Existential Risks and Intelligent Optimization

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

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