Carl Feynman got his Master’s in Computer Science and B.S. in Philosophy from MIT, followed by a four-decade career in AI engineering.
He’s known Eliezer Yudkowsky since the ‘90s, and witnessed Eliezer’s AI doom argument taking shape before most of us were paying any attention!
He agreed to come on the show because he supports Doom Debates’s mission of raising awareness of imminent existential risk from superintelligent AI.
00:00 - Teaser
00:34 - Carl Feynman’s Background
02:40 - Early Concerns About AI Doom
03:46 - Eliezer Yudkowsky and the Early AGI Community
05:10 - Accelerationist vs. Doomer Perspectives
06:03 - Mainline Doom Scenarios: Gradual Disempowerment vs. Foom
07:47 - Timeline to Doom: Point of No Return
08:45 - What’s Your P(Doom)™
09:44 - Public Perception and Political Awareness of AI Risk
11:09 - AI Morality, Alignment, and Chatbots Today
13:05 - The Alignment Problem and Competing Values
15:03 - Can AI Truly Understand and Value Morality?
16:43 - Multiple Competing AIs and Resource Competition
18:42 - Alignment: Wanting vs. Being Able to Help Humanity
19:24 - Scenarios of Doom and Odds of Success
19:53 - Mainline Good Scenario: Non-Doom Outcomes
20:27 - Heaven, Utopia, and Post-Human Vision
22:19 - Gradual Disempowerment Paper and Economic Displacement
23:31 - How Humans Get Edged Out by AIs
25:07 - Can We Gaslight Superintelligent AIs?
26:38 - AI Persuasion & Social Influence as Doom Pathways
27:44 - Riding the Doom Train: Headroom Above Human Intelligence
29:46 - Orthogonality Thesis and AI Motivation
32:48 - Alignment Difficulties and Deception in AIs
34:46 - Elon Musk, Maximal Curiosity & Mike Israetel’s Arguments3
6:26 - Beauty and Value in a Post-Human Universe
38:12 - Multiple AIs Competing
39:31 - Space Colonization, Dyson Spheres & Hanson’s “Alien Descendants”
41:13 - What Counts as Doom vs. Not Doom?
43:29 - Post-Human Civilizations and Value Function
44:49 - Expertise, Rationality, and Doomer Credibility
46:09 - Communicating Doom: Missing Mood & Public Receptiveness
47:41 - Personal Preparation vs. Belief in Imminent Doom48:56 - Why Can't We Just Hit the Off Switch?
50:26 - The Treacherous Turn and Redundancy in AI
51:56 - Doom by Persuasion or Entertainment
53:43 - Differences with Eliezer Yudkowsky: Singleton vs. Multipolar Doom
55:22 - Why Carl Chose Doom Debates
56:18 - Liron’s Outro
Show Notes
Carl’s Twitter — https://x.com/carl_feynman
Carl’s LessWrong — https://www.lesswrong.com/users/carl-feynman
Gradual Disempowerment — https://gradual-disempowerment.ai
The Intelligence Curse — https://intelligence-curse.ai
AI 2027 — https://ai-2027.com
Alcor cryonics — https://www.alcor.org
The LessOnline Conference — https://less.online
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
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