Zack Korman
CEO of Embroidery.
“If I had to tell a story, I could tell a trillion stories of all the ways where we could stop. And whereas the doomers have to tell this like two, three, five stories where like we'll never catch them… That's like kind of the crux of the problem. It's like everything has to go right in this doomer story for them to pull it off.”
Doom Debates! · AI Research & Frontier Labs · October 2026
Context
Korman, a cybersecurity expert who left the AI-doom camp, responds to host Liron Shapira's scenario of an ambiguous AI-caused catastrophe. He argues that layered security controls and many chances to notice give humanity far more ways to stop a takeover than a doom story allows.
Transcript
…more just like doomers give too little credit to humanity's willingness to survive to say like we will see things over time. And there's so many like half failures that doomers have created into like big moments of blow up, right? Where like nothing is scary and then suddenly everything is scary.
…be like a sequence of accidents, right? There's like a flood, right? A mysterious flood. And like all these accidents are happening. And you're just claiming that like the human intuition is going to like kick into gear and probably attribute that this is all due to like scaling AI capabilities.
…along the way where like you would, you would be able to identify things. You'd be able to like kind of have like also importantly, we don't even have to wait for like the nuke to go off. There are like relevant stops along the way that are just like, we can say that that's not worth a risk, right? That we can visibly see. I think like there's all of these scenarios. I feel like if I were to, if I had to tell a story, I could tell a trillion stories of all the ways where we could stop. And whereas the doomers have to tell this like two, three, five stories where like we'll never catch them. Like they, they get away with it, you know, like, and it's to me, that's like kind of the crux of the problem. It's like everything has to go right in this doomer story for them to pull it off.
Yeah. Okay. I mean, I know we're, I know we're heading toward the wrap up and I do think we've done a good job kind of giving viewers a sense of our different mindsets. Maybe I can try this mental model on you. I mean, just think about how people feel in software and in math and in writing today.…
We're not in a war, right? They're not, it's like, because they're not all one thing. It's not that they're nice. Like I don't have to, I place no bets on them being like nice and friendly AI. It's just like they're not one thing. You're not fighting the centralized planning of Nazi Germany. You're…
Right. I mean, I guess, you know, to give you some do, I mean, I guess if I were to say, what does the good solution look like? It just looks like we keep maintaining control. So we keep maintaining this invariant that there's some power center which is aligned to humans, right? Like the longer…
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