Doom Debates!

Dr. Holly Elmore is the founder and executive director of PauseAI US and holds a Harvard PhD in evolutionary biology. She’s back, and this time she’s taking on none other than Eliezer Yudkowsky!
She argues his public behavior is alienating the people PauseAI US needs to reach, but I wonder if she’s asking too much of the man who laid the foundation for the AI safety movement.
We also clash over Yudkowsky’s coherent extrapolated volition. She thinks the theory doesn’t properly factor in humanity’s consent, but I argue that’s already embedded into the CEV framework.
Holly and I dive into the rationalists’ involvement in a controversial kink scene, John Wentworth’s defunding news, transhumanism, pacing the frontier, and “Holly’s Basilisk”—her case for sending AI lab employees to jail.
It’s another great episode with one of the most controversial—and thoughtful—thinkers in AI safety. Enjoy!
Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jn8mS3kC-SU
Timestamps
00:00:00 — Cold Open
00:01:09 — Holly Elmore and PauseAI’s Political Breakthrough
00:07:36 — Pause AI vs. “Pacing the Frontier”
00:14:17 — Holly’s Case Against Eliezer Yudkowsky
00:16:20 — Coherent Extrapolated Volition and Pivotal Acts
00:31:19 — Brain Copies, Consent, and Self-Determination
00:36:56 — Transhumanism, Dyson Swarms, and Humanity’s Future
00:45:36 — The Missing Democratic Checkpoint
00:51:04 — Yudkowsky’s Role in Accelerating AI
01:02:48 — Genius, Arrogance, and Rationalist Culture
01:10:14 — The Aella Photo and Holly’s Breaking Point
01:20:21 — John Wentworth’s Grant Controversy
01:28:17 — PauseAI US’s Rules and Red Lines
01:32:05 — Poe’s Law and the Cost of Sarcasm
01:36:18 — Holly’s Case for Jailing AI Developers
Links
Donate to PauseAI US
Holly on X
Holly’s Substack
Pacing the Frontier letter
Jacob Coxon’s resignation post
PauseAI leadership disendorsement letter, reproduced on LessWrong
Holly on movement infighting — No, the Judean People’s Front should not just get along with the People’s Front of Judea
Coherent Extrapolated Volition — Eliezer Yudkowsky (2004 PDF)
Pivotal act — Eliezer Yudkowsky (Arbital mirror)
Genes did misalignment first — Holly Elmore
Holly’s reaction to the Yudkowsky/Aella photo
On Kink & Status in the Rationalist Community — John Wentworth (October 8 response)
Holly’s basilisk
Are We a Circular Firing Squad? — previous Holly Elmore episode
Let’s Call Out the AI Doom Enablers — previous Holly Elmore episode
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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, or to really take things to the next level: Donate 🙏


