ToKCast
ToKCast
Brett Hall
Ep 248: AI and Philosophy of Science
1 hour 25 minutes Posted Oct 13, 2025 at 8:00 pm.
Introduction
The Big Questions and the new Priesthoods
Nick Bostrom and Superintelligence
If anyone builds it, everyone dies and Yudkowsky.
Prophecy, Inevitability, Induction and Bayesianism.
Popper, Kuhn, Feyerabend and Lakatos.
AI researchers ignore The Philosophy of Science.
A new test for AGI from Sam Altman and David Deutsch?
Accelerationists, Doomers and “Everyone dies”.
Conclusions
Audience Questions
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Show notes
This is the extended "director's cut" of a talk delivered for "RatFest 2025" (next year to be "Conjecture Con"). This also serves as a supplement to my "Doom Debates" interview which can be found here: https://youtu.be/koubXR0YL4A?si=483M6SPOKwbQYmzb
It is simply assumed some version of "Bayesian reasoning" is how AI will "create" knowledge. This misconception permeates the https://ai-2027.com paper, as well as Bostrom and Yudkowsky's work on this, as well as that of every other AI "Doomer" and even on the other extreme the so-called "AI-Accelerationists". All of that indicates a deep misconception about how new explanations are generated which comes from a deep misconception about how science works because almost no one in the field of AI seems to think the *philosophy of* science is even relevant. I explain what has gone wrong: