Note: manually cross-posted from LessWrong. See here for discussion on LW. Introduction I recently watched Eliezer Yudkowsky’s appearance on the Bankless podcast, where he argued that AI was nigh-certain to end humanity. Since the podcast, some commentators have offered pushback against the doom conclusion. However, one sentiment I saw was that optimists tended not to engage with the specific arguments pessimists like Yudkowsky offered. Economist Robin Hanson points out that this pattern is very common for small groups which hold counterintuitive beliefs: insiders develop their own internal language, which skeptical outsiders usually don’t bother to learn. Outsiders then make objections that focus on broad arguments against the belief’s plausibility, rather than objections that focus on specific insider arguments. As an AI “alignment insider” whose current estimate of doom is around 5%, I wrote this post to explain some of my many objections to Yudkowsky’s specific arguments. I’ve split this post into chronologically ordered segments [...]