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Sarah Hastings-Woodhouse is an AI safety writer and researcher who went down the AI doom rabbit hole in 2023 and never came back up. After a year as digital communications officer at the UK AI Security Institute (AISI), she’s gone independent to speak her mind unfiltered.
Read Sarah’s Substack: https://longerramblings.substack.com
Join PauseAI UK’s March Against AI Extinction in London on November 21: https://luma.com/pauseai-nov26
Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDbHCKwuMrk
Timestamps
00:00:00 — Cold Open
00:00:41 — Introducing Sarah Hastings-Woodhouse
00:02:06 — How a Humanities Grad Got AGI-Pilled
00:08:40 — Whose Timelines Do You Trust?
00:11:32 — Joining the UK AI Security Institute
00:15:47 — What AISI Actually Does
00:19:23 — Verifying Anthropic’s Mythos Claims
00:21:59 — Leaving Government to Speak Freely
00:23:22 — What’s Your P(Doom)?™
00:25:37 — Yudkowsky, EA, and Keeping Your Identity Small
00:32:08 — Is Anthropic Doing Enough to Call for a Slowdown?
00:35:56 — Can You Do AI Safety from Second Place?
00:39:20 — Hugging Face and the Vibe Shift
00:44:02 — Is Everything Weird Yet?
00:48:27 — Prevent Recursive Self-Improvement, Don’t Ban It
00:52:28 — Build the Speed Dial, Not the Pause Button
00:56:54 — Was Calling for a Pause in 2023 a Mistake?
01:01:22 — Turning Up the Fear Dial
01:04:23 — Donation Drive
01:05:11 — PauseAI UK’s March Against AI Extinction
Links
SARAH HASTINGS-WOODHOUSE
Sarah’s Substack
Sarah on X (@littIeramblings)
Consistently Candid — Sarah’s podcast
“What is recursive self-improvement and what would it mean to ban it?” — Sarah’s RSI post (Oct 1, 2026)
“Is everything weird yet?” (Aug 30, 2026)
“What the hell just happened?” — on AI safety’s viral moment (Sep 18, 2026)
“We have been warned” — the Hugging Face hack as a warning shot (Jul 27, 2026)
“The pause-shaped hole in ‘Policy on the AI Exponential’” — is Anthropic doing enough to call for a slowdown? (Jun 19, 2026)
Sarah’s 2023 thread on stumbling into the world of AI doom (“I’m angry because I love the world”)
“The other night I successfully AGI-pilled a man on a first date”
“Welcome, and also I’m sorry” — Sarah’s note to AI safety newcomers (Sep 11, 2026)
“‘We’re all f*cked and it’s totally hopeless’ is almost as bad of a meme to be spreading” (Feb 12, 2025)
REFERENCED IN THE EPISODE
“Our evaluation of Claude Mythos Preview’s cyber capabilities” — AISI (Apr 13, 2026)
AISI Frontier AI Trends Report (Dec 2025)
“The levers of political persuasion with conversational AI” — AISI Human Influence team
US Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) — NIST
“Geoffrey Hinton tells us why he’s now scared of the tech he helped build” — MIT Technology Review (May 2023)
“We’re All Gonna Die with Eliezer Yudkowsky” — Bankless (2023)
“GPT-2 As Step Toward General Intelligence” — Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex (Feb 2019)
“AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalities” — Eliezer Yudkowsky
“Keep Your Identity Small” — Paul Graham
Pacing the Frontier — the open letter signed by 1,300+ frontier lab employees
“You can’t do safety from second place” — Sarah Heck, Anthropic’s head of public policy (Sep 29, 2026)
Ezra Klein’s op-ed calling for a ban on recursive self-improvement — The New York Times (Sep 20, 2026)
“Banning self-recursive improvement in AI models?” — Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution (Sep 22, 2026)
PauseAI UK
March Against AI Extinction — PauseAI UK, London, November 21, 2026
PAST DOOM DEBATES EPISODES MENTIONED
Top Economist Sees AI Doom Coming — Dr. Peter Berezin, BCA Research
Will AI Kill Everyone by 2050? Debate with Dr. Casey Hart (Ontology Explained)
DOOM DEBATES
Donate to Doom Debates
Join the Doom Debates Discord
Transcript, links, and show notes: https://doomdebates.com/p/ai-has-become-profoundly-weird
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, or to really take things to the next level: Donate 🙏


