P(doom)

Ah, it's a happy face, you know, the kind designed to scare the crap out of your kid at Halloween but in this case, this image indirectly connects to a newly coined term P(doom) and I quote.

P(doom), or the probability of doom, is a quasi-empirical way of expressing how likely you think AI will destroy humanity — y'know, the kind of cheerful stuff you might talk about over a cup of coffee.

It gets better ...

It lets other AI guys know where you stand on the tech without getting too far into the weeds on what exactly constitutes an existential risk. Someone with a p(doom) of 50 percent might be labeled a "doomer," like short-lived interim CEO of OpenAI Emmet Shear, while another with 5 percent might be your typical optimist. Wherever people stand, it now serves, at the very least, as a useful bit of small talk.

"It comes up in almost every dinner conversation," Aaron Levie, CEO of the cloud platform Box, told the NYT.

Whistling past the graveyard comes to mind here as the harder one tries to shrug off this issue, the scarier it becomes because we don't know how AI works and we never will and the guys who build said tech know it so dark humor suffices, right?

For yours truly, it's 50% because thanks to Quantum Mechanics, one can only guesstimate about the future and ... phase transitions in tech are never linear, particularly when one sees just how fast AI is evolving ... in real time.

Dario Amodei demonstrates how the use of simple video games can be used to train the A.I. bots.Credit...Christie Hemm Klok for The New York Times

Running the numbers ...

Dario Amodei, the chief executive of the A.I. company Anthropic, puts his between 10 and 25 percent. Lina Khan, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, recently told me she’s at 15 percent. And Emmett Shear, who served as OpenAI’s interim chief executive for about five minutes last month, has said he hovers somewhere between 5 and 50 percent.

I’m talking, of course, about p(doom), the morbid new statistic that is sweeping Silicon Valley.

P(doom) — which is math-speak for “probability of doom” — is the way some artificial intelligence researchers talk about how likely they believe it is that A.I. will kill us all, or create some other cataclysm that threatens human survival. A high p(doom) means you think an A.I. apocalypse is likely, while a low one means you think we’ll probably tough it out.

So, what’s your P(doom) score?