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:
- on Substack -
Liam’s Doom Train post -
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:
Eliezer Yudkowsky - "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality"
Previous Episodes:
Doom Debates Live at Manifest 2025 -
Transcript
Opening
Liam Robins: Pretty much everyone cheats and is basically shameless about it.
Liron Shapira: You're saying the professors are kind of in denial. They're not even making it logistically hard.
Liam: Some professors are. But for anything that can be cheated on, yeah, pretty much everyone is cheating.
Liron: It's just even easier than high school at this point, right? Just pure social life.
Liam: Pretty much.
Liron: Are there any faculty members who seem to know anything about AGI?
Liam: Not really about AGI in particular.
Liron: Do folks understand the Singularity is near? Do they realize they're living out the last days here of organic humans?
Liam: No, not at all. Basically nobody I know is feeling the AGI.
Introducing Liam Robins
Liron: Welcome to Doom Debates. My guest, Liam Robins is a math major at George Washington University. Heading into his junior year, he's also minoring in political science. He is the president of George Washington University Effective Altruism. And he co-founded a campus debate forum to improve the level of discourse on important topics.
In recent years, Liam has been thinking a lot about superintelligent AI and its associated risks and opportunities. We met a few weeks ago at the Manifest Conference in Berkeley. He came to my live taping of Doom Debates. I'm going to take you on a ride on the Doom train today. We're going to visit all the doom stops and we're going to see where all of you get off.
Afterwards, he wrote up a thoughtful article on his blog explaining where he gets off the Doom train. So today we're going to be talking about what it's like going to college at the dawn of the AGI singularity and what Liam thinks about the P(Doom) argument. Liam Robins, welcome to Doom Debates.
Liam: Hello. Glad to be here.
Liron: Great to have you.
Liam's Academic Pivot
Liron: So you used to be majoring in political science, right? But then you had a pivot last year. You have a pivotal moment. What happened?
Liam: So the pivot came from a couple of things. One is just some more practical concerns - oh, I actually am better at math than I thought I was, so why don't I try to do more math? And also, as far as future job prospects go, assuming that humans still have jobs in a couple of years, which I don't think is certain, but assuming that's the case, I think a math major would be more marketable than just humanities or political science.
Liron: Yeah, that's something the AIs can't do, right? Math?
Liam: Well, yeah, I don't think any job is really safe. So partly it's for job reasons, but also partly, I think you do need some level of technical math background in order to understand modern AI systems. And as somebody who really wants to understand modern AI systems and wants to understand where they're going, I think that's just a very useful skill for me to have.
I really sort of started feeling the AGI around, I don't know, May to June of 2024. And then Situational Awareness really hit it in for me that, oh yeah, this is happening. This is not just me being crazy and reading too much news. This is actually very serious. People are starting to talk about this.
Liron: Yeah. Remind the viewers what was Situational Awareness.
Liam: Sure. Situational Awareness. It was this very smart researcher named Leopold Aschenbrenner basically giving the case for short AGI timelines.
Liron: So before you read that, you just weren't really thinking that much about the coming AGI wave.
Liam: I mean, I knew that big things were happening. Of course you can't follow the news at all without realizing that something very big is happening with AI. But until then, I didn't really have very firm thoughts about where it was at or where it was heading.
My sense that things would get very crazy very soon was just very amorphous. And even I was not at that point really short timelines pilled in the sense that I am today. I still thought that the world would look broadly normal for the next 10 years. And I no longer believe that.
Liron: So Situational Awareness was an aha moment that really took you down the rabbit hole.
Liam: Yes.
Liron: What about the LessWrong sequences? Did you ever encounter those? Or Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality?
Liam: Not really, not directly for me. It was actually, I read a couple rationalists prior to last summer. Scott Alexander specifically. And that's what convinced me to go to Manifest. And then at Manifest I met a bunch of the people in real life. So I actually met Eliezer Yudkowsky in the flesh before I'd read almost any of his works.
