In September of 2023, when OpenAI’s GPT-4 was still a fresh innovation and people were just beginning to wrap their heads around large language models, I was invited to debate Beff Jezos, Bayeslord, and other prominent “effective accelerationists” a.k.a. “e/acc” folks on an X Space.
E/acc’s think building artificial superintelligence is unlikely to disempower humanity and doom the future, because that’d be an illegal exception to the rule that accelerating new technology is always the highest-expected-value for humanity.
As you know, I disagree — I think doom is extremely likely and imminent possibility.
This debate took place 9 months before I started Doom Debates, and was one of the experiences that made me realize debating AI doom was my calling. It’s also the only time Beff Jezos has ever not been too chicken to debate me.
Timestamps
00:00:00 — Liron’s New Intro
00:04:15 — Debate Starts Here: Litigating FOOM
00:06:18 — Defining the Recursive Feedback Loop
00:15:05 — The Two-Part Doomer Thesis
00:26:00 — When Does a Tool Become an Agent?
00:44:02 — The Argument for Convergent Architecture
00:46:20 — Mathematical Objections: Ergodicity and Eigenvalues
01:03:46 — Bayeslord Enters: Why Speed Doesn’t Matter
01:12:40 — Beff Jezos Enters: Physical Priors vs. Internet Data
01:13:49 — The 5% Probability of Doom by GPT-5
01:20:09 — Chaos Theory and Prediction Limits
01:27:56 — Algorithms vs. Hardware Constraints
01:35:20 — Galactic Resources vs. Human Extermination
01:54:13 — The Intelligence Bootstrapping Script Scenario
02:02:13 — The 10-Megabyte AI Virus Debate
02:11:54 — The Nuclear Analogy: Noise Canceling vs. Rubble
02:37:39 — Controlling Intelligence: The Roman Empire Analogy
02:44:53 — Real-World Latency and API Rate Limits
03:03:11 — The Difficulty of the Off Button
03:24:47 — Why Liron is “e/acc at Heart”
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