Awareness Gap: College Life and the AGI Challenge

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

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