Liron: Wow. Yeah, that's a weird order to go in.
The Reality of College Today
Liron: Okay, I definitely want to dive more into your position and where you got off the doom train. But first, I'm very curious to talk about AI in college today. So I went to college almost two decades ago, and my first question for you is, what's college these days? Just in terms of the nuts and bolts? Do they still have lectures?
Liam: They do still have lectures. Plenty of people still go to the lectures. I'm told that plenty of people also don't go to the lectures anymore.
Liron: Does anybody raw dog the lectures? Raw dog meaning walk over to a lecture hall, sit down in a chair without a laptop or phone in front of your face, watch the professor at 1x speed with no pausing or anything. Take notes on a piece of paper I guess, and then walk home or a stone tablet or whatever, something without a computer chip in it and just walk back to the dorm?
Liam: Yes, actually. In fact, in my personal experience, most of the people who attend lectures are probably still raw dogging it for the most part. I mean I always have a laptop in front of me when I go to lectures, but plenty of people don't.
Liron: Wow, that's pretty mind blowing to me. And even back in 2009 when I had graduated from college, I looked back and I was, what the hell was I doing in these lecture halls? This is no way to learn information. The 1x speed, the no pause, the no asking questions. Because when you're in a lecture hall with 100 people in it, you're really going to raise your hand and ask a question. Let's say your question is helpful to 20 people out of the 100. Aren't you kind of being a jerk, wasting 80 people's time? It's a messed up system.
Liam: Yeah. So for me, for the classes where they were large 100 person lectures, I mostly just did not attend those classes and did all the readings on my own. Because for a class that you really can just get as much out of the textbook as you would out of the in class experience.
But for the ones, the classes where it actually is just a roughly 20 person experience, then I think it is still worthwhile to actually go in person and ask questions to the teacher.
Liron: Do colleges still make you write papers?
Liam: Yes. I don't necessarily think they should. At least the only papers they should make people write are physical pen and paper papers nowadays. But a bunch of teachers are still just pretty slow to catch up. So yeah, there's many opportunities for cheating nowadays in college.
The AI Cheating Revolution
Liron: I remember when I was a freshman in college they'd give me the general education, so I was taking humanities and they would just give me the most annoying book, just some Greek play or something. Just whatever it is, I had zero interest in it. And you're supposed to analyze the symbolism or whatever. Something that had zero real world impact or most people in the class were in the same boat as me. Zero stakes from our perspective.
But I would just be dreading it because I didn't have good time management skills. So it'd be a two week cycle and of course I'd save it till the last day or two and then I'd just be dreading it the rest of the two weeks. And then the night of, it's I didn't even know how to do it, right? I didn't even know the proper way to BS the five paragraph essay or whatever it was.
So I'm thinking back to that experience and I'm, yeah, that sucked. Eventually, yeah, I'd pull out an A minus, B plus, whatever. But if I were in college today, it would literally just be one prompt, right? One and done pretty much.
Liam: I mean, not quite one and done. You have to finagle it so it doesn't sound too much like AI, but that's not too much effort. Yeah, I think the amount of effort required to get an A in the average college class is probably dropped by an order of magnitude.
Liron: I feel 20 year olds were in this prison for decades, right? And I got to, I was an inmate and then your generation, you guys have broken out of the prison and I'm pretty jealous.
Liam: Yeah, I mean, I think there's an extent to which it was never a good prison to put yourself in.
Liron: Right. No, I agree, I agree. I'm pretty resentful of everybody who maintains the institution that is formal education in college. I just think they're wasting precious lives. They're making people do exercises without even communicating the stakes. Not to mention not teaching them anything. They're not even telling them why they're learning it. And then the learning is useless, Brian Caplan's The Case Against Education. I mean it's pretty tragic compared to what these young souls could be doing with their lives.
