If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies

The most important book I’ve read for years: I want to bring it to every political and corporate leader in the world and stand over them until they’ve read it. Yudkowsky and Soares, who have studied AI and its possible trajectories for decades, sound a loud trumpet call to humanity to awaken us as we sleepwalk into disaster. Their brilliant gift for analogy, metaphor and parable clarifies for the general reader the tangled complexities of AI engineering, cognition and neuroscience better than any book on the subject I’ve ever read, and I’ve waded through scores of them. We really must rub our eyes and wake the fuck up! – Stephen FryIf Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies may prove to be the most important book of our time. Yudkowsky and Soares believe we are nowhere near ready to make the transition to superintelligence safely, leaving us on the fast track to extinction. Through the use of parables and crystal-clear explainers, they convey their reasoning, in an urgent plea for us to save ourselves while we still can – Tim Urban, co-founder of Wait But WhyThe best no-nonsense, simple explanation of the AI risk problem I’ve ever read – Yishan Wong, former CEO of RedditSoares and Yudkowsky lay out, in plain and easy-to-follow terms, why our current path toward ever-more-powerful AIs is extremely dangerous – Emmett Shear, former interim CEO of OpenAI

Eliezer Yudkowsky (Author)

Eliezer Yudkowsky is the co-founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), and the founder of the field of AI alignment research. He is one of the most influential thinkers and writers on the topic of AI risk, and his TIME magazine op-ed of 2023 is largely responsible for sparking the current concern and discussion around the potential for human extinction.

Nate Soares (Author)

Nate Soares is the president of MIRI and one of its seniormost researchers. He has been working in the field of AI alignment for over a decade, after previous experience at Microsoft and Google.