Word.ws English Dictionary

p(doom)

/piː duːm/

p(doom) noun: the probability of existentially catastrophic outcomes (doom) as a result of misaligned artificial intelligence, especially one's personal estimate for such an outcome, usually given as a percentage value.

Noun (1)

p(doom) (countable and uncountable, plural p(doom)s)

  1. (artificial intelligence) The probability of existentially catastrophic outcomes (doom) as a result of misaligned artificial intelligence, especially one's personal estimate for such an outcome, usually given as a percentage value.
    • My p(doom) is 15%.
    • I’ve been to two tech events this year where a stranger has asked for my p(doom) as casually as if they were asking for directions to the bathroom.2023 December 6, Kevin Roose, “Silicon Valley Confronts a Grim New A.I. Metric”, in The New York Times, →ISSN, archived from the original on 07 Dec 2023

Noun (2) capitalized: P(doom)

P(doom) (countable and uncountable, plural P(doom)s)

  1. Alternative letter-case form of p(doom).
    • For some experts, their P(doom) is AI taking over a power grid. For others, their P(doom) is AI leading to mass job loss. Others say their (P)doom^([sic]) is already happening now - right? - and it's AI supercharging the harms of social media, including the spread of misinformation.2023 May 30, Bobby Allyn, “Mitigating the risk of AI should be a global priority, open letter says”, in NPR

Examples of p(doom) in a sentence

  • At gatherings like these, it’s not uncommon to hear someone strike up a conversation by asking, “What are your timelines?” or "What's your p(doom)?”2024 March 18, Andrew Marantz, “О.К., Doomer”, in The New Yorker, page 42:
  • And the cartoonish connotations are apt: just like such fictional battles, p(doom) estimates are based in fantasy rather than data or empirical fact.2025, Emily M. Bender, Alex Hanna, “An Introduction to AI Hype”, in The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We...

Forms of p(doom)

pluralp(doom)s
alternative formdoom
alternative formP(doom)
pluralP(doom)s

Origin of p(doom)

Mathematical notation for the probability (p) of an event (more formally written as P(doom)). Originated on the LessWrong message board around 2010, later popularized by Eliezer Yudkowsky and other AI safety researchers.

Questions about p(doom)

What does p(doom) mean?
P(doom) means the probability of existentially catastrophic outcomes (doom) as a result of misaligned artificial intelligence, especially one's personal estimate for such an outcome, usually given as a percentage value.
How do you use p(doom) in a sentence?
At gatherings like these, it’s not uncommon to hear someone strike up a conversation by asking, “What are your timelines?” or "What's your p(doom)?”
What part of speech is p(doom)?
P(doom) is a noun.
How do you pronounce p(doom)?
P(doom) is pronounced /piː duːm/.
What is the plural of p(doom)?
The plural of p(doom) is p(doom)s.

Words near p(doom) in the dictionary

  1. P'u-t'ien
  2. p'u-t'ung-hua
  3. P'u-tung
  4. P'u-yang
  5. P'urhépecha
  6. p(doom)
  7. p**do
  8. p**dophile
  9. p**s
  10. p**sed
  11. p**ses

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: p(doom) (page history and authors); P(doom) (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “p(doom).” Word.ws, https://word.ws/p(doom). Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.