Liam: Yeah, I definitely got to college with a mostly idealistic picture of, okay, I'm going to go in, get a history, political science degree and I'm actually going to learn something useful about the world and they're going to teach me good skills. And then within a year I actually learned a bit about how the world works. And I just realized, oh, this is mostly still just a credentialing regime.
And that's not to say you can't learn good things in college. You can. And I've had great professors who have taught great things. But you could also learn a lot of those things by just buying their books and reading them on your own.
Liron: Exactly right. So after I graduated from college, I looked backwards and I'm, how would I reverse engineer my own learning? What were the actual moments when I'm learning? And for me personally, I know people have different learning styles, but for me personally, it was just when I would open the book and read the book and do the exercises in the book, or watch a video and do an exercise from the video. That's how I would learn. Or do a programming project.
And all of those things were available online. So I was, why did they put me through this four year program with this lopsided pace, throw a bunch of different subjects at me and make me go to class. And my speed was obviously very different from other people's speeds. And sometimes I'd be procrastinating, sometimes I'd be ahead of the class. What's the point about that?
And then also my curriculum, it's just all this random stuff that I forgot most of it. And it didn't include a bunch of stuff that I did want to learn. A classic example for software engineers is they didn't teach us source control, Git. So I had to learn that on the job. I'm really? And then I just learned a bunch of other random stuff instead. So I'm just looking back on that and I'm, well, if my goal was to actually learn, I just know how to get myself to learn. This institution makes no sense.
Liam: Yeah, I think you really should approach higher education in just a very mercenary manner. Okay, this is the system as it works. This is how the school bureaucracy functions. Here's the ideal steps I should do to just get out of it what I want to get out of it. And don't let them drag me in a bunch of random different directions.
Because I think one very big mistake that I've seen a lot of people fall into is they come to Washington, D.C. where my school is, and they come to GW and they don't have a good picture of what they actually want to be doing with their education and with their life. And so they're just dragged in so many different unproductive directions. And they either have gotten burned out, or I can tell that they will get burned out within a number of years by doing that.
The Job Market Reality
Liron: There's this concept of the entry level job which is kind of imagine somebody graduating from college and then they go get a job somewhere and they're usually just doing tasks. And they kind of learn what the tasks are on the job. They just join some random organization, oh, I helping the environment. Well, here's some nonprofit that does something related to the environment and I'm going to go there and they're going to give me some project to work on which could be anything. Could even be making their website. Even though I didn't study making websites, right?
That's kind of the typical way somebody who graduates college with a random major gets into the real world and just kind of bops around. They don't actually use their four years worth of training, they just use kind of their general intelligence and their general oh, I'm a person, I know how to navigate social interactions.
And so there was this concept of an entry level job. I think that in the AI age the entry level jobs are slowly being eaten by the AIs. But even if we roll back the clock 20 years, when I graduated college, even then it kind of sucked to have to have an entry level job. I as a software engineer. The nice thing about majoring in computer science I always thought is you do actually get to skip a rung in the ladder because being a junior software engineer is actually a whole rung higher than being a generic entry level employee. So I was, sweet, I got to level up and then pretty soon you can become a senior engineer.
Liam: College for a long time has been just this giant Moloch trap where I think society as a whole would be better off if far fewer people were educated, particularly in the sort of non technical fields where you really don't need a college education. But for any individual working in the system, well, I do need to have some way to signal to employers that I am employable and I'm conscientious and I'm smart. And right now the only reliable signal that most people can send is just getting a college degree.
Liron: The observation that I always had when I would watch my 21 and 22 year old friends go and try to get their foot on the ladder with an entry level job, I was, couldn't you have done this when you were 18? Why did you just spend four years in order to go try to do something that you would have been capable of doing when you were 18. Isn't that incredibly damning about the last four years of your life? And shouldn't the advice to 18 year olds be, don't get into that situation. Don't spend four years getting yourself into a position that you could just be in today?
