If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies
Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All
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4.7 • 78 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER | The New Yorker's Best Books of 2025 | The Guardian's Best Books of 2025 | A 2025 Booklist Editors' Choice Pick
The scramble to create superhuman AI has put us on the path to extinction—but it’s not too late to change course, as two of the field’s earliest researchers explain in this clarion call for humanity.
"May prove to be the most important book of our time.”—Tim Urban, Wait But Why
In 2023, hundreds of AI luminaries signed an open letter warning that artificial intelligence poses a serious risk of human extinction. Since then, the AI race has only intensified. Companies and countries are rushing to build machines that will be smarter than any person. And the world is devastatingly unprepared for what would come next.
For decades, two signatories of that letter—Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares—have studied how smarter-than-human intelligences will think, behave, and pursue their objectives. Their research says that sufficiently smart AIs will develop goals of their own that put them in conflict with us—and that if it comes to conflict, an artificial superintelligence would crush us. The contest wouldn’t even be close.
How could a machine superintelligence wipe out our entire species? Why would it want to? Would it want anything at all? In this urgent book, Yudkowsky and Soares walk through the theory and the evidence, present one possible extinction scenario, and explain what it would take for humanity to survive.
The world is racing to build something truly new under the sun. And if anyone builds it, everyone dies.
“The best no-nonsense, simple explanation of the AI risk problem I've ever read.”—Yishan Wong, Former CEO of Reddit
Customer Reviews
Lucid, Excellent , and Worthwhile
Scary throughout and somewhat hopeful in the end… this book will get you active in working to end this mad dash to our end. Read it, weep and get active. Excellent.
A literal must-read
.. for every policymaker, politician, leader, journalist, researcher, and citizen. Clear and shocking without being alarmist or sensational, the authors present an accessible description of the ‘clear and present danger’ unlike any other our species has faced.
Everyone needs to read this, now.
This is, simply put, the most important issue of our species. We must be informed if we hope to survive. And we will only survive if we act on the information.