00:56:54 — Was Calling for a Pause in 2023 a Mistake?

01:01:22 — Turning Up the Fear Dial

01:04:23 — Donation Drive

01:05:11 — PauseAI UK’s March Against AI Extinction

Links

SARAH HASTINGS-WOODHOUSE

Sarah’s Substack

Sarah on X (@littIeramblings)

Consistently Candid — Sarah’s podcast

“What is recursive self-improvement and what would it mean to ban it?” — Sarah’s RSI post (Oct 1, 2026)

“Is everything weird yet?” (Aug 30, 2026)

“What the hell just happened?” — on AI safety’s viral moment (Sep 18, 2026)

“We have been warned” — the Hugging Face hack as a warning shot (Jul 27, 2026)

“The pause-shaped hole in ‘Policy on the AI Exponential’” — is Anthropic doing enough to call for a slowdown? (Jun 19, 2026)

Sarah’s 2023 thread on stumbling into the world of AI doom (“I’m angry because I love the world”)

“The other night I successfully AGI-pilled a man on a first date”

“Welcome, and also I’m sorry” — Sarah’s note to AI safety newcomers (Sep 11, 2026)

“‘We’re all f*cked and it’s totally hopeless’ is almost as bad of a meme to be spreading” (Feb 12, 2025)

REFERENCED IN THE EPISODE

“Our evaluation of Claude Mythos Preview’s cyber capabilities” — AISI (Apr 13, 2026)

AISI Frontier AI Trends Report (Dec 2025)

“The levers of political persuasion with conversational AI” — AISI Human Influence team

US Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) — NIST

“Geoffrey Hinton tells us why he’s now scared of the tech he helped build” — MIT Technology Review (May 2023)

“We’re All Gonna Die with Eliezer Yudkowsky” — Bankless (2023)

“GPT-2 As Step Toward General Intelligence” — Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex (Feb 2019)

“AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalities” — Eliezer Yudkowsky

“Keep Your Identity Small” — Paul Graham

Pacing the Frontier — the open letter signed by 1,300+ frontier lab employees

“You can’t do safety from second place” — Sarah Heck, Anthropic’s head of public policy (Sep 29, 2026)

Ezra Klein’s op-ed calling for a ban on recursive self-improvement — The New York Times (Sep 20, 2026)

“Banning self-recursive improvement in AI models?” — Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution (Sep 22, 2026)

PauseAI UK

March Against AI Extinction — PauseAI UK, London, November 21, 2026

PAST DOOM DEBATES EPISODES MENTIONED

Top Economist Sees AI Doom Coming — Dr. Peter Berezin, BCA Research

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

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Transcript, links, and show notes: https://doomdebates.com/p/ai-has-become-profoundly-weird

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