Liam: I 100% agree with that. If you do not have a good plan for why you should be going to college, then I think you should seriously consider if you should be going to college. I think actually probably far more people should just take a gap year or take a gap two years, get a job somewhere, travel, do something to actually get your life in order and get your priorities straight. And only after that, after you've developed a better sense of self and a better sense of your priorities, then can you go back and if appropriate, go to college and actually make use of all that time and money you're spending.
Liron: So what job do you think you're going to be ready for when you graduate from college that you wouldn't just be able to take a stab at before you got into college?
Liam: First of all, I'm saying this advice as somebody who largely did not follow it at the beginning. I do not think I came in with a particularly good full image of the world and an image of my own priorities, which I am a quick learner. So I think I found out those things faster than most people. But even still I felt my freshman year especially I could have spent doing much more productive endeavors.
But in general, I'd say I am actually now getting a technical degree in math and maybe also data science. And I do think there are technical skills there that you do just need to spend a lot of time on it in an academic setting.
Liron: Fair enough, fair enough. Kind of a software engineer track.
Liam: Yeah. As far as any of my humanities courses go, they're enjoyable and I think just for personal learning reasons, I'm glad to have taken some of them, but I don't think from a job slash marketing myself perspective, any of my political science classes are really helpful to me.
Liron: Fair enough. And why are you majoring in math instead of software engineering?
Liam: I say a couple of reasons. Number one, I'm sure you've seen this more than most people, but computer science degrees are totally oversaturated right now.
Liron: And that's a very interesting phenomenon, right? Because I definitely came up at a time when it was a pretty great time to get the degree because not that many people were getting it yet. The dot com bubble had burst and well, I mean the market was actually kind of bad right when I graduated, but then it got good. But I guess it's very weird for me to wrap my head around today you having that reaction to a computer science degree. Because I've seen the data, right? I've seen the data about computer science graduates struggling to find a job. I guess I'm just skeptical that the non computer science majors are really actually doing any better. That seems kind of fake to me somehow.
Liam: I honestly, you're not wrong. I can totally see a future where by 2027 when I graduate a math major will be just as useless because I can already do math better than most math majors can. So I'm banking on one of two scenarios being true. Either A, just by the time I need to enter the job market, nobody will be entering the job market because we'll get AGI. At which point we'll probably have bigger problems to worry about than whether I can get an entry level job.
Or B, some level of math skills are still necessary if only to interpret what the AI is doing and to implement it.
Liron: Yep. Are you and your classmates scared of having a ton of student debt?
Liam: I mean I can't say universal statement. I am fortunate enough that my parents can pay for my undergraduate degree, so I do not have to worry about that. But I do know people who are not in that position and yeah, they do eventually will have to pay back their degree.
Liron: Yeah, I mean the funny thing to me about college, I mean this is a well known point at this point, but they kind of guarantee that you're going to be six figures in debt unless your parents really help you out. And they really don't guarantee that you're going to have much income earning potential. So it's really starting you backwards from my perspective.
Liam: Yeah, I mean if you look at the current economic data, then it is still the case that college graduates earn just so much more than non college graduates to the extent that it will pay off in expected value the debt you incur.
Liron: But, well, but nobody did that as a randomized controlled trial, right? I mean there's the selection effect of the smart people choose to go to college.
Liam: Yeah. That does not apply to all college graduates. And also that is based on data from now, 20, 30 years ago. And I totally don't know if that same thing applies to the people graduating today.
Liron: Yeah, I suspect that if you did it as a randomized control trial and the second option, as opposed to going to college was directly focus on your career. Spend ages 18 through 21 actually getting your foot on the rung of the career ladder instead of messing around, traveling or whatever. I suspect that the same person with the same aptitude for college is going to better spend that aptitude on their career ladder. But it doesn't matter. I mean, who even says that the world will even be around in three years, right? This kind of long term planning I don't think is very interesting at this point.
