We made a map of the doom debate

This was produced as a part of the AI Safety Camp 2026 "Assumptions of the Doom Debate" project, led by Sean Herrington, who was also the lead author on this post. The other participants have equal contributions and are listed in no particular order. It is the first in a sequence we intend to publish over the coming weeks. TL;DR:We have created a breakdown of AI threat pathways, which can be accessed at https://lifeuniversesafety.com/doom-assumptions/index.html. This breakdown is in a tree format, and we allow people to set their own probabilities for each threat pathwayYou can use this to drill down into components of your P(Doom)You can analyse the sensitivity of your beliefs to changes in your assumptionsYou can compare your worldview to others’ and find cruxes automaticallyThe exercise of creating this sort of structure is valuable as a way to think about the future in a more general manner.IntroductionJust about everyone in the AI community seems to disagree about the risks of the technology. People disagree on the likelihood (Yann LeCun: <0.01% chance of extinction; Roman Yampolskiy: >99.99%), the worst threat (AI takeover vs concentration of power vs gradual disempowerment vs bioweapons vs …), the timelines and many other things. It seems like a shared framework would be helpful in this capacity.The main issue that comes with creating such a thing is that it requires everyone to agree on it. We call this requirement "worldview independence"; it significantly narrows down the space of options for the shape this framework can take. In particular, every part of the structure has to be a mathematical statement; those are some of the only things people can agree on. The structure we eventually ended on looks like this:Breaking it down:E: Event that we're worried about (Nuclear war, Bioweapon is released, Human extinction, etc)A: Set of worlds, e.g., "AI-driven worlds" = "credence that we live in a world where AI is making E more likely."¬A: Set of worlds which are n