Ep 248: AI and Philosophy of Science

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: It is simply assumed some version of "Bayesian reasoning" is how AI will "create" knowledge. This misconception permeates the 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: 00:00 Introduction 09:14 The Big Questions and the new Priesthoods 18:40 Nick Bostrom and Superintelligence 25:10 If anyone builds it, everyone dies and Yudkowsky. 33:32 Prophecy, Inevitability, Induction and Bayesianism. 41:42 Popper, Kuhn, Feyerabend and Lakatos. 49:40 AI researchers ignore The Philosophy of Science. 58:46 A new test for AGI from Sam Altman and David Deutsch? 1:03:35 Accelerationists, Doomers and “Everyone dies”. 1:10:21 Conclusions 1:15:35 Audience Questions

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Ep 248: AI and Philosophy of Science is an episode from ToKCast by Brett Hall.

This episode is 85:39 long.

This episode was published on Oct 13, 2025.

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