Google DeepMind AI Safety Researcher Who Just RESIGNED Says P(Doom) is 25% — Debate with Alex Turner

Dr. Alex Turner went viral for resigning from Google DeepMind over its Pentagon AI contract, which he said lacked binding restrictions against autonomous weapons and mass surveillance.

Alex is a world-class researcher with a PhD in alignment from Oregon State University, a postdoc at Stuart Russell’s Center for Human-Compatible AI at UC Berkeley, and top distinctions at NeurIPS. He’s one of the minds behind Shard Theory (with Quintin Pope), and he also helped pioneer the Steering Vectors research made famous through Anthropic’s Golden Gate Claude experiment.

Alex says Google DeepMind broke its founding promise — the commitment Google made when it acquired DeepMind — and that the people best known inside Google for caring about AI ethics largely didn’t act when it counted.

Alex came up through the rationalist community, and became one of LessWrong’s highest-karma users before leaving the site. He still shares many of my concerns about AI doom, but he believes technical alignment research is going better than expected. I’m not so optimistic.

In this episode, we debate my Yudkowskian doom views against Alex’s own framework. Can he convince me the Yudkowskians are miscalibrated?

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Timestamps

00:00:00 — Cold Open00:01:15 — Introducing Alex Turner00:02:30 — From Harry Potter Fanfic to AI Alignment00:05:03 — Meeting Quintin Pope & Rethinking AI Doom00:06:17 — Shard Theory, Steering Vectors & Golden Gate Claude00:08:25 — Why He Joined Google DeepMind00:10:32 — Google DeepMind’s Broken Promise00:16:01 — Debating Google DeepMind’s Pentagon Contract00:19:09 — What’s Your P(Doom)™?00:22:42 — Alex’s Research on Instrumental Convergence00:26:35 — Misuse vs. Misalignment: The Mainline Doom Scenario00:29:31 — Will Society Self-Correct?00:36:36 — Superintelligence in 10 Years00:39:43 — Will Technical Alignment Produce a Safe AI?00:41:16 — Donation Drive00:42:12 — How Fragile Is the Chain of Alignment?00:49:50 — Disagreements with Yudkowsky’s ‘List of Lethalities’00:57:46 — Why Alex Quit LessWrong01:01:48 — What’s Next for Alex01:02:54 — Does He Support PauseAI? Stop the AI Race?01:04:40 — Wrap-Up01:06:04 — Producer Ori’s Closing Note

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