AI Has Become Profoundly WEIRD, But Is Anyone Noticing? With Sarah Hastings-Woodhouse

Sarah Hastings-Woodhouse is an AI safety writer and researcher who went down the AI doom rabbit hole in 2023 and never came back up. After a year as digital communications officer at the UK AI Security Institute (AISI), she’s gone independent to speak her mind unfiltered. Read Sarah’s Substack: https://longerramblings.substack.com Join PauseAI UK’s March Against AI Extinction in London on November 21: https://luma.com/pauseai-nov26 Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDbHCKwuMrk Timestamps 00:00:00 — Cold Open 00:00:41 — Introducing Sarah Hastings-Woodhouse 00:02:06 — How a Humanities Grad Got AGI-Pilled 00:08:40 — Whose Timelines Do You Trust? 00:11:32 — Joining the UK AI Security Institute 00:15:47 — What AISI Actually Does 00:19:23 — Verifying Anthropic’s Mythos Claims 00:21:59 — Leaving Government to Speak Freely 00:23:22 — What’s Your P(Doom)?™ 00:25:37 — Yudkowsky, EA, and Keeping Your Identity Small 00:32:08 — Is Anthropic Doing Enough to Call for a Slowdown? 00:35:56 — Can You Do AI Safety from Second Place? 00:39:20 — Hugging Face and the Vibe Shift 00:44:02 — Is Everything Weird Yet? 00:48:27 — Prevent Recursive Self-Improvement, Don’t Ban It 00:52:28 — Build the Speed Dial, Not the Pause Button 00:56:54 — Was Calling for a Pause in 2023 a Mistake? 01:01:22 — Turning Up the Fear Dial 01:04:23 — Donation Drive 01:05:11 — PauseAI UK’s March Against AI Extinction Links SARAH HASTINGS-WOODHOUSE Sarah’s Substack Sarah on X (@littIeramblings) Consistently Candid — Sarah’s podcast “What is recursive self-improvement and what would it mean to ban it?” — Sarah’s RSI post (Oct 1, 2026) “Is everything weird yet?” (Aug 30, 2026) “What the hell just happened?” — on AI safety’s viral moment (Sep 18, 2026) “We have been warned” — the Hugging Face hack as a warning shot (Jul 27, 2026) “The pause-shaped hole in ‘Policy on the AI Exponential’” — is Anthropic doing enough to call for a slowdown? (Jun 19, 2026) Sarah’s 2023 thread on stumbling into the world of AI doom (“I’m angry because I love the world”) “The other night I successfully AGI-pilled a man on a first date” “Welcome, and also I’m sorry” — Sarah’s note to AI safety newcomers (Sep 11, 2026) “‘We’re all f*cked and it’s totally hopeless’ is almost as bad of a meme to be spreading” (Feb 12, 2025) REFERENCED IN THE EPISODE “Our evaluation of Claude Mythos Preview’s cyber capabilities” — AISI (Apr 13, 2026) AISI Frontier AI Trends Report (Dec 2025) “The levers of political persuasion with conversational AI” — AISI Human Influence team US Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) — NIST “Geoffrey Hinton tells us why he’s now scared of the tech he helped build” — MIT Technology Review (May 2023) “We’re All Gonna Die with Eliezer Yudkowsky” — Bankless (2023) “GPT-2 As Step Toward General Intelligence” — Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex (Feb 2019) “AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalities” — Eliezer Yudkowsky “Keep Your Identity Small” — Paul Graham Pacing the Frontier — the open letter signed by 1,300+ frontier lab employees “You can’t do safety from second place” — Sarah Heck, Anthropic’s head of public policy (Sep 29, 2026) Ezra Klein’s op-ed calling for a ban on recursive self-improvement — The New York Times (Sep 20, 2026) “Banning self-recursive improvement in AI models?” — Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution (Sep 22, 2026) PauseAI UK March Against AI Extinction — PauseAI UK, London, November 21, 2026 PAST DOOM DEBATES EPISODES MENTIONED Top Economist Sees AI Doom Coming — Dr. Peter Berezin, BCA Research Will AI Kill Everyone by 2050? Debate with Dr. Casey Hart (Ontology Explained) DOOM DEBATES Donate to Doom Debates Join the Doom Debates Discord Transcript, links, and show notes: https://doomdebates.com/p/ai-has-become-profoundly-weird 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