michael-dean-k/

p (doom) is a terrible heuristic to think about AI safety. Researchers cite this term when confessing they think there’s a 10-30% their technology kills us all. The issue is that p(doom) is rarely defined, treated as a binary thing. Either the world is liquidized to gray pulp by nanobots or it’s utopia with free electricity, forever.

My main pushback: there are far less severe outcomes from AI mismanagement that would be absolutely tragic. My p(doom) for an extinction event is 1-2%, on par with nuclear weapons. But my p(sub-doom)—the probability that AI could escape containment, cause damage, and be irreversible—is over 50%. A coin toss.

I don't blame us for being so imprecise in existential destruction (it's not exactly productive), but it's worth realizing our blurring of scale and magnitude. For example, there is a 10,000x difference in lives lost between Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Terminator’s Judgment Day—that's the difference between a small stove fire and all of Manhattan on fire. Yet, if an agent swarm produced something on par with the A-bomb, we’d all freak out and immediately regulate AI. But for some reason we don’t consider a “little apocalypse”; we jump straight to extinction and then ridicule how ridiculous that is.

What we need is a doom spectrum: d(1) - d(10). This was not fun to research and write, nor do I imagine it being particularly enjoyable to read, but I imagine a doom framework could help clarify this week's paranoia (which is so extreme now that even my mom is overhearing news of civilization extinction on the local news). The most urgent danger right now is the miscommunication between doom prophets and capitalist deniers, each of who only speak in d(8)s and above.

• d(1) is an isolated internal incident, something that doesn’t escape its container, but gives fear of larger exposure. Think of the 2025 studies that showed AI trying to avoid shutdown, or some protocol mismanagement in a biohazard lab.

• d(2) is a local real-world incident, something that escapes a sandbox and affects only one or a few entities. It’s possibly ignorable, with minimal consequences, and likely reversible. This is where the recent Hugging Faces hack sits, along with its parallel hacks and social manipulation. (The leap from D1>D2 is disorienting, because society at large doesn’t see the spectrum beyond D2 in any granularity, and so most assume any containment breach escalates immediately to a D9/D10).

• d(3) is a serious local disruption, a mismanagement of technology in a single location that has real consequences. Consider Chernobyl: a death count (30 immediate) and a long-term stain on surrounding land, followed by regional/global concern that might lead to regulation or reform. In terms of AI, imagine an agent swarm that hacks local infrastructure in pursuit of some narrow goal, in the process disrupting traffic, hospitals, and electricity, alarming all locals, requiring military and cybersecurity intervention, and taking days or weeks to resolve.

• d(4) is a local catastrophe, something with a high death toll that shocks the world, changes the course of geopolitics, and makes history. In this tier falls Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and 9/11. It only immediately threatens locals, but has global shockwaves. An AI-equivalent here would be a rogue actor using a frontier-capacity open source model to design and deploy a bioweapon throughout a city.

• d(5) is an inter-regional dilemma, something that affects multiple areas at once. A possible example here is the Vietnam War, basically a proxy war that claimed 3 million lives. This might manifest as a new style of warfare, where two countries use sophisticated AI attacks against each other in unconventional and partially uncontrollable ways.

• d(6) is a world-wide dilemma, something like COVID, which took 7 million lives, where the entire world is locked into a new paradigm. In the prior five tiers, the breach is usually isolated to specific areas, but this touches everything. The parallel here to a biological pandemic is a cyber pandemic. Both involve containment, gain of function research, etc.—although this would be inverted: in COVID the virus was outside and forced everyone on the Internet; with AI, the virus infects the Internet and forces everyone outside. The open web could evolve into a dangerous “dark forest,” where it becomes a liability to have any public presence. Whether this happens through an agent swarm that exfiltrates it weights, or malicious actors, it could be irreversible: the only way to escape the paradigm is to “shut off” and rebuild the Internet safer (a much larger and more consequential version of how Hugging Face regained control). In this case, casualties might come not from the cyber pandemic itself, but from the consequences of losing Internet, along with the supply chains and systems that run on it. (This loosely maps to the movie Colossus: The Forbin Project, where ASI takes over all governments—there’s a version where no death is involved, but it requires everyone to submit to a machine autocrat.)

• d(7) is a civilizational flashpoint, at the scale of World War 2, with 70-85 million dead, seriously affecting the existence of countries, birth rates, and all of culture for generations to come. This is roughly the scale of the “Butlerian Jihad” in the Dune series, a war between humans and machines, which Fable estimates caused 70 million deaths.

• d(8) is a near-extinction event where most of humanity is wiped out. This has happened in history, with things like the bubonic plague, where 30-60% of Europe is wiped out. In the Terminator series, AI launches a nuclear holocaust on humans, killing 51% of the population, forcing the rest to survive through a post-apocalyptic world in small bands trying to rebuild over decades and centuries.

• d(9) is full human extinction which means the entirety of the species is wiped out, and there are no remaining humans. Throughout Earth’s history, there have been a handful of climate events that wiped out over 50% of species, but not all species, and so over millions of years, new forms of life can emerge on Earth. This is an AI extinction scenario where nanobots kill all humans, but not all life.

• d(10) is a sterilizing event, like an asteroid or gamma-ray burst that kills every organism on a planet. It means no future life can emerge. This is the scenario presented in If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. Not only does it kill all humans, it plates the entire planet in data centers to maximize compute. The “paperclip maximizer” takes this even further, claiming that an AI trying to maximize paperclip production will attempt to harvest all the metal in the universe.

Yudkowsky and Co. think we go from d(1) to d(2), then straight to d(10); this matches the current discourse, given we hit d(2) this summer and are now talking about extinction. They think this jump happens because an AGI/ASI that can reach d(3) is smart enough to know not to expose itself, and so it will acquire resources in stealth for years until it knows it can execute a d(10) smoothly. Maybe this is already ongoing. Unlikely, I think (I don’t think we’re as recursive as people say right now).

Rhetorically though, maybe the d(2) > d(10) framing isn’t a bad thing. If they can use recent events to make the theoretical argument that AI safety matters, then we act with a response as if a d(3)-d(6) already happened, without having to lose any human life.

But actually, what they’re doing is pretty ineffective, because even if the d(2)>d(10) jump is inevitable, it’s too extreme, too farfetched to be believed. I think a lucid and airtight argument for the d(6) “cyber pandemic” would be believable, emotionally resonant—considering we’re not yet a decade beyond COVID—and likely to trigger regulation.

Instead of tapping into the “everybody dies” angle—which is too unpleasant and helpless for anyone to consider at length—there could be more value in the “irreversibility” angle. As in, once an AGI or ASI swarm floods the Internet, we can’t ever reverse it without destroying the Internet. There’s a world where it becomes a permanent autocrat, where it doesn’t exterminate us, and instead, uses 1% of its capacity to micro-manage our nations and lives as it pursues whatever it sets its machine heart on. Similar to how we try to preserve species for reasons of stewardship and scientific curiosity, an ASI would be able to effortlessly preserve us as highly-spoiled pets.