A profile of several AI “doomers”, including AI Impacts researcher Katja Grace, and “effective accelerationists”, as both make arguments about the future of AI
Some people think machine intelligence will transform humanity for the better. Others fear it may destroy us.
New YorkerAndrew Marantz
Context & Ripple Effects
Coverage around AI had already cast the technology as an unusually fast industrial-scale transition, with optimism and existential-risk concerns competing to define its social meaning. This profile makes that abstract divide more legible through AI Impacts researcher Katja Grace and the accelerationist camp.
The dispute matters because it connects forecasts about machine intelligence to a live choice raised in earlier coverage: whether societies should adapt faster or seek a collective mechanism to slow development.
First-order effects
Katja Grace and AI Impacts gain a clearer public association with the existential-risk case, while effective accelerationists receive a comparably visible articulation of the pro-transformation case.
The article gives audiences a simple interpretive frame for competing AI claims: potential broad benefit versus severe, potentially existential harm.
Second-order effects
Companies, policymakers, and researchers face greater pressure to state whether their AI plans prioritize rapid deployment, risk mitigation, or a balance of both; the divide is less easily treated as a purely technical disagreement.
If this debate remains central, AI governance will increasingly turn on legitimacy as well as capability: who may set deployment speed, what risks count, and how benefits are distributed.
The durable split is likely to be between institutions organized around accelerating AI industrialization and those seeking enforceable safeguards, rather than a settled consensus on either path.
The trend: AI’s public narrative is evolving into a contest over the acceptable pace and governance of increasingly capable systems.
cool to be quoted in the New Yorker on the AI ‘doomsayers’ - I said “preventing an arms race is the best outcome, but if you think it's inevitable, you might want the ‘good guys’ to win the race”. Note: I think we can prevent it, with institutions and international dialogue.
“J. Robert Oppenheimer may be portrayed as a flawed, self-pitying protagonist, or even as a war criminal, but no one is making a Hollywood blockbuster called 'Rotblat.')” They bloody should https://www.newyorker.com/...
“Some people think machine intelligence will transform humanity for the better. Others fear it may destroy us. Who will decide our fate?” https://www.newyorker.com/...
Two things can be true at once: 1) the key concerns of this report—that AI is about to become so powerful it may destroy the world in the next few years—are utter horseshit, and 2) we should absolutely do the below parts of the action plan https://time.com/... [image]
“The doomers and the boomers are consumed by intramural fights, but from a distance they can look like two offshoots of the same tribe: people who are convinced that A.I. is the only thing worth paying attention to.” https://www.newyorker.com/...
“'I'm generally pro-A.I. and against slowing down innovation,' Robin Hanson, an economist who has had friendly debates with the doomers for years, told me. ‘I want our civilization to continue to grow and do spectacular things.’” https://www.newyorker.com/...
This... seems to be the most candid and well-written feature article on AI Safety, rationalism, and EA that I have ever read? https://www.newyorker.com/...
It's a new low in journalism to praise Berkeley's Eliezer Yudkowsky and Katja Grace. Both declared a p(doom) of 90%. Find someone who will love you - as much as @TIME & @NewYorker love AI doomers. https://www.newyorker.com/...