Prof. Scott Sumner is a well-known macroeconomist who spent more than 30 years teaching at Bentley University, and now holds an Emeritus Chair in monetary policy at George Mason University's Mercatus Center. He's best known for his blog, the Money Illusion, which sparked the idea of Market Monetarism and NGDP targeting. I sat down with him at LessOnline 2025 to debate why his P(Doom) is pretty low. Where does he get off the Doom Train? 🚂 00:00 Episode Preview 00:34 Introducing Scott Sumner 05:20 Is AGI Coming Soon? 09:12 Potential of AI in Various Fields 36:49 Ethical Implications of Superintelligent AI 41:03 The Nazis as an Outlier in History 43:36 Intelligence and Morality: The Orthogonality Thesis 49:03 The Risk of Misaligned AI Goals 01:09:31 Recapping Scott’s Position Show Notes Scott’s current blog, The Pursuit of Happiness : Watch the Lethal Intelligence Guide , the ultimate introduction to AI x-risk! 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 DoomDebates.com and to youtube.com/@DoomDebates Get full access to Doom Debates at lironshapira.substack.com/subscribe
