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Foom & Doom 1: “Brain in a box in a basement” — LessWrong

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A decade or two ago, it was pretty common to discuss “foom & doom” scenarios, as advocated especially by Eliezer Yudkowsky. In a typical such scenario, a small team would build a system that would rocket (“foom”) from “unimpressive” to “Artificial Superintelligence” (ASI) within a very short time window (days, weeks, maybe months), involving very little compute (e.g. “brain in a box in a basement”), via recursive self-improvement. Absent some future technical breakthrough, the ASI would definitely be egregiously misaligned, without the slightest intrinsic interest in whether humans live or die. The ASI would be born into a world generally much like today’s, a world utterly unprepared for this new mega-mind. The extinction of humans (and every other species) would rapidly follow (“doom”). The ASI would then spend countless eons fulfilling its desires, desires which we humans would find to be bizarre and pointless. Now, I don’t endorse every word of that foom & doom scenario above—for ex

x Foom & Doom 1: “Brain in a box in a basement” — LessWrong AI Takeoff AI Timelines AI Curated 2025 Top Fifty: 14 % 302 Foom & Doom 1: “Brain in a box in a basement” by Steven Byrnes 23rd Jun 2025 AI Alignment Forum 35 min read 125 302 Ω 91 1.1 Series summary and Table of Contents This is a two-post series on AI “foom” (this post) and “doom” ( next post ). A decade or two ago, it was pretty common to discuss “foom & doom” scenarios, as advocated especially by Eliezer Yudkowsky. In a typical such scenario, a small team would build a system that would rocket (“foom”) from “unimpressive” to “Arti

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