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Notes -
I should also emphasize that most doomers don't think rapid, recursive self improvement is an important ingredient, since the economic incentives to improve AI will be so strong that we won't be able not to improve it.
I don't know about "most doomers" but there does seem to be a large subset of doomers that believes something like
The moment that anyone builds something smart enough to improve its own intelligence, that thing will almost immediately continue improving its intelligence until it reaches the limits imposed by physics
Those limits are really really high. John Von Neumann's brain consumed approximately 20 watts of power. The Frontier supercomputer consumes approximately 20 megawatts of power. As such, we should expect an AI that can gain control of that supercomputer to be as good at achieving goals as a million von Neumanns working together.
The "amplify from
human to1M von Neumann's" step will happen over a very short period of timeWhichever AI first makes that jump will be more capable than all other entities in the world combined, so we only get one try
For pretty much any goal that AI will have, "acquire resources" and "prevent competition from arising" will be important subgoals in achieving that goal. In the limit, both of those are bad for humans unless the AI specifically cares about humans (because e.g. the largest resource near us is the sun, and most ways of rapidly extracting energy from the sun do not end well for life on Earth).
As such, that AI would not have to care about what humans want, because humans can't threaten it and they don't have any comparative advantage such that it has an incentive to trade with us ("we don't trade with ants").
We can't extrapolate its behavior while it was operating at subhuman capabilities to what it will do at superhuman capabilities, because we should expect a sufficiently capable AI to exhibit a "sharp left turn"
By the above, alignment is a problem we need to solve on the first try, iterative approaches will not work, and the "good guys" have to finish their project before the first researchers who don't care about alignment build a god.
"Do something complicated on the first try, quickly and efficiently, and without being able to iterate" is not something humans have ever done in the past, so we're probably not going to manage it this time.
Therefore doom.
I think this is a fairly compelling case, if you accept (3). If you don't accept (3), you don't end up with this variety of doom.
Confounding everything, there's a separate doom hypothesis that goes "it gets easier to cause the end of human civilization every year, so unless we change from our current course we will get unlucky and go extinct eventually". This doom hypothesis just seems straightforwardly true to me.
But a lot of the people who accept the FOOMDOOM hypothesis also go "hey, if we succeed at creating an aligned AI that doesn't kill anyone, that AI can also permanently change things so that nobody else can destroy the world afterwards". And I think the whole "nothing is a valid thing to do unless it is a pivotal act" mindset is where a lot of people, myself included, get off the train.
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