P(doom)

Or worse, have they casually woven the apocalypse into their PR strategy so much that we are completely desensitized to it?

I mean, consider a concept widely discussed in these insider circles, PDoom, or the probability of doom.

Oh, yeah.

PDoom.

You have leaders in the AI space casually debating on podcasts whether there is a 10% or 20% chance of their life's work causing the literal end of the world.

Which is insane.

It is.

And by putting a neat little percentage on it, they normalize the unthinkable.

If you slow things down, you're going to miss out on the benefits.

In this age of Hugging Face and P. Doom ratings, you're Feeling, thinking on that change?

Yeah, so it has and it hasn't.

My view was I was concerned that we were slowing down use of AI based on speculation of things that could occur that were bad.

It's worth knowing that a lot of those Silicon Valley venture capitalists who are accelerationists, they've known these doomers for years.

They've all been at dinner parties in the Bay Area where you have a Yacousi-style doomerist going on about their P. Doom, and they really find them annoying.

And so there's almost this sort of lunchroom, different tables in the cafeteria type thing going on.

We're like, oh my God, there you go again with all of your AI, God, super intelligent stuff.

It's worth knowing that a lot of those Silicon Valley venture capitalists who are accelerationists, they've known these doomers for years.

They've all been at dinner parties in the Bay Area where you have a Yacousi-style doomerist going on about their P. Doom, and they really find them annoying.

And so there's almost this sort of lunchroom, different tables in the cafeteria type thing going on.

We're like, oh my God, there you go again with all of your AI gods, super intelligent stuff.

It's worth knowing that a lot of those Silicon Valley venture capitalists who are accelerationists, they've known these doomers for years.

They've all been at dinner parties in the Bay Area where you have a Yacousi-style doomerist going on about their P. Doom, and they really find them annoying.

And so there's almost this sort of lunchroom, different tables in the cafeteria type thing going on.

We're like, oh my God, there you go again with all of your AI gods, super intelligent stuff.

my P-Doom, if you ask me, is negative because...

What's your PDoom? And have you actually thought about what this question even means? Because my problem with PDoom is that it has so many assumptions that are misleading.

Two years ago, I put my PDoom at 28%, and I built a whole scenario tree to get there.

Today, my answer is below zero.

So let's take the question apart, piece by piece.

Eliezer Yudkowsky is above 95, and he wrote a book called If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.

Even the people building these mines have a number.

What's your PDoom number? Yeah, I really hate that term.

You read the headlines and, you know...

What's your PDoom number? Everyone's talking about this technology that is an existential threat to humanity.

And then you go to work and you're like, how do we make that? How do we utilize this better and drive shareholder value? There's this real tension between these two types of existence where you can be really excited about how a piece of technology works and all the things that can unlock for you or your customers or your users.

And then also have to hold in your head this, this fear or this like question about whether we're the bad guys, you know, when you say you work, I've just joined an AI company, we're building an agent and, you know, and depending on who I'm talking to about my new job, some of them will say, I hope it's not an AI company before I've even, you know, said where I'm working.

When we get AI companies talking about This doom, this rogue AI, all these other things, and they get us worried about all this other stuff.

And our P-Doom goes up, and we're worried that, yeah, there's going to be large men with Austrian accents and dark sunglasses and black biker jackets telling us that they will be back.

We start worrying about that stuff and we stop worrying about other things, such as the fact that these things are eroding jobs, particularly at the bottom layers, that these things are eroding privacy and creating more inferences that can be used to erode privacy, that in terms of intellectual property, I saw a great LinkedIn post recently and it said you know back in the 1990s some teenager would steal a few songs and they would get sued into ruins for millions of dollars because they used napster now ai companies suddenly tech companies are stealing everybody's work and who cares yeah it's great um look um There's an awful lot of things that we need to be paying attention to on what AI does and how we need to mold what it does and regulate the people who are building it, selling it, distributing it, using it.

And I sometimes worry very much that we're falling very deliberately prey to an almost disinformation campaign, you know? I guess I suppose I'm never going to get open AI or Anthropic as a client now.