Don't Just Tell Me Your p(doom), Tell Me Your Conditionals | American Enterprise Institute - AEI
At AI conferences, researchers casually trade their p(doom) predictions like they’re restaurant recommendations. p(doom) is a concept that emerged from artificial intelligence safety discussions, representing the probability that artificial general intelligence (AGI) development will lead to catastrophic outcomes for humanity. It’s often expressed as a number between 0 and 1, where 0 equates to no chance of doom and 1 means 100 percent certainty of doom. What began originally as a joke has evolved into a serious metric. There is even a Wikipedia page collecting p(doom) estimates. Geoffrey Hinton, the 2024 Nobel Prize winner in physics for his work on AI, puts the number between 10 and 50 percent. Yann Le Cun, the lead of AI at Meta, has his number at less than 0.01 percent. Even Lina Khan, previous Federal Trade Commission Chair, proffered a guess at around 15 percent. It has become a common shorthand in AI risk discussions, allowing researchers and policymakers to quantify and compare