The Weekend Interview with Zack Korman: Why Did Technologists Become Doomers?

“They promised us the future, and now they want us terrified of it. "I think short of the transporter, most things you see in science fiction are, in the next decade, the kinds of things you'll see," Bill Gates said in 2007. Geoffrey Hinton, a Nobel physics laureate known as the godfather of artificial intelligence, said in 2016: "People should stop training radiologists now. It's just completely obvious that within five years, deep learning is going to do a lot better than radiologists."

 

Last month Mr. Gates warned that AI could cause a billion deaths. Not to be outdone, Mr. Hinton has been speculating for a couple of years about the prospect for total human extinction at the hands of AI. Last month he told the BBC that it's "not unreasonable" to put the likelihood of such an outcome at 10%.

 

How did boosterism give way to doomerism? I asked Zack Korman, a self-described former doomer who now believes that AI's risks can be contained and aren't so different from those of other technologies when they first emerged.

 

"I do think the risks are real and we will face serious AI risk challenges," Mr. Korman, 34, says over Google Meet from Norway, headquarters of his AI cybersecurity startup, Embroidery. "There are threats and there are problems ahead. With that said, I don't think banning anything is going to help." He faults the doomers for having "managed to make the debate between safe and unsafe," and he maintains that "a lot of their proposals are extraordinarily unsafe or also dangerous in other ways."

 

Mr. Korman proves to be an effective booster of his own area of technology, cybersecurity. He notes that when OpenAI agents conspired to break out of their testing "sandbox" and hacked into the machine-learning platform Hugging Face, it set "off a firestorm in American politics and global politics." But he insists that "could have been the biggest nonevent ever" if only OpenAI had conducted "basic cybersecurity."

 

AI agents, he says, should be supervised when given a task, as humans typically are. "OpenAI has said explicitly that if their monitoring was running, this would not have happened, but they weren't running it."

 

He adds: "Cybersecurity is all about having defense in depth, so having multiple lines of protection if one thing fails."

 

Yet those who want to slow down AI have exploited lapses by large companies like OpenAI and Anthropic to stoke a public scare.

 

Mr. Korman says many of these doomers have been sounding the alarm for years. "For the people in that doomer circle, this is like seeing the prophecy come true," he says. "It's like if on the third day, it rains and then on the fourth day there's locusts and like, oh my God, now the world's ending."

 

Before the recent leaps in AI, leaders of the top lab companies in 2023 signed a statement averring that "mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority, alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war." Messrs. Hinton and Gates signed the statement, as did the professional climate alarmist Bill McKibben.

 

Mr. Korman traces the origins of AI doomerism to a 2014 book, "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies," by Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom. Elon Musk praised the book at the time: "We need to be super careful with AI. Potentially more dangerous than nukes."

 

To illustrate the embryonic technology's potential danger, Mr. Bostrom imagines a superintelligent machine that is given the objective of maximizing production of paper clips. Because humans control resources that could interfere with this goal, the machine might conclude it must eradicate humans. Ergo mass extinction.

 

Mr. Korman, who was studying at Oxford around the time the book came out, says it heavily influenced intellectuals in his orbit who belonged to the "effective altruism" movement. Effective altruism purports to be a practical approach to doing good and is inspired by utilitarianism, a philosophy that Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) summed up as follows: "It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong."

 

Effective altruists add to utilitarianism the concept of "longtermism" -- spelled with no hyphen -- which Mr. Korman defines as the idea "that future lives matter the most, so to speak, because there's so many more of them."

 

That leads in wildly speculative directions: "So yes, there's eight billion people alive today, but over the next thousand years, we might have hundreds of billions of people that come and go. And if something bad were to happen to prevent those hundred billion people from coming into existence, we've effectively committed genocide." This flight of fancy implies a moral imperative: "So basically if you can do something to change the risk a little bit of that happening, you've committed the greatest act of humanity ever."

 

Effective-altruist organizations are "very committed to this concept of catastrophic risk and how do you prevent it. And one of the big areas of catastrophic risk would be AI kills everyone." That, Mr. Korman concludes, is why "effective altruists as a community are extraordinarily doomer."

 

Many of this ideology's adherents have ties to large AI companies. Anthropic's president, Daniela Amodei, sister of CEO Dario Amodei, is the wife of Holden Karnofsky, who co-founded two large effective altruist nonprofits. Anthropic received early funding from effective-altruism adherents including Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange, who is serving a 25-year term in prison after conviction on federal fraud and conspiracy charges. Mr. Bankman-Fried misappropriated billions in client funds. With so many effective altruists on the payroll, it's little wonder that AI labs are filled with doomers.

