An Open Letter to Scott Alexander: The dangers of AI are real, but doomerism may be counterproductive. quillette.com/2026/09/26/an-…

Suleyman's arguments against the computational theory of sentience are compelling, but one needn't accept them completely to recognize the case for assigning no rights to AI at the expense of humans: we know that humans are sentient (because each of us knows that we ourselves are sentient, and others are made of the same stuff that makes us sentient, putting aside the logical possibility of solipsism), whereas the case for AI sentience is permanently untestable and for most people extremely implausible).

Contra @slatestarcodex, my arguments against AI doomerism have never been based on the claim that it is a cult. But the responses to my open letter (together with journalistic digging by NYT and WSJ) have made this more plausible. Foremost is the invocation of tenets in the doomer catechism (particularly "instrumental convergence," the belief that intelligent agents will inevitably seek power, resources, and self-preservation as subgoals) as if they were sacred truths rather than tendentious assumptions. (IC is in fact the not-so-intelligent pursuit of a goal heedless of side effects, and the reckless empowerment of AI, that we un-doomers note are deliberate, hence avoidable, design choices, not intrinsic constituents of intelligence). I feel as if I'm doubting the Second Coming and am being told, "That's naive and ignorant; you seem to be unaware that the Apostles' Creed dictates that it will happen."