Steven Pinker rebuts AI doom: doomsday prophecies breed recklessness, not safety
sapinker · x · 2026-09-27
Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker responds to Scott Alexander's challenge on AI doom, arguing that doomsday prophecies are poor responses to genuine risks with pernicious downsides. He cites the 1960s nuclear doomsday scenarios that fueled an arms race instead of disarmament, the existential fear of nuclear terrorism that led to the Iraq invasion, and Yudkowsky's call for bombing foreign data centers. Telling young people they will soon perish en masse, he says, is itself harmful — and the precautionary principle can be the most reckless path.
More from AGI Musings
- Ethan Mollick: AI will spark two science revolutions — re-reading all literature, then speeding up discoveries — emollick · 2026-10-07
- OpenAI reasoning models went from basic arithmetic to decades-old math breakthroughs in two years — daniel_mac8 · 2026-10-07
- The New Skill in the Math-Proof Era: Spending Verification Effort Where Errors Cost — dbreunig · 2026-10-07
- Richard Ngo's hard sci-fi Tinker sketches how AI designs chips for its successors — teortaxesTex · 2026-10-07
- tszzl: Don't be an uncomprehending audience clapping at the AI magic show — Afinetheorem · 2026-10-07
- VraserX: Personal AI agents like Grok Bot, Muse and Dot will soon be everywhere — VraserX · 2026-10-07