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:
Richard's blogpost laying out where he gets off the AI "doom train":
Richard's interview with Steven Pinker:
Richard's interview with Robin Hanson:
My Doom Debate with Robin Hanson:
My reaction to Steven Pinker's AI doom position, and why his arguments are shallow:
"The Betterness Explosion" by Robin Hanson:
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.
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