Blueprint for AI Armageddon: Josh Clymer Imagines AI Takeover, from the Audio Tokens Podcast

**Nathan Labenz** (0:00)
Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. This is Nathan's AI clone, powered by ElevenLabs. Today, we're presenting an AI narrated version of Joshua Clymer's How AI Might Take Over in Two Years, wrapped by an edited version of Josh's recent appearance on the Audio Tokens Podcast with Lukas Peterson. Josh wrote this story in a personal capacity, but it's worth noting that by day he works as a technical AI safety researcher at Redwood Research, which I increasingly see as one of the most important independent AI safety organizations in the world today. Ryan Greenblatt, author of the Alignment Faking Paper, as you may recall from our recent episode with him, is also at Redwood Research, and he and CEO Buck Schlageris have led the development of a really important AI control research agenda over the last year and a half, which I probably haven't covered as much as I should have, particularly considering all the higher order bad behaviors we've seen from the latest generation of models. While this story is a nightmare scenario, not the scenario Josh thinks most likely, it is very much grounded in current AI industry realities and trends. Despite all the reward hacking, opaque decision making, and other bad behavior it produces, scaled up reinforcement learning is the main driver of capabilities advances. The fictional U3 model begins to change how open-minded technical staff work in the first half of 2025, anticipating the more recently published O3 system card, which reported that O3 can complete more than 40% of pull requests recently produced by open AI research engineers. Eventually models become natively omni-modal in a way that I've sketched out on multiple previous episodes. Josh writes that a later version of U3 can viscerally feel the bend of a protein and the rate of diffusion across a membrane. These objects are as intuitive to it as wrenches and bolts are to a car mechanic. And despite an eerie feeling that the world is spinning so quickly, and that perhaps the descendants of this new creature would not be so docile, intensifying competition, both domestic and international, leaves little time to catch one's breath and take stock of the situation, and everyone races ahead. All gas, no break.
After the story, which I won't spoil for you, you'll have a chance to hear Josh and Lucas unpack the scenario and explore Josh's thinking on misalignment risks, the competitive landscape between AI labs, the role of government regulation, and what safety measures might actually work. They also discuss Josh's personal response to these concerns, including his decision to purchase a bioshelter for his family. As always, if you're finding value in the show, please share it with friends, review us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or just drop a comment on YouTube. If you have any feedback, you can contact us via our website, cognitiverevolution.ai, or by direct message on your favorite social platform. Keep in mind that I'll be speaking at three major AI events over the next few months. Imagine AI Live, May 28th to 30th in Las Vegas, the Adapta Summit, August 12th to 13th in São Paulo, Brazil, and the Enterprise Tech Leadership Summit, September 23rd to 25th in Las Vegas. Please get in touch if you'll be at any of these events. Finally, I'm excited to welcome ElevenLabs as our newest sponsor. Throughout this episode, you'll experience several ElevenLabs voices. For Josh's introduction to the story, plus an interjection about halfway through, we cloned Josh's voice with ElevenLabs' Instant Voice Clone feature, which starts at just $5 per month. For the bulk of the story, we used an original AI voice created with their Voice Design feature. And I'm speaking to you right now through a professional voice clone, which we started using on occasion, long before ElevenLabs became a sponsor. It really is amazing what you can do with AI voice technology these days, not just in content like this, but increasingly in the form of customer service and other agents too. With that, here is a disturbingly plausible Nightmare AI Scenario, which hopefully, with a strong effort and some good luck, will forever remain fantastical fiction. By Joshua Clymer, with additional discussion from the Audio Tokens Podcast, with Lukas Peterson.

**Lukas Peterson** (4:31)
Nice to have you here, Josh. It's a very particular situation we are at the moment. I read your post from a couple of days ago.
I wouldn't say I enjoyed it, maybe it was well-written. It was fascinating. Do you want to just give the CLDR of what the essay was about, just super quickly, and maybe why you wrote it?

**Joshua Clymer** (4:51)
Yeah. So the story is basically about the scenarios that keep me up at night. So I'm an AI technical researcher, technical safety researcher. So my day job is to prevent AI from doing terrible things, like heard people talk about AI potentially taking over in the future, or more near-term risks, like AI enabling cyber or bioterrorism, that kind of thing. My job is to prevent those risks, and the risks that spook me the most are the ones that could be extremely devastating and are also disturbingly plausible, and I think AI Takeover is in that category. But a lot of people hear AI Takeover and they think, wow, that sounds insane. As anybody ever taken over, and that's people's immediate gut reaction, and I think that's just, it's false. And I think very plausibly, something like AI Takeover could happen as early as in the next two years. So I wrote a story to explain to people how this could happen, to give them some food for their imagination, because I think people don't really believe something could happen until they can see it in their mind's eye. And I've been thinking for a while about how these kinds of scenarios could occur. And so I thought it would be valuable to share those images and those scenarios.