Get full access to Doom Debates at lironshapira.substack.com/subscribe

Bestselling author Robert Wright and I are back for round two of our collaboration, reacting to the week in AI. We cover Trump's summit with the AI labs, the FTC's investigation of OpenAI & Anthropic, the latest Gemini announcement, and much more. The Overton window is moving fast, but is the AI moving faster?
Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Li-rc6swhQs
Timestamps
00:00:00 — Cold Open
00:00:21 — Round Two of Nonzero × Doom Debates
00:01:23 — Trump, the FTC, and an Industry Feeling the Heat
00:05:37 — Google Says Gemini 4 Exists
00:07:41 — Greg Brockman Pulls His $25M from Leading the Future
00:12:53 — The Break-Ins Keep Coming
00:15:23 — The Market Wants Agent Swarms
00:18:30 — The End of “Alignment by Default”
00:20:55 — The Prelude to Recursive Self-Improvement
00:26:14 — David Sacks Can’t Explain Dario
00:30:31 — The All-In Echo Chamber
00:33:47 — Scott Alexander vs. Steven Pinker
00:38:37 — Jason Calacanis vs. the Public Benefit Corporation
00:43:03 — The Elephant in the Room Is the AI
00:46:21 — What the Average American Thinks
00:48:17 — From Chatbot to Agent to Swarm
00:54:20 — Boeing, Agent Swarms, and the Off Switch
00:57:07 — Skynet as a Botnet That Trades With Us
01:00:32 — Tyler Cowen: National Treasure, Net Negative on AI
01:04:01 — Liron’s Doomer DCF Yields a 20x P/E
01:07:11 — Interest Rates: Where Cowen Has Me
01:09:12 — Does Pinker Owe Us a Debate?
01:12:48 — Pinker vs. Instrumental Convergence
01:17:00 — Wrap-Up
Links
ROBERT WRIGHT & NONZERO
Nonzero’s post for this episode — “Trump and the AI Safety Vibe Shift”
Subscribe to The NonZero Newsletter
Robert Wright on X (@robertwrighter)
The God Test — Bob’s book on AI; Chapter 14, “Enlightenment Now,” is the Steven Pinker chapter
“The Singularity Is Clear” — Bob’s essay in installments on recursive self-improvement (Parts I–III)
“AI and the New McCarthyism” — Bob on the pro-AI lobby smearing Sanders, Tegmark, and Krueger as China stooges (Nonzero, May 2026)
Why Buddhism Is True — Bob’s 2017 book
THE WEEK IN AI
AI’s biggest players promise to police themselves at the White House — Fortune on the “Joint Commitment on Frontier Responsibilities”
Major White House split on AI policy leaks as top aides freak out — The Daily Beast on the Sacks–Wiles rift
FTC is investigating OpenAI and Anthropic over possible risks to consumers — AP
“We Must Pace the Frontier” — Dario Amodei’s call to slow down (with the China caveat and chip controls)
China rejects Dario Amodei’s call to slow AI development — Rest of World
Google rolls out new Gemini model but restricts access over safety concerns — The Guardian
GLM-5.3 and the spread of advanced cyber capabilities — Anthropic on Zhipu’s open-weight model
OpenAI’s Greg Brockman backs out of second $25 million donation to AI super PAC — The New York Times
Sanders convenes Chinese and American computer scientists to warn of threat from AI — Broadband Breakfast
THE BREAK-INS AND THE AGENT SWARM
METR: Brief independent investigation of agents’ behavior, reasoning and collaboration in the OpenAI / Hugging Face incident
Chris Painter’s testimony to the U.S. Senate on AI agent incidents — METR, Sept 30, 2026
SwarmTraces: how OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face — forensic report co-authored by Palisade Research
OpenAI confirms ‘wiki incident’ — TechCrunch on the German wiki agent message board
Are Current AI Safety Techniques Enough? Adam Gleave vs. Oliver Habryka — FAR.AI debate
Alignment faking in large language models — Anthropic
On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem — OpenAI
Jacob Coxon’s resignation post (@hilbertspaess)
Pacing the Frontier — the AI lab employees’ letter
THE ALL-IN PODCAST
All-In: Anthropic IPO at Risk, Meta’s Muse Pop, Token Prices Fall, Open Source Gains Share, Alignment Fails — the episode we react to
Helen Toner: letting OpenAI be destroyed “would actually be consistent with the mission” — The Decoder, Dec 2023
Garfield Minus Garfield
PINKER, SCOTT ALEXANDER, AND TYLER COWEN
Scott Alexander challenges Steven Pinker to a public AI-doom debate ($5,000 vs. $1,000)
An Open Letter to Scott Alexander — Steven Pinker declines the debate as a “spectator sport,” Quillette
Your Book Review: Why Buddhism Is True — the anonymous Astral Codex Ten review Bob mentions
Mistakes in financial economics — Tyler Cowen: doomers should be buying puts (Marginal Revolution)
Liron’s answer: a doomer DCF yields the S&P’s 20x forward P/E
ALSO MENTIONED
Obsolete — Garrison Lovely’s book (with Bob’s blurb)
If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies — Eliezer Yudkowsky & Nate Soares
PAST DOOM DEBATES EPISODES MENTIONED
Nonzero × Doom Debates, Episode 1 — Did AI Doom Just Go Mainstream?
Eliezer Yudkowsky Tried to “Coup the World”?! — Garrison Lovely, Author of “Obsolete”
OpenAI’s Model Just ATTACKED Them — the Hugging Face hack breakdown
DOOM DEBATES
Join the Doom Debates Discord
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, or to really take things to the next level: Donate 🙏


