Destiny

Steven Kenneth Bonnell II (born 1988), known as Destiny, effectively invented political debate streaming — a format of marathon, adversarial argument that he has run since the early 2010s across Twitch, YouTube, and Kick. His willingness to platform and contest fringe positions made him a natural entrant into the AI-existential-risk debate.

Arguing against doom

At the Manifest prediction-market conference in Berkeley in September 2023, Bonnell debated Eliezer Yudkowsky, the most prominent advocate of the view that superhuman AI likely kills everyone. Bonnell took the skeptical side: he grants that AI capabilities are real and accelerating, but rejects the chain of assumptions that runs from capability to extinction. He returned to the argument on the Doom Debates podcast in 2025, opening with a p(doom) of “less than one percent in the next hundred years.”

His skepticism is empirical rather than dismissive — he identifies AI-powered social engineering as the most plausible near-term danger, puts meaningful odds on a warning-shot incident within a decade, and admits “there could be a story that breaks tomorrow” that changes his mind; by the end of the Doom Debates exchange he nudged his twenty-year estimate up to five percent. He also concedes his optimism is partly temperamental: “I have to be optimistic about the outcome of the human race because I’m human.” Meanwhile he treats AI as a normal tool of the trade, a research and production aid for a one-man media operation.