Richard Hanania is the President of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology. His work has been praised by Vice President JD Vance, Tyler Cowen, and Bryan Caplan among others. In his influential newsletter , he’s written about why he finds AI doom arguments unconvincing . He was gracious enough to debate me on this topic. Let’s see if one of us can change the other’s P(Doom)! 0:00 Intro 1:53 Richard's politics 2:24 The state of political discourse 3:30 What's your P(Doom)?™ 6:38 How to stop the doom train 8:27 Statement on AI risk 9:31 Intellectual influences 11:15 Base rates for AI doom 15:43 Intelligence as optimization power 31:26 AI capabilities progress 53:46 Why isn't AI yet a top blogger? 58:02 Diving into Richard's Doom Train 58:47 Diminishing Returns on Intelligence 1:06:36 Alignment will be relatively trivial 1:15:14 Power-seeking must be programmed 1:21:27 AI will simply be benevolent 1:27:17 Superintelligent AI will negotiate with humans 1:33:00 Super AIs will check and balance each other out 1:36:54 We're mistaken about the nature of intelligence 1:41:46 Summarizing Richard's AI doom position 1:43:22 Jobpocalypse and gradual disempowerment 1:49:46 Ad hominem attacks in AI discourse Show Notes Subscribe to Richard Hanania's Newsletter: https://richardhanania.com Richard's blogpost laying out where he gets off the AI "doom train": https://www.richardhanania.com/p/ai-doomerism-as-science-fiction Richard's interview with Steven Pinker: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/pinker-on-alignment-and-intelligence Richard's interview with Robin Hanson: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/robin-hanson-says-youre-going-to My Doom Debate with Robin Hanson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTQb6N3_zu8 My reaction to Steven Pinker's AI doom position, and why his arguments are shallow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tIq6kbrF-4 "The Betterness Explosion" by Robin Hanson: https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/the-betterness-explosionhtml --- Watch the Lethal Intelligence Guide, the ultimate introduction to AI x-risk! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CUFbqh16Fg PauseAI, the volunteer organization I’m part of: https://pauseai.info Join the PauseAI Discord — https://discord.gg/2XXWXvErfA — and say hi to me in the #doom-debates-podcast channel! --- 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 https://DoomDebates.com and to https://youtube.com/@DoomDebates Get full access to Doom Debates at lironshapira.substack.com/subscribe
