I Warned You AI Would Hack Us — My 2023 Interview Aged Terrifyingly Well

In April 2023, weeks after GPT-4 launched, when many were saying it was just a "stochastic parrot", I went on AdQuick's Madvertising podcast hosted by Adam Singer and warned that GPT was "about to be the strongest hacker the world has ever known". Watch that conversation, which also covered the Web3 bubble and AI doom more broadly, and judge for yourself how my claims are holding up. Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6gNwZWY-T8 Timestamps 00:00:00 — Adam Introduces Liron 00:02:03 — Liron's P(Doom) Poll 00:03:24 — Web3 Postmortem 00:05:05 — Axie Infinity and Hollow Abstractions 00:07:54 — Brand Marketers' Metaverse FOMO 00:13:33 — Near-Term AI: Elevator to Heaven 00:16:46 — AI at Relationship Hero 00:18:25 — From Chatbots to Bricking the Universe 00:20:17 — The Passive Income Doom Scenario 00:22:58 — 50 Orders of Magnitude Smarter 00:26:10 — Accelerationism and Transhumanism 00:28:51 — Why There's No Off Button 00:31:00 — Can't We Hard-Code Safeguards? 00:33:13 — CRISPR, Nukes, and Fusion 00:35:40 — AI Doom vs. Climate Change 00:39:10 — Nanotechnology Endgame 00:41:45 — AI Attackers vs. AI Defenders 00:43:28 — The Ethics of AI Persuasion 00:46:41 — The Blue Sky Scenario 00:49:04 — Will AI Kill Craft? 00:51:13 — Stuck Culture and Hollywood Sequels 00:54:50 — The Pause Letter: Don't Train GPT-5 00:59:00 — Worldcoin and Proof of Humanity 01:00:44 — "You Probably Won't Die of Old Age" 01:01:52 — Wrap-Up Original episode: https://madvertising.buzzsprout.com/2118560/episodes/12603815-liron-shapira-web-3-mania-cybersecurity-how-ai-could-brick-the-universe-madvertising-6 Links ADAM SINGER & MADVERTISING Adam Singer on X: https://x.com/AdamSinger Madvertising by AdQuick (the original show): https://madvertising.buzzsprout.com/ LIRON'S PROJECTS MENTIONED Bloated MVP (Liron's blog on hollow abstractions): https://www.bloatedmvp.com/ REFERENCED IN THE EPISODE "Pause Giant AI Experiments" open letter (FLI, March 2023): https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments/ Eliezer Yudkowsky — "Pausing AI Developments Isn't Enough. We Need to Shut it All Down" (TIME, March 2023): https://time.com/6266923/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-open-letter-not-enough/ Rob Miles AI Safety on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/robertmilesai Engines of Creation by Eric Drexler: https://www.amazon.com/Engines-Creation-Nanotechnology-Library-Science/dp/0385199732 --- Doom Debates’ Mission is to raise mainstream awareness of imminent extinction from AGI and build the social infrastructure for high-quality debate. Support the mission by subscribing to my Substack at DoomDebates.com and to youtube.com/@DoomDebates, or to really take things to the next level: Donate 🙏 Get full access to Doom Debates at lironshapira.substack.com/subscribe