"If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies" Part 2: Can We Navigate the AI Transition?

Having established the diagnostic case in our first event, we turn now to Part III of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies — the chapters titled "A Cursed Problem," "An Alchemy, Not a Science," "I Don't Want to Be Alarmist," and "Shut It Down" — which wrestle with the question of what, if anything, can be done. The book resists easy optimism here, and that resistance creates productive space for our discussion.

We will use Part III as a launching point for exploring the broader question of civilizational navigation during a genuine phase transition. Here we draw more extensively on the Fifth Joint Point framework and on Brandon's 2024 UTOK Consilience Conference presentation Navigating the Fifth Joint Point through Enlightenment 2.0, which proposes that mindfulness of JII dynamics — justification, influence, and investment — at individual, group, and human-machine levels is an essential part of any adequate response to the challenges these technologies pose. The core argument is that Enlightenment 2.0 (a convergence of Western rational and Eastern contemplative traditions, applied not just individually but institutionally) represents the kind of civilizational wisdom upgrade that the moment demands.

Central questions for the evening include: Is the book's final prescription ("shut it down") politically or practically viable, and what would it actually require? If collective wisdom practice is part of the answer, is it sufficient against the hypercapitalist and hypermodern attractors currently driving AI development? And what would it look like to build the kinds of ecologies of practice — within organizations, institutions, and communities — that could keep us mindful of JII dynamics in our daily engagement with AI systems?

Complementary reading:

• Brian Christian's The Alignment Problem provides a more phenomenologically grounded treatment of misalignment than the Yudkowsky tradition, and is highly accessible.
• Shoshana Zuboff's work on The Age of Surveillance Capitalism gives depth to the political-economic forces driving the acceleration.
• Henriques' broader UTOK framing of the metacrisis offers the theoretical scaffolding within which all of these threads can be held together.