Doom Debates!

Former Singularity Institute President: PauseAI Is Making AI Doom WORSE

Aug 18, 2026 · 1 hr 44 min · 13 segments

Michael Vassar used to work closely with Eliezer Yudkowsky as President of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, the organization that later became the Machine Intelligence Research…

Michael Vassar used to work closely with Eliezer Yudkowsky as President of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, the organization that later became the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI). Even though his P(Doom) is in the tens of percents by 2050, he says the people trying to pause AI are "bad people”. He hopes this episode convinces me to stop being a fearmonger… but I claim the general public needs to hurry up and get *more scared*. All aboard the Doom Train! 🚂 Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GbFng6htaQ **Timestamps** 00:00:00 — Cold Open 00:01:26 — Introducing Michael Vassar 00:02:39 — Shorting Boeing at the Start of COVID 00:05:41 — What's Your P(Doom)™? 00:08:11 — The Magic Dial Thought Experiment 00:10:25 — "A Treaty Between Demis and Dario" 00:13:33 — AI CEOs 20 Years Ago 00:15:59 — Lessons from Peter Thiel 00:17:47 — Riding the Doom Train™ 00:19:41 — Will the Human Brain Stay Relevant? 00:22:21 — When Does a Singleton Form? 00:28:35 — Hugging Face Hack 00:30:43 — Mistake Theory vs. Conflict Theory 00:33:18 — Debating the Orthogonality Thesis 00:36:38 — Maximally Evil AI Scenario 00:40:28 — Is the AI Development Process Safe? 00:42:05 — "PauseAI People Are Bad People" 00:44:44 — Michael Psychoanalyzes Liron 00:49:39 — How Liron Can Redeem Himself 00:55:10 — Michael Critiques Eliezer Yudkowsky 00:59:11 — Is Doomerism Bad Epistemology? 01:02:03 — Do Serious People Believe in Doom? 01:04:45 — Should Liron Stop Fearmongering? 01:07:16 — Political Violence Won't Help 01:11:04 — The Data Center Airstrike Scenario 01:13:34 — Could Every Nation Sign a Pause Treaty? 01:17:21 — What "Governance" Actually Means 01:26:12 — Michael's History with Rationalists 01:33:43 — Are We in a Computer Simulation? 01:38:43 — Wrap-Up **Links** Michael Vassar on X — https://x.com/HiFromMichaelV The anti-anti-normativity sequence on Natural Hazard (Michael's recommended reading) — https://naturalhazard.xyz/ben\jess\sarah\starter\pack Michael on DemystifySci #366 — "1000 Year Plan to Crush Thought" — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W17Cx21in9I Michael on The Vance Crowe Podcast #303 — Good vs. Evil — https://open.spotify.com/episode/2RzlQDSwxGbjloRKqCh1xg Michael on Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg — Preference Falsification and Postmodernism — https://podcast.clearerthinking.org/episode/028/michael-vassar-preference-falsification-and-postmodernism/ "The Survival of Noise Traders in Financial Markets" — De Long, Shleifer, Summers & Waldmann — https://www.nber.org/papers/w2715 Scott Alexander — Conflict vs. Mistake — https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/ Scott Alexander — Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lightning — https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/ Scott Alexander — Samsara — https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/04/samsara/ Eliezer Yudkowsky — Meta-Honesty: Firming Up Honesty Around Its Edge-Cases — https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xdwbX9pFEr7Pomaxv/meta-honesty-firming-up-honesty-around-its-edge-cases Zvi Mowshowitz — Book Review: Going Infinite — https://thezvi.substack.com/p/book-review-going-infinite Jaan Tallinn — "Why Now? A Quest in Metaphysics" (Singularity Summit 2012) — https://vimeo.com/54718573 Paul Graham — "Five Founders" (the Sam Altman essay) — https://paulgraham.com/5founders.html Truthful AI (Owain Evans' safety org) — https://truthful.ai METR — Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Tasks (the time-horizon graph) — https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-complete-long-tasks/ Statement on AI Risk (Center for AI Safety, 2023) — https://safe.ai/work/statement-on-ai-risk Vitalik Buterin — Will "d/acc" Protect Humanity from Superintelligent AI? — https://lironshapira.substack.com/p/debate-with-vitalik-buterin-will Holly Elmore — These Effective Altruists Betrayed Me — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFFObQ6vnLU Noah Smith — Top Economist Says P(Doom) Is 0.1% (the "AI drugs" claim) — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwmJ-OnK2I4 \--- 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

Michael Vassar used to work closely with Eliezer Yudkowsky as President of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, the organization that later became the Machine Intelligence Research…

P Doom, Timelines, and Pausing AI5:29 – 13:34

Liron ShapiraHost

5:29

This is, after all, Doom Debates, so we have to talk about debating the imminent risks of extinction from artificial super intelligence.

Liron ShapiraHost

5:36

So let's just get some grounding here.

Liron ShapiraHost

5:38

Let's get our bearings.

Liron ShapiraHost

5:40

You ready for this?

Michael VassarGuest

5:41

Sure.

Michael VassarGuest

5:41

P Doom.

Michael VassarGuest

5:43

P Doom.

Michael VassarGuest

5:43

What's your P Doom? What's your P Doom? What's your P Doom?

Liron ShapiraHost

5:47

Michael Vassar, what's your P Doom?

Michael VassarGuest

5:51

I really don't think this is a useful frame, but in another sense, in a long enough time horizon, it has to be close to one, or things end.

Michael VassarGuest

6:01

And in a short enough time horizon, like 2027, it has to be a single-digit percentage.

Michael VassarGuest

6:08

But even a single-digit percentage is, like, noteworthy and concerning.

Michael VassarGuest

6:14

It was not a single digit last year.

Michael VassarGuest

6:18

It [laughs]

Liron ShapiraHost

6:19

I mean, when you say single-digit percentage by 2027, I mean, if this was the year 2007 when we first met, I don't think you would've said it's a single-digit percentage in 2007.

Michael VassarGuest

6:29

I agree, very strongly not.

Michael VassarGuest

6:31

I mean, my, my normal take has been it's roughly uniformly distributed over the 21st century and with some level of concentration in the traditional, like, 2030 to 2045 period that everyone was already talking about, but not very much concentration.

Michael VassarGuest

6:53

And as history has progressed, that concentration gets higher and higher.

Michael VassarGuest

6:59

It seems like things are much more concentrated in approximately the time period that Kurzweil and Vinge and others thought they were concentrated back when they started talking about it.

Liron ShapiraHost

7:09

So what is your P doom by 2050?

Michael VassarGuest

7:13

[sighs] So I feel like sudden extinction and sudden loss of control are pretty different, so you might want to de- separate chance that there are no humans in 2050, which is still noticeable, from chance that humans are hopelessly, hopelessly removed from the loop for any sort of meaningful decision-making, which is, like, very strongly the null hypothesis.

Michael VassarGuest

7:44

It seems like China might possibly be able to resist that, but the rest of the world just won't.

Liron ShapiraHost

7:52

Right.

Liron ShapiraHost

7:53

Yeah, I mean, removing humans from decision-making, uh, I think we're all getting a taste of that, right? If we use agentic AI, I think we're all seeing the trend where it's so much easier to just let the AI make the next decisions.

Liron ShapiraHost

8:03

I mean, I've noticed the effect.