The Scale of Academic Cheating
Liron: But let me ask you this. Let's talk about cheating again. Remember New York magazine recently published this article, Everyone is Cheating Their Way Through College. Do you think that is accurate?
Liam: Yes, it is. I can maybe count on one hand the number of people who don't cheat. From what they've told me, pretty much everyone cheats and is basically shameless about it. At this point.
Liron: It would be really hard for me to imagine not cheating unless it was just logistically hard. But why would it be logistically hard? You're saying the professors are kind of in denial. They're not even making it logistically hard.
Liam: Some professors are. Some professors are taking deliberate actions to again, switch to pen and paper tests. But for anything that can be cheated on, yeah, pretty much everyone is cheating.
Liron: I will say there's a close acquaintance of mine who generally has trouble with his college classes. And I recently caught up with him and I was, hey, so you know that biology class you just took? So how did you do? He's, I got an A. I was, you got an A? Whoa, Congratulations. How'd you manage that? And he was, ChatGPT, because it was an online remote class. And he's, it was so easy to just feed the final exam to ChatGPT.
And I was, geez, they didn't use any of the software to get you on a video call, try to track your eyes. They didn't even do anything yet. He's, no, I don't know what the professor's thinking. I'm, God, wow. The professor, I give him a little bit of credit. Maybe he's just using ChatGPT to grade and just calling it a day. You're checking out, he's checking out. And I don't even know who's holding the bag here.
Liam: I think half the story is in a lot of colleges and with a lot of professors, they kind of see that it's a mostly pointless credentialing scheme or their heart's not really in it. And so for them the easiest thing is to just use AI to grade or turn a blind eye to students cheating with AI because actually trying to redesign your course and rigorously enforce anti cheating takes a lot of effort. And if you just don't even see that effort as worthwhile, then why would you do it?
How to Actually Prevent Cheating
Liron: Is it even really that hard to enforce non cheating? Right off the top of my head, if I were the professor, why not just be, okay, yeah, your homework assignments don't count for your grade. Your grade is just all going to be your tests and all your tests. You're just going to come here with no computing devices and write on little books of paper. And then I will go scan the papers into the computer and I'll use the computer to help me grade. What's wrong with that system?
Liam: Well, I'd say a couple of things. A, that means that basically there is no more homework if all the homework isn't graded. B, people in the middle of the test can still get up and go to the bathroom, at which point they pull out their phone and take a picture, then have ChatGPT tell them all the answers anyway.
Liron: But what if they can't take a picture because they can't take the documents with them when they go to the bathroom?
Liam: I'm not saying you're wrong. There are ways to enforce it.
Liron: Yeah, I mean, my observation here is it actually seems a little bit surprising, right? Because sure, it's not that easy to prevent the cheating, but what I just described is straightforward.
Liam: I'd say part of it is there are some assignments that you really can't have that sort of mentality with. So for instance, if you want to assign somebody a 20 page research paper that takes them a few weeks to do, you can't look over them the entire time they're writing that. You do just have to sort of take it on faith that when they go home they're not plugging it into AI or I'm in a math class and they want me to write proofs again, are you going to look over my shoulder every time I'm writing a proof to make sure I'm the one really writing it? I would just do that.
Designing Better Assignments with Real Stakes
Liron: I'd be, look, at the end of every lecture there's a graded quiz. I have you guys, I have your bodies coming to my lecture and I'm gonna take advantage of this meet to meet interaction and I'm going to put a sheet of paper in front of you and you're gonna write. It's gonna happen once a week and you're not gonna have homework assignments, you're gonna be graded on this.
