I Debated Beff Jezos and His "e/acc" Army
I Debated Beff Jezos and His "e/acc" Army  
Podcast: Doom Debates
Published On: Tue Dec 30 2025
Description: In September of 2023, when OpenAI’s GPT-4 was still a fresh innovation and people were just beginning to wrap their heads around large language models, I was invited to debate Beff Jezos, Bayeslord, and other prominent “effective accelerationists” a.k.a. “e/acc” folks on an X Space.E/acc’s think building artificial superintelligence is unlikely to disempower humanity and doom the future, because that’d be an illegal exception to the rule that accelerating new technology is always the highest-expected-value for humanity.As you know, I disagree — I think doom is extremely likely and imminent possibility.This debate took place 9 months before I started Doom Debates, and was one of the experiences that made me realize debating AI doom was my calling. It’s also the only time Beff Jezos has ever not been too chicken to debate me.Timestamps00:00:00 — Liron’s New Intro00:04:15 — Debate Starts Here: Litigating FOOM00:06:18 — Defining the Recursive Feedback Loop00:15:05 — The Two-Part Doomer Thesis00:26:00 — When Does a Tool Become an Agent?00:44:02 — The Argument for Convergent Architecture00:46:20 — Mathematical Objections: Ergodicity and Eigenvalues01:03:46 — Bayeslord Enters: Why Speed Doesn’t Matter01:12:40 — Beff Jezos Enters: Physical Priors vs. Internet Data01:13:49 — The 5% Probability of Doom by GPT-501:20:09 — Chaos Theory and Prediction Limits01:27:56 — Algorithms vs. Hardware Constraints01:35:20 — Galactic Resources vs. Human Extermination01:54:13 — The Intelligence Bootstrapping Script Scenario02:02:13 — The 10-Megabyte AI Virus Debate02:11:54 — The Nuclear Analogy: Noise Canceling vs. Rubble02:37:39 — Controlling Intelligence: The Roman Empire Analogy02:44:53 — Real-World Latency and API Rate Limits03:03:11 — The Difficulty of the Off Button03:24:47 — Why Liron is “e/acc at Heart”Doom Debates’ Mission is to raise mainstream awareness of imminent extinction from AGI and build the social infrastructure for high-quality debate.Support the mission by subscribing to my Substack at DoomDebates.com and to youtube.com/@DoomDebates, or to really take things to the next level: Donate 🙏 Get full access to Doom Debates at lironshapira.substack.com/subscribe