If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies (Reading group: session 2)

The scramble to create superhuman AI has put us on the path to extinction—but it’s not too late to change course, as Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares explain in the new book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All.

Reading this book and want to share your thoughts? Want to read this book but need a deadline to get motivated? This reading group welcomes everyone, whether you're deeply familiar with AI safety or completely new to the topic. No registration required—just read (or skim) the assigned chapters and join us for thoughtful discussion over tea.

Format: Three 90-minute sessions. Attend all or just the ones that interest you.

For session 2, we’re reading Part II: One extinction scenario (chapters 7-9). We’ll discuss the scenario laid out and compare it with other narratives we’ve encountered in this field (such as the AI 2027 study).

Amazon link: https://a.co/d/iNU32DG

Book blurb:
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.

Dates:
Session 1: Tue 21 oct, 18.00 (chapters 1 - 6)
Session 2: Tue 4 nov, 18.00 (chapters 7 - 9)
Session 3: Tue 18 nov, 18.00 (chapters 10 - 14)