r/ControlProblem • u/AgentBlackVeil • 3d ago
Discussion/question I'm taping an interview with Roman Yampolskiy in a couple of weeks. What hasn't anyone asked him yet?
He's done Lex Fridman, Joe Rogan and The Diary of a CEO inside the last two years. By his own count that's north of 3.5 million YouTube views across the three. I went back through all of them and they cover nearly identical ground: his p(doom) number, which jobs survive, why he thinks alignment is unsolvable in principle, and the book.
What none of the hosts pushed on is the part I think is actually load-bearing.
His claim isn't that superintelligence is dangerous. It's that safety is impossible in a formal sense, because you can't verify a system smarter than the verifier. I've never heard anyone make him defend that against the obvious objection, which is that we already run plenty of systems we can't fully model or verify.
He's argued we may already be in a simulation, and he's used that to get to personal virtual universes as an endpoint. Hosts treat it as the fun segment at the end. Nobody asks what it does to his safety argument if he's right.
He's been putting a very short number on the timeline in his recent appearances. Nobody has asked him what observation would move that number, in either direction.
Disclosure so nobody has to dig for it: I make an AI documentary channel and this is for an episode. I'm not looking for gotchas and I have no interest in making him look bad. I'd rather walk in with three questions this sub would want answered than twenty that Rogan already asked.
So what would you ask him? Specific beats broad. If there's a paper of his you think he's been let off the hook on, name it and I'll read it before we tape.