Zack Korman, Cybersecurity Expert, Is Confident That Humanity Will SURVIVE

Cybersecurity expert and entrepreneur Zack Korman is an increasingly prominent nondoomer voice on Twitter. Naturally, with AI now breaking out of sandboxes and hacking corporate systems, people want to hear what cybersecurity experts have to say. So I’m thrilled that Zack was brave enough to face me on Doom Debates!

Zack was reading Nick Bostrom at Oxford and worrying about AI doom as far back as 2016, but his views have since shifted. In a recent post, he writes: “This focus on AI causing human extinction is going to get people killed.” Now he expects security failures to give humanity plenty of opportunities to learn, fight back, and stop risky superintelligence development if necessary.

We argue about whether sandboxing and AI monitoring are hopeless strategies, whether competing superintelligences would keep each other in check, whether to expect instrumental convergence, and more.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/QJTeZfx1ZLk

Timestamps

00:00:00 — Cold Open

00:01:15 — Introducing Zack Korman

00:03:41 — From Law to AI Security

00:09:17 — Why Zack Stopped Being a Doomer

00:12:03 — What’s Your P(Doom)?™

00:21:00 — Why Zack Supports AI Safety

00:25:54 — Believing in Superintelligence

00:30:06 — AI Without Tools

00:39:42 — Warning Shots and Time to React

00:46:08 — A Country of Geniuses in a Datacenter

00:55:55 — Can We Sandbox AI?

01:05:58 — Monitoring and Layers of Defense

01:14:49 — Riding the Doom Train™

01:22:23 — The Case for Accelerating

01:24:46 — AI CEOs and the Transfer of Power

01:34:19 — Who Presses the Stop Button?

01:41:38 — Humans, Bacteria, and the Limits of Power

01:48:30 — When Would Zack Pause AI?

01:56:13 — Will Different AIs Keep Each Other in Check?

02:06:11 — Can Progress Turn Against Us?

02:08:35 — The Ideological Turing Test

02:14:58 — Closing Thoughts

Links

Zack Korman on X

Zack Korman’s website

Zack Korman: “AI doomers are furious”

Zack Korman: “AI doomers are anti-security”

Zack Korman: “3 reasons sandboxing won’t secure your AI agent”

Zack Korman: “This focus on AI causing human extinction is going to get people killed.”

METR’s investigation of the OpenAI–Hugging Face incident

The PHP Foundation: “Today’s PHP Security Release, and How We’re Strengthening PHP Security”

Nick Bostrom: Superintelligence

Center for AI Safety: Statement on AI Risk

Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies

AI 2027

Zvi Mowshowitz: “The Three AI Pills”

PauseAI

Eliezer Yudkowsky: “Value is Fragile”

Aaron Scher at MIRI

Doom Debates: Robin Hanson vs. Liron Shapira — Is Near-Term Extinction From AGI Plausible?

Doom Debates: OpenAI’s BOMBSHELL Hack — Swarms of Agents, Zero-Day Exploits, & Misaligned AI

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