Slang & Culture
p(doom)
Someone’s stated probability that advanced AI ends in catastrophe for humanity, written like a math expression: “my p(doom) is 10%.” It is used as shorthand in AI-safety and lab circles, and treating it as a measurement is the mistake. Nobody has a formula for it — the number is a personal judgment dressed in notation, which is why two equally informed researchers give figures that differ by a factor of fifty and neither can be checked. Useful as a way of saying how worried a person is; useless as evidence about the world.
Origin · no single documented coiner
No documented coiner. The notation comes from probability writing (“p(x)” for the probability of x) and spread through LessWrong and Effective Altruism forums, then into lab and Twitter culture, becoming mainstream around 2022–2023. Writer Webb Wright’s Gizmodo piece “P(doom) Is Just Vibes Masquerading as Science” is the clearest account of why the figures are not measurements, quoting the plain fact that no one at the frontier labs has a mathematical method for producing them.