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Eliezer Yudkowsky & Nate Soares
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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.
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.
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From If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies:
If any company or group, anywhere on the planet, builds an artificial superintelligence using anything remotely like current techniques, based on anything remotely like the present understanding of AI, then everyone, everywhere on Earth, will die.We do not mean that as hyperbole. We are not exaggerating for effect. We think that is the most direct extrapolation from the knowledge, evidence, and institutional conduct around artificial intelligence today. In this book, we lay out our case, in the hope of rallying enough key decision-makers and regular people to take AI seriously. The default outcome is lethal, but the situation is not hopeless; machine superintelligence doesn't exist yet, and its creation can yet be prevented.
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About the Authors
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Eliezer Yudkowsky is a founding researcher of the field of AI alignment and played a major role in shaping the public conversation about smarter-than-human AI. He appeared on Time magazine's 2023 list of the 100 Most Influential People In AI, was one of the twelve public figures featured in The New York Times's "Who's Who Behind the Dawn of the Modern Artificial Intelligence Movement," and has been discussed or interviewed in The New Yorker, Newsweek, Forbes, Wired, Bloomberg, The Atlantic, The Economist, The Washington Post, and many other venues.
Nate Soares
Nate Soares is the President of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. He has been working in the field for over a decade, after previous experience at Microsoft and Google. Soares is the author of a large body of technical and semi-technical writing on AI alignment, including foundational work on value learning, decision theory, and power-seeking incentives in smarter-than-human AIs.
For media inquiries, email [email protected]
