Rob Bensinger
A huge announcement today: Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares have written a book attempting to raise the alarm about superintelligent AI for the widest possible audience —
If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.
The book comes out this September 16, and preorders start today.
This is Nate and Eliezer’s first mass-market book, and advance copies have been getting an extremely positive reception. E.g.:
“The most important book I’ve read for years: I want to bring it to every political and corporate leader in the world and stand over them until they’ve read it. Yudkowsky and Soares, who have studied AI and its possible trajectories for decades, sound a loud trumpet call to humanity to awaken us as we sleepwalk into disaster. We really must rub our eyes and wake the **** up!” —Stephen Fry
“If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies may prove to be the most important book of our time. Yudkowsky and Soares believe we are nowhere near ready to make the transition to superintelligence safely, leaving us on the fast track to extinction. Through the use of parables and crystal-clear explainers, they convey their reasoning, in an urgent plea for us to save ourselves while we still can.” —Tim Urban, Wait But Why
With this book, Nate and Eliezer are trying to bring this issue fully into the mainstream. Commenting on the book push, Eliezer says:
And this is — not quite MIRI’s last desperate hope — but probably the best of the desperate hopes remaining that you can do anything about today: that this issue becomes something that people can talk about, and humanity decides not to die.
Our big ask for you is: If you have any way to help this book do shockingly, absurdly well— in ways that prompt a serious and sober response from the world — then now is the time.
Concretely:
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Making this book a bestseller would have a huge impact, and pre-orders count as “first-week sales”, which determines placement on the bestseller list, which is a major factor in how many people are likely to read the book.
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Pre-orders between now and mid-June (and through mid-July, to a lesser extent) affect how large the book’s initial print run will be, which we also expect to have a significant impact on sales.
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You can pre-order the book here.
From the perspective of the MIRI staff I’ve spoken with, the two proximate reasons humanity is currently racing to destroy itself with AI are that (1) not enough people are aware of the danger, and (2) some of the people aware of the danger are worried about looking silly by speaking out about it.
These are completely insane reasons for the human experiment to end.
Humanity is fully capable of just not building catastrophically dangerous technologies. Indeed, the more typical case is that people are too cautious around new technologies.
If public figures woke up tomorrow and just started talking about this issue, that would make this whole topic stop feeling like it has to be discussed in hushed tones.
We don’t know of a better solution than to plainly state the situation, as best we understand it, to as many people as possible; and to hope that informing enough people, and emboldening enough others to speak up, can change the course we’re all on.
To that end:
Over the last twenty years, MIRI has built up a large, extremely talented, extremely driven community of friends and allies. We don’t think many authors have a community that’s capable of anything remotely like what this community can do when we put our minds to it.
If you would like to help, we humbly ask you to shock the world with preorders — and with other clever ideas to cause this book to do explosively well.
If, between now and September 16, we reach 10k in preorders, we’re likely to reach the bestseller list.
If we reach 20k, we’re almost certain to make the bestseller list.
At 50k in preorders, we would be blowing the publishing industry’s mind and would be the talk of the town.
We would very much like to blow people’s minds here. We think it’s possible, and every single unique / nonbulk purchase helps — especially up to the critical “we made the bestseller list” threshold.
(“Nonbulk” matters; bulk orders don’t help. Recommending the book to friends, family, and strangers helps. Buying some books to gift to friends is great. Crazy schemes to cause the book to spread virally are excellent.)
Beyond that, many other actions might be useful, directly or indirectly. E.g., if you’re friends with someone famous (or someone with a lot of political or scientific clout) who might be able to provide a book blub, get in touch and we might be able to pass along an advance copy of the book.
Though other obstacles exist, the first major obstacle that lies between us and a flourishing future is that humanity needs to take this problem seriously and decide to change course. That process has begun, but slowly; and time is plausibly short, though nobody knows exactly how short.
So this is us calling on all of you to fight with us. Given the early reception of the book, we think there’s a chance that it makes a big splash, and that it thrusts this conversation into the mainstream, where humanity can react and stop the suicide race.
If you share the sense that humanity needs to change course, and agree that the book could catalyze that change, we would be honored by your help.
