If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies
The Case Against Superintelligent AI
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If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies
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About this listen
Brought to you by Penguin.
AI is the greatest