"You Can’t Even Imagine the Scale of the Catastrophe" — Roman Yampolskiy on Superintelligence

Most AI researchers think alignment is a hard problem. Roman Yampolskiy argues it's an impossible one. Yampolskiy is a computer scientist at the University of Louisville and one of the longest-standing voices in AI safety research. For over a decade he has argued that controlling a system more intelligent than ourselves isn't a challenge the field will eventually solve — it's a structural limit we can't get past. His position sits at the far end of AI safety discourse, and most of the field disagrees with him. In this conversation we get into why he holds it, what he thinks the rest of the community is missing, and what the next decade looks like if he's right. What we cover: The impossibility argument: why he sees alignment not as a problem to solve, but as a wall. His timeline for ASI, and what — if anything — could meaningfully slow it down. Why he's skeptical of the alignment work being done at the frontier labs. What happens to economies, employment, and human agency in the years before ASI arrives. Whether any policy or technical move in 2026 actually buys time. If Yampolskiy is wrong, this is one researcher's pessimism. If he's right, almost nothing else we're doing matters.