And then when it comes to a long project, okay, I'm just making this up as I go along. If it's a long four week paper, I would just say only give assignments that have marketable value. So it's this is gonna be posted on your blog and you need to get a certain rank on Google for that blog post or you need to get a certain amount of likes on your social media and you could be, well what if they make a bot farm? But I would use some kind of metric and be, okay, you make a bot farm. Well, I still need you to make at least $25 in ad revenue from X monetization. So what I'm saying is if you give an assignment where you set that kind of objective standard in the real world, that way you're, look, you can cheat however you want to cheat, but this is the standards that you're going to experience in the real world. So I'm just exposing you to them here.
Liam: Yeah, I mean I agree with you. That would be a better model, AI cheating or not, that would actually just be a better model of education. However, that would require A totally rethinking the value of higher education and B, taking a lot of time of the professors to really redesign their courses. And frankly there's just a lot of laziness, inertia, stubbornness, sticking your head in the sand. Such that I think for many classes in the immediate future that's just not going to happen. But I agree that in a better design college that would happen.
Liron: Imagine a college where it occurred to the professors that the way they should motivate you to do your assignments is to be, look, the point of this assignment is to get ranked on Google as a trusted resource for this information. You're writing a research paper, you're not writing it for me. You're not writing it as a pointless exercise. You're writing it to. You're writing it to enhance humanity's knowledge by creating a reference that people will find when they search the web, right? Wouldn't that be a nice good stakes to have? Why do assignments have zero stakes. I never understood that.
Liam: I agree. Actually, one of my professors two semesters ago did that. It was actually for an AI policy class. And basically what he said is, okay, you're going to choose some issue related to AI regulation that you care about and you're going to write basically a white paper about it, following certain criteria. But hopefully by the end of this you will have a paper that you can actually submit to jobs and to think tanks as proof that you are a serious policy writer. And in D.C. that's a pretty valuable skill to have.
Liron: Exactly. Yeah, that would be great.
College Social Life
Liron: Okay, so one thing people say about college is they're, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're cheating and you're not learning anything and the knowledge is pointless. But it's all about the social life, man. The social, it's really the school of girls or school of how to meet ladies, right? This is the school of how to learn to be cool and schmooze. So my question for you is, what is college social life?
Liam: So I'm a pretty weird person to be asking this question just because I'm a generally atypical person with an atypical social life. It comes partly from various student organizations and societies I'm in. You mentioned the two in the intro, the effective altruism student group and also the debating society I helped co found. Partly, you meet friends the same way you'd always meet friends through your classes or through events or through mutual friends.
To your point where is college just a giant place to schmooze or to find your next romantic partner. To a large extent that is true. Where again, I'm going to school at George Washington University. If I want a network of early 20 somethings who care about politics and foreign policy and are intelligent, it would be very hard for me to find a better place than where I'm at now.
Liron: So my mental model of the median college student is even when I was in college, it's they'd go to college and they'd really try to minimize efforts. They'd get a reading assignment. And I was guilty of this too. You get the reading assignment. You try to not read the book if you can. There were spark notes in my day, right? So you still get notes of the book instead of reading the book unless you the book, which is rare.
So if they're already trying to minimize how much time they're learning and now they have AI which lets them cheat through it sounds the majority of their assignments. So now my model of the median college student is they go there and they're just always thinking about just hanging out. So it's just even easier than high school at this point, right? It's just pure social life.
Liam: Pretty much.
Liron: That's hilarious, man. So let me ask you this, here's a hack, okay? I think that the viewers, some of the younger viewers might appreciate this hack. It's free to just live right next to the campus and partake in the social life, correct?
Liam: Yeah, I mean it depends where you are, but in general, yes, if you can get invites to college events as somebody who isn't a student of that college. Yeah. You can get a lot of the same benefits out of it.
Liron: Right? Right. I mean if you have, let's say you have a twenty thousand dollar a year budget that you were going to spend on college and instead, you just get a cheap, cheap housing right next to the college and then you just peel off a fraction of what you're going to spend and you just spend it making yourself really cool. You're just buying beers for everybody. I don't even know how else you spend money. Maybe you can buy services for people around you. Hey, I've got a driver guys, let's go party out on me, use my limo. I feel that's going to get you a lot farther than paying tuition and cheating through your classes and then partaking in the social life that way.
Liam: Yeah, I mean, admittedly I'm not really optimizing for the college social life anyway. I have a pretty small, fairly close knit group of friends and that's fine by me. But yeah, if I was really trying to optimize for just college social life without any of the effort or any of the expenditure, I might just pull that strategy.
Gen Z Social Dynamics
Liron: Another thing I'm wondering about is, are nerds cool now?
Liam: As a general rule, No, I don't think so. I think that the whole nerd jock distinction has always been more fictional than realistic. If you actually look at, I don't know, IQ versus athletic achievement or IQ versus social ability, they're actually either not correlated or if anything positively correlated. Where a lot of the people who are very athletic and very sociable are also very intelligent.
Liron: Right, right, right. Well, I hear rumors of things Gen Z. They don't make eye contact with each other when they're in public because they're just not used to that kind of stranger social interaction because it's all mediated through their phone. Do you think there's a kernel of truth to that?
Liam: Probably there is. I mean, it's hard for me to give comparative analysis just because any given person is only in college for four years. So you don't necessarily know what it would have been 10 years previously. But just based on what I've read online, various reports, that probably is true. Probably the average person in my generation has far fewer social skills, far more social anxiety than somebody you know in Millennial or Gen X.
Liron: If you have a college classmate right now and they say they're going to drink a brewski, is alcohol still cool?
Liam: I mean, still cool? I would say so. There still is very much a college drinking culture. I am not a big alcohol guy. And also, I'm sure if you look at the statistics, you'll see that Gen Z in general is far less...
Liron: Is it cooler if they're drinking a Celsius?
Liam: I wouldn't even necessarily say cool to drink energy drinks. It's just normal.
Social Apps and Dating
Liron: What social apps are hot? So in my day, we had this app called Facebook, and I don't think that that exists anymore, but what are people on, right? And we also had dating apps.
Liam: So the biggest social media are generally Snapchat, Instagram, to some extent, TikTok. Though TikTok's not really a social app. It's just...
Liron: That's pretty impressive. Serious longevity, because it's not that much younger than Facebook, I mean, I guess. Yeah, it's still 2000s. So that's pretty impressive that Snapchat is so hot.
Liam: Yeah, Snapchat's definitely still around. There's some people who use Discord as their primary social app.
Liron: I heard this concept of a dating app is kind of dying, right? Gen Z doesn't dating apps because they treat regular apps Instagram as already being dating apps.
Liam: So I wouldn't say dying, but there's just a pervasive feeling that they should be dead. I don't know a single person who's pro dating apps or really excited about using dating apps. It's just that a lot of people still use it out of either perceived necessity where they don't know how else they would get a date, or they're literally just using it for entertainment. Oh, I wanna see what people are in my area, which frankly, I think is kind of sociopathic to use dating apps in that way. But people...
Liron: The funny thing about dating apps, though, is that there's always been that sense of guilt. So the funny thing is, in my day, it'd be, oh, my God, I can't believe I'm using a dating app instead of looking around the bar or meeting somebody through a friend. And then it sounds today it's, oh, my God, I can't believe I'm using a dating app instead of using a different social app.
Liam: Right.
Liron: I feel the guilt has just been moved.
Liam: Well, no, I don't think there's any guilt in it. I think that, the actually going to a bar and cold approaching somebody in person is just so much less common nowadays. Most people doesn't even really register as the way they could or should be going about things. So the general attitude among my generation is that, oh, you want to date? Go on a dating app. And that's the first thing that comes to mind.
Liron: Right, right, right. Which. So personally, I mean, I'm married now, but if I were single again, that would be a nice bonus for me because I just feel as a nerdy guy who's better when I can think and craft a message, I feel that is where I shine on the dating apps compared to meeting strangers in person. So I feel the world is kind of tilting in favor of the nerds.
