Liam Robins is a math major at George Washington University who recently had his own "AGI awakening" after reading Leopold Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness. I met him at my Manifest 2025 talk about stops on the Doom Train.
In this episode, Liam confirms what many of us suspected: pretty much everyone in college is cheating with AI now, and they're completely shameless about it.
We dive into what college looks like today: how many students are still "rawdogging" lectures, how professors are coping with widespread cheating, how the social life has changed, and what students think they’ll do when they graduate.
* 00:00 - Opening
* 00:50 - Introducing Liam Robins
* 05:27 - The reality of college today: Do they still have lectures?
* 07:20 - The rise of AI-enabled cheating in assignments
* 14:00 - College as a credentialing regime vs. actual learning
* 19:50 - "Everyone is cheating their way through college" - the epidemic
* 26:00 - College social life: "It's just pure social life"
* 31:00 - Dating apps, social media, and Gen Z behavior
* 36:21 - Do students understand the singularity is near?
Show Notes
Guest:
* Liam Robins on Substack - https://thelimestack.substack.com/
* Liam's Doom Train post - https://thelimestack.substack.com/p/my-pdoom-is-276-heres-why
* Liam’s Twitter - @liamrobins
Key References:
* Leopold Aschenbrenner - "Situational Awareness"
* Bryan Caplan - "The Case Against Education"
* Scott Alexander - Astral Codex Ten
* Jeffrey Ding - ChinAI Newsletter
* New York Magazine - "Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College"
Events & Communities:
* Manifest Conference
* LessWrong
* Eliezer Yudkowsky - "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality"
Previous Episodes:
* Doom Debates Live at Manifest 2025 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=detjIyxWG8M
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