There’s a 50% Chance AI Kills Us by 2050

**Liron Shapira** (0:00)
AI is the most powerful thing ever. It's going to be the best thing that's ever happened to the economy until it disconnects, it severs the link where it listens to humans.
And then things are going to go to hell.

**LG** (0:11)
What's up, everybody? It's LG Dusead here. Welcome to Milk Road AI, the daily AI show that can't wait to say, I told you so when the robots come in the middle of the night to harvest our organs, and the best we can do is stream it live on X. Today is July 27th, 2026, recording on the 22nd. Listen, guys, this podcast that we do is like 99% optimistic about AI. We're all investors here and we spend most of our time analyzing the market with the long-term view that all of this AI build out is not just good, but necessary.
My guest today not only takes the opposite view, he actually runs a very popular podcast focused solely on how AI will mark the end of humanity and just how quickly and realistically that could happen. Liron Shapira, host and founder of Doom Debates, is with us today. A reminder that our podcast is free. It would not be possible without our partners at Securitize, the regulated rails for tokenization, and BitGet, Stocks 2 with real liquidity, real dividends. Keep an ear out later in the show for a message about them. Let's get them out here. Liron, what's up, man? Welcome to the show.

**Liron Shapira** (1:11)
What's up, LG? Thanks for letting me enter your echo chamber here for a little dose of AI realism.

**LG** (1:20)
Oh, man. It totally is an echo chamber, and I will say that one of my favorite things online these days is, on X, is that people say that there's a ton of people out there walking around, no idea what's going on in AI, no idea what's going on in the market, no idea what's going on in politics, and that those people live in bliss, and I feel like you probably agree with that.

**Liron Shapira** (1:38)
Oh, boy. Yeah.
The extent of what's happening right now, even if you just have the economic lens, there's a huge bull thesis that I think you guys explore, and then there's my thesis, which is AI Doom. But the scale of what's happening, this is like a billion-year scale event, the creation of a new intelligence, and the fact that people are going about their lives and just tuning it out, right? Deciding that it's not an area they need to pay attention to. It's like incredibly ironic and insane.

**LG** (2:06)
Okay. Let's start from the beginning, man, because I feel like we have a lot to say, and you're going to teach us a lot about some of those perspectives. Tell me, though, what exactly is Doom Debates? Like, what do you guys talk about? Who do you talk to?

**Liron Shapira** (2:17)
Doom Debates is a mission-focused show. I personally think that what I call my P Doom, my probability that we're all doomed very soon, that humanity is literally going to go extinct, I'm afraid it's pretty high because of super-intelligent AI on the horizon coming soon. So I have a high P Doom, and the point of Doom Debates is to debate that. With all the world's top intellectuals, people like Vitalik Buterin, Gary Marcus, former employees from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, sharing their unvarnished views, and people are all over the map. They're saying, oh, yeah, my P Doom is higher than yours, Liron, my P Doom is 85%.
And then some of them, like famously Yann LeCun, is like, oh, well, my P Doom is way less than 0.01%. And I'm like, hmm, don't you think we need to hash this out, what the P Doom really is? Because I think government policy should be very different if it's 0.01% versus 50%. And Doom Debates is the forum to do that.

**LG** (3:11)
So what is a P Doom?

**Liron Shapira** (3:12)
So probability of Doom, just like in investing, right? You wanna do an expected value calculation, so you need to know the probability of various events. Well, in this case, it's really important to put a rough probability on whether we are all literally going to go extinct soon.
And my own probability is 50%.
So I literally think roughly by the year 2050, it's about an even coin flip whether you and I and our descendants are going to be around in any way, shape or form.

**LG** (3:39)
Okay. So how do I calculate my P Doom? Or how can we do this like live on the show? I feel like before I ask you more questions, I need to know where I stand on the scale.