Get full access to Doom Debates at lironshapira.substack.com/subscribe

Garrison Lovely is an award-winning journalist and author of the highly anticipated book, Obsolete: The AI Industry’s Trillion-Dollar Race to Replace Us and How to Stop It. I give it the Doom Debates stamp of approval!
While we’re mostly on the same page about the AI arms race, Garrison and I clash over Eliezer Yudkowsky’s role. He blames Eliezer for kicking off the superintelligence race and refers to his Coherent Extrapolated Volition (CEV) vision as a “coup on humanity.” But I say it was actually Yud’s attempt to keep humanity in charge.
Can Garrison change my mind?

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZ94J4DBRkw

Timestamps
00:00:00 — Cold Open
00:01:05 — Introducing Garrison Lovely
00:04:23 — “Freeze AI” vs. “Pause AI”
00:06:17 — Garrison’s Background at McKinsey
00:10:31 — Should ICE Be Abolished?
00:17:07 — How Garrison Got on the AI Beat
00:22:16 — What’s Your P(Doom)?™
00:23:29 — Focusing on Extinction Is a Distraction
00:25:46 — Is Stopping AI an Easy Coordination Problem?
00:29:02 — Society’s Immune Response to AI
00:33:54 — Garrison’s P(Extinction) by 2050
00:37:09 — Did Eliezer Yudkowsky Start the AI Race?
00:45:56 — Freeze AGI Until the Public Opts In
00:50:32 — Is Coherent Extrapolated Volition a Coup?
01:02:17 — Democracy, Informed Consent, and the Singularity
01:11:39 — Should Eliezer Have Raised the Alarm Sooner?
01:16:45 — “Classic” AI Safety Burned Its Credibility
01:19:18 — Garrison’s Proposal to Stop the Race
01:21:35 — Will China Agree to a Freeze?
01:25:14 — Let’s Stop the “Obsoleting Project”
01:26:00 — Wrap-Up
Links
GARRISON LOVELY
“Obsolete: The AI Industry’s Trillion-Dollar Race to Replace Us—and How to Stop It” — Garrison’s book
Obsolete — Garrison’s Substack
Garrison Lovely on X
Organize Against the Machine — Garrison’s new podcast with labor organizer Cassie Pritchard
“Can Humanity Survive AI?” — Garrison’s Jacobin cover story
“McKinsey & Company: Capital’s Willing Executioners” — Garrison’s Current Affairs essay
REFERENCED IN THE EPISODE
Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration — Bryan Caplan
“The AI Revolution: Our Immortality or Extinction” — Wait But Why
Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies — Nick Bostrom
“AI 2040: Plan A” — AI Futures Project
“An easy coordination problem?” — Katja Grace
The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead — OpenAI
“Pause AI for Humanity’s Sake” — Peggy Noonan
“Pause AI Development NOW” — Bernie Sanders
If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies — Eliezer Yudkowsky & Nate Soares
“Staring into the Singularity” — Yudkowsky’s 1996 manifesto (archived)
“Coherent Extrapolated Volition” — Eliezer Yudkowsky, 2004 (PDF)
“Coherent Extrapolated Volition: A Meta-Level Approach to Machine Ethics” — Nick Tarleton, 2010 (PDF)
Solomonoff induction — Wikipedia
“Personal statement on joining the OpenAI board” — Paul Christiano (4% over the next year)
“Darwin among the Machines” — Samuel Butler, 1863
PauseAI
PAST DOOM DEBATES EPISODES MENTIONED
Are We A Circular Firing Squad? — with Holly Elmore, Executive Director of PauseAI US
Debate with Robert Wright: Will Humanity Pass the “God Test”?
Robin Hanson vs. Liron Shapira: Is Near-Term Extinction From AGI Plausible?
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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, or to really take things to the next level: Donate 🙏


