NonZero Newsletter
Robert Wright's Nonzero
Rationalism and AI Doomerism (Robert Wright & Liron Shapira)
Preview
0:00
-47:05

Rationalism and AI Doomerism (Robert Wright & Liron Shapira)

Note: Paid NZN subscribers can now get a 50 percent discount on a one-year subscription to Paul’s excellent Substack newsletter, Small Potatoes. The discount coupon is at the bottom of this newsletter, below the paywall.

This episode includes an Overtime segment that’s available to paid subscribers. If you’re not a paid subscriber, we of course encourage you to become one. If you are a paid subscriber, you can access the complete conversation either via the audio and video on this post or by setting up the paid-subscriber podcast feed, which includes all exclusive audio content. To set that up, simply grab the RSS feed from this page (by first clicking the “...” icon on the audio player) and paste it into your favorite podcast app. If you have trouble completing the process, check out this super-simple how-to guide.

0:00 Teaser
0:59 Why Liron became a Yudkowskian
5:17 Eliezer Yudkowsky’s vision of AI apocalypse
12:45 Does intelligence want power?
19:24 Decoding Yudkowsky’s key Darwinian metaphor
31:12 Is doomerism crowding out other AI worries?
40:38 Liron: The silent majority is very AI anxious
45:41 Heading to Overtime

Robert Wright (Nonzero, The Evolution of God, Why Buddhism Is True) and Liron Shapira (Pause AI, Relationship Hero). Recorded October 15, 2025.

Join NonZero’s newly established Discord server: https://discord.gg/Zy4jAhTQMF

Twitter: https://twitter.com/NonzeroPods

Overtime titles:

0:00 Steelmanning AI accelerationism
3:54 The long-ago Bob-Eliezer podcast meetup
6:56 Steven Pinker, the rationalists, and Bayesian problematics
23:18 Liron’s activist (and contrarian) streak
27:41 What’s the deal with Dario Amodei?

Overtime video:

This post is for paid subscribers