Book Club: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies

Join us as we discuss If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares.

Optional extra reading

Quintin Pope's objections: https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/wAczufCpMdaamF9fy/my-objections-to-we-re-all-gonna-die-with-eliezer-yudkowsky

Alex Turner's objections: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yQSmcfN4kA7rATHGK/many-arguments-for-ai-x-risk-are-wrong

Alex Turner’s dissertation on avoiding power-seeking AI: https://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/concern/graduate_thesis_or_dissertations/0r967b839?locale=en

“AGI is impossible” book from a philosopher: https://www.amazon.com/Machines-Will-Never-Rule-World/dp/1032309938
(My critical review of that book: https://thegreymatter.substack.com/p/book-review-why-machines-will-never)

Ben Goertzel objections:
https://bengoertzel.substack.com/p/why-everyone-dies-gets-agi-all-wrong

ACX review (generally positive about the book): https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-if-anyone-builds-it-everyone

Comments from Scott Aaronson (generally positive about the book): https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8901

Normie criticism: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2495333-no-ai-isnt-going-to-kill-us-all-despite-what-this-new-book-says/

Book Blurb:
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.