Get full access to Doom Debates at lironshapira.substack.com/subscribe

Casey Hart is a professional ontologist who has closely studied If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies and concluded the arguments are bad. His P(Doom) is under 1%, and he wouldn’t bet on AGI arriving before 2075.
Casey and I agree AI has become remarkably capable and we need more accountability towards the companies building it. But we disagree on where the future is headed. I believe uncontrollable superintelligence could soon wipe out humanity. He calls that a “pretty outlandish hypothesis.”
Casey holds a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and has worked as an ontologist at Ford, Amazon, and Cycorp (maker of Cyc).
Can this professional philosopher convince me that AI doom is just a story, and not even a well-argued one?
Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxHKesSpqBM
Timestamps
00:00:00 — Cold Open
00:01:04 — Introducing Casey Hart
00:03:08 — What Is Ontology?
00:08:49 — Inside Cyc, the Original Common-Sense AI
00:19:14 — Do LLMs Actually Understand Anything?
00:25:36 — What’s Your P(Doom)?™
00:29:42 — Casey’s Case for Under 1%
00:34:24 — Does Casey’s Christianity Factor In?
00:40:50 — Timelines and Scaling Laws
00:49:44 — Could an AI CEO Beat a Human CEO by 2050?
00:52:21 — AGI Over/Under: 2075
00:55:29 — Rogue AI as a Computer Virus
01:14:52 — Putting Numbers on Each Step of the Doom Argument
01:26:40 — Planes vs. Birds: What Mature Intelligence Looks Like
01:31:05 — The “Outcome Slot”
01:42:32 — Would a Superintelligence Just Compose Music in a Cabin?
01:47:22 — One Prompt Away from a Dyson Swarm
01:52:39 — Was Navier–Stokes an AI Alley-Oop?
02:00:43 — S-Curves vs. Exponentials
02:08:14 — Casey’s Critique of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies
02:14:15 — Is the Doom Train Biased?
02:23:24 — AI Policy: Liability vs. Pausing AI
02:29:50 — The Crux, and Liron Steelmans Casey
02:33:29 — Wrap-Up
Links
CASEY HART
Ontology Explained — Casey’s YouTube channel
The first video in Casey's series on IABIED, “The Case for Superintelligence Is Surprisingly Thin” — Casey on Chapter 1
Philosophy, Programs, and Prompts — Casey’s podcast with Carl Brown (Spotify)
“Artificial General Intelligence?: Wanna Bet?” — Ep 1, where Casey sets his AGI over/under at 2075
REFERENCED IN THE EPISODE
If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies — Eliezer Yudkowsky & Nate Soares
Cyc — Doug Lenat’s hand-built common-sense knowledge base
The Hanson-Yudkowsky AI-Foom Debate (2008) — where Hanson backed Cyc and Eliezer didn’t
Lean — the formal proof language
On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem — OpenAI
The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead — OpenAI
Morris worm (1988)
“On the Loose” — Dean W. Ball on self-sovereign AI agents
Paul Christiano joins OpenAI Foundation Board — OpenAI
“The Age of Wonders and Terrors” — Scott Aaronson
“Are We at War with AI Agent ‘Civilizations’?” — Cal Newport on restricting prompt-loop agents
AI 2027 — Daniel Kokotajlo et al.
PauseAI
PAST DOOM DEBATES EPISODES MENTIONED
The Most Likely AI Doom Scenario — with Jim Babcock, LessWrong Team
David Deutschian vs. Eliezer Yudkowskian Debate — With Brett Hall
Dr. Keith Duggar (Machine Learning Street Talk) vs. Liron Shapira
Where Do YOU Get Off the Doom Train? Live Debate at Manifest 2026 (hosted by Ori)
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, or to really take things to the next level: Donate 🙏


Get full access to Doom Debates at lironshapira.substack.com/subscribe