Liam: I really don't think so. Dating apps are very rough for men, especially men who are not outwardly that physically attractive. I actually think there's a lot more value to, especially for, I don't know, a guy me, it's actually just meeting somebody in person because on a dating app, you're gonna see my face, which is nothing special. I'm not ugly or anything. You're gonna see that I'm pretty short. I'm five six. And then it's also just not particularly good at selecting.
I'm told that OkCupid back in the day was a lot better at, you give your interest and the other person gives theirs, and it'll find people who are very compatible. Whereas a lot of dating apps nowadays are just they're only matching you up based on very surface level things, which is just not a good selection process, I think.
Liron: Yeah, yeah, that definitely makes sense. And that that's probably the biggest flaw of these dating apps, right, is that if you don't have a pick that makes you look a model and you're a guy, it's just the volume is going to be low. You're gonna get non zero volume. But it's not going to be the fire hose you want unless you move to an area where the gender ratio is in your favor. That's my understanding.
So for you personally, when you look around at your social circle, what percentage of the people there met their significant other through an app?
Liam: It might actually be zero. Of the people I am close to who are in long term serious relationships, I don't think any of them started on the apps.
Faculty Awareness of AGI
Liron: So at George Washington University, are there any particular faculty members who seem to know anything interesting about AGI?
Liam: Not really about AGI in particular, just because we're not a very technical school. I will say that one faculty member in particular is Jeffrey Ding. If you're on Substack, he is the China AI blog. He does weekly translations of Chinese AI materials into English. And he's possibly the world's expert on how technology, how new technologies relate to geopolitical shifts in the balance of power. And so he's just a very fascinating person to talk to and also just a very nice person. I've met him quite a few times and I've always enjoyed every conversation with him.
Liron: Well, my last question for you about college is, do folks understand the singularity is near? Do they realize they're living out the last days here of organic humans?
Liam: No, not at all. Basically, nobody I know is feeling the AGI.
Closing Thoughts
Liron: That's pretty funny. Yeah, I mean, I had that experience. I still remember the day, it was the end of February 2020, when a bunch of the rationalist sphere blogs were saying, hey, this could be really big. Definitely stock up on supplies. And I'm, oh, I only stocked up on two weeks. I need to go stock up on six weeks. So I go to Walmart and I'm, man, I hope the shelves aren't empty. And this is Walmart in upstate New York, where I don't think people are reading the rationalist blogosphere there.
So I go there, totally normal Walmart, right? Zero signs of the pandemic. And I'm just going through the shelves. I'm, okay, I got to take every can on the shelf. I'm prepper style and filling up my cart with all the stuff, tons of water, toilet paper, everything. I go to the front and it's more than $1,000 purchase of all these weird prep supplies. And the cashier is just, oh, yeah, you planning for something? And I'm, yeah, I'm kind of worried about COVID And she's, Covid, there's just living in a totally different reality for everybody. And of course, a couple of weeks later, everybody's on the same page. The shelves were mostly full, but they didn't have ever.
But I just feel that is living out on a multi year scale right now, right? You're going to college and somebody's, oh, I better go to my lecture so that I could plan my 20 year career, right? It's just it's two different movies, as Scott Adams says, right? Movies playing on the same screen.
Liam: Yeah, 100%. And it still just baffles me how little the average person is seriously thinking about or preparing for AGI.
Liron: Big thanks to Liam Robins for coming on the show. What you just heard is part one. That was about the college experience in the era of AGI. Part two is coming soon. That's going to be about riding the Doom train and seeing if me and Liam can reconcile our P(Doom). Do make sure you're subscribed to doomdebates.com, subscribe to the Doom Debates YouTube channel. Subscribe to Doom Debates in your podcast player, and then you'll be getting part two really soon right when it drops in your feed. Thank you very much for watching Doom Debates.
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