ODC WEBINAR
Why They Disagree: Decoding Differences in Opinions about AI Risk on the Lex Fridman Podcast
Özgecan Koçak (Emory)
Nghi Truong (Sasin School of Management)
Phanish Puranam (INSEAD)
--- 29 th Jan. 2026, Thursday at 9am EST/3pm CET ---
The emergence of transformative technologies often surfaces deep societal divisions, nowhere more evident than in contemporary debates about artificial intelligence (AI). A striking feature of these divisions is that they persist despite shared interests in ensuring that AI benefits humanity and avoiding catastrophic outcomes. This paper analyzes contemporary debates about AI risk, parsing the differences between the “doomer” and “boomer” perspectives into definitional, factual, causal, and moral premises to identify key points of contention. We find that differences in perspectives about existential risk (“X-risk”) arise fundamentally from differences in causal premises about design vs. emergence in complex systems, while differences in perspectives about employment risks (“E-risks”) pertain to different causal premises about the applicability of past theories (evolution) vs their inapplicability (revolution). Disagreements about these two forms of AI risk appear to share two properties: neither involves significant disagreements on moral values and both can be described in terms of differing views on the extent of boundedness of human rationality. Our approach to analyzing reasoning chains at scale, using an ensemble of LLMs to parse textual data, can be applied to identify key points of contention in debates about risk to the public in any arena.
About the Speakers:
Özgecan Koçak is associate professor of Organization & Management at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School. She received her PhD from Graduate School of Business, Stanford University. Her research focuses on how shared understandings (such as communication codes, categorization systems, and identity schema) develop and shape behavior in organizations and markets. She serves on the board of Organization Design Community and on the editorial review boards of Management Science, Journal of Organization Design, and Organization Science.
Nghi Truong is a core faculty member at Sasin School of Management, Chulalongkorn University. Her research lies at the intersection of AI, behavioral science, and network theory. Her current projects examine how AI reshapes organizational structures, how to effectively measure and improve AI literacy among professionals, and how large language models can be used to analyze discourse and team dynamics. Prior to joining Sasin, she was a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn, Germany.
Last date to Register is 28th January 2026, 9 am EST
Organization Design Community (ODC)
