A major update for Gowers, who says until recently he had a psychological aversion towards taking xrisk seriously, as he already had climate change causing him enough anxiety:
> Until recently, I have always found that my anxiety of choice was climate change rather than x-risk, but I was aware that there were a lot of very intelligent people who disagreed with me, and also aware that I had thought much less about x-risk than about climate change. So when I agreed to be on the scientific advisory panel, I also decided that that was the moment that I should think a bit harder about x-risk.
> ...
> I find it very disheartening to read a climate denier trotting out a layer-1 argument when its layer-2 rejoinder has been established for a long time and can be found after two seconds on Google (or, nowadays, an LLM). But until recently, my arguments against x-risk were basically layer-1 arguments, the sorts of arguments that would provoke eye rolls among the people who have thought properly about it.
> I don't have a p(doom), but in particular I can't confidently say that my p(doom) is close to zero, which is a worrying position to be in. I also try to encourage mathematicians to think harder about the question and maybe consider working on AI safety.
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 7.4 ms ] thread> Until recently, I have always found that my anxiety of choice was climate change rather than x-risk, but I was aware that there were a lot of very intelligent people who disagreed with me, and also aware that I had thought much less about x-risk than about climate change. So when I agreed to be on the scientific advisory panel, I also decided that that was the moment that I should think a bit harder about x-risk.
> ...
> I find it very disheartening to read a climate denier trotting out a layer-1 argument when its layer-2 rejoinder has been established for a long time and can be found after two seconds on Google (or, nowadays, an LLM). But until recently, my arguments against x-risk were basically layer-1 arguments, the sorts of arguments that would provoke eye rolls among the people who have thought properly about it.
His twitter TL;DR: https://x.com/wtgowers/status/2111045962911097188
> I don't have a p(doom), but in particular I can't confidently say that my p(doom) is close to zero, which is a worrying position to be in. I also try to encourage mathematicians to think harder about the question and maybe consider working on AI safety.