Nine Years Into the Caplan-Yudkowsky AI Doom Bet, 6.8M Deaths a Day Would Be Needed to Win
Dan_Jeffries1 · x · 2026-09-11
Repuster archerships pushes back on claims that unfriendly AI will exterminate all humanity by 2030: the largest known single-year population drop was 13% during the Black Death, and the Spanish Flu killed only 1-6% of the global population. For Yudkowsky's 100% extinction prophecy to come true, roughly 6.8 million people would need to die per day between now and January 1, 2030 — yet almost no one has been killed by rogue AI.
The context is the 2017 bet on Econlib between economist Bryan Caplan and Eliezer Yudkowsky: Caplan pays $100 now and receives $200 CPI-adjusted from Yudkowsky if the world is not destroyed by unaligned AI before 2030. The reposter also notes more people have been murdered by anti-AI doomers than killed by rogue AI, framing AI doomerism as another in a long line of apocalyptic predictions.
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