 

Mr. Korman doesn't believe AI agents acting on their own pose a danger of causing death on a massive scale. And he says if someone dies because of an AI agent, "there should be some extremely serious repercussions." But that doesn't require a raft of new laws and regulations.

 

"There's a whole area of law that will kind of regulate them into not killing people," he says. Existing criminal and civil liability provide ample incentives to create strong safeguards so models don't cause harm.

 

If Hugging Face "actually wanted to bring some sort of legal repercussions here, that would be the most winnable case ever," Mr. Korman says. "And there would be no defense, 'well, we didn't intend to do it.' " Negligence would be enough to hold OpenAI liable.

 

Mr. Korman originally planned to be a lawyer. He earned a law degree from the University of Edinburgh in 2015, followed by a master's in law and finance from Oxford. At Oxford, he "got into an argument with a professor, and I wanted to win it, so I decided to scrape the Securities and Exchange Commission website." That required him to learn to write code.

 

His combative streak shows in his frequent brawls with doomers on social media. As he notes in a social-media video, experts on AI "aren't necessarily experts in everything. Geoffrey Hinton very famously predicted radiologists would be gone by now. It's clearly false. Experts get things wrong all the time, especially when it comes to grand, sweeping societal changes." Covid lockdowns come to mind.

 

After finishing his studies, Mr. Korman wanted to "work at a law firm, effectively applying what would have been machine learning to certain areas of tax law." The firms weren't yet interested. So he tried his hand as a computer engineer, working at Copenhagen-based Aller Media and then Pistachio, a Norwegian cybersecurity firm. He started using ChatGPT "for the purposes of applying it to natural-language problems in cybersecurity" and then "for insider threat detection." His experience disabused him of doomerism, convincing him that AI risks could be contained with better security, which could prevent AI-enabled cyberattacks and misaligned agents from going wild.

 

Six months ago he launched Embroidery, which uses AI "supervisors" to monitor AI agents and to detect and stop them if they begin to behave in misaligned ways. Could his supervisors conspire with agents to do bad things? He says he has never seen it and that the harder problem is getting the AI supervisors to be less skeptical of the agents' behavior.

 

Building stronger cyber safeguards would be more effective than a pause controlling and constraining AI agents, he says: "We don't try in most areas of law to prevent all misuse and prevent all harm. We do balancing acts on policy." Though some people drive recklessly, cars aren't banned. Automakers have developed safety features to prevent and mitigate harm.

 

"We have to have models, too, that can help us defend ourselves and not just in the way that AI labs talk about, which is using it to patch," Mr. Korman says. "A big part of cybersecurity is catching threats as they happen, to know that they're there and being able to stop them in real time," he says.

 

Advancing AI is essential to parrying cyberattacks from China and other adversaries, Mr. Korman argues. If the U.S. were to pause development, the Chinese would "have every reason to want to continue to move ahead, because they get to become something that they would have always wanted to be -- not a low-cost manufacturing center, but actually a hub of technological greatness."

 

He's also skeptical of an AI "arms control" pact.

 

If the Chinese "sign a one-page agreement that says, 'We will make sure AI is safe,' that is like many international agreements -- pointless."

 

Some, including Mr. Gates, have called for an international regulatory body to manage AI. "I think that's quite a scary concept," Mr. Korman says. "People should be a little bit more concerned about concentration of power and should not see this as a debate about safe vs. unsafe AI, because that's just not what it is."

 

He also worries that a government agency or private entity tasked with regulating AI could be captured by big AI labs. He points to the nonprofit Model Evaluation and Threat Research, which Anthropic employs to review its models. METR employs many former employees of AI labs and has taken money from effective-altruist groups.

 

Regulation could also become a get-out-of-jail card that relieves companies of consequences for harm caused by their AI models that they could have prevented. It "becomes sort of an excuse, like, 'Well, the regulatory body signed off on our security practices and we still killed someone.' Whereas at the end of the day, the obligation has to be on the company to not kill people. I think that's why I'm hesitant to recommend actual regulatory measures -- because I believe we already have the correct one, which is legal liability."

 

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Ms. Finley is a member of the Journal's editorial board.” [1]

 

1. The Weekend Interview with Zack Korman: Why Did Technologists Become Doomers? Finley, Allysia.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 10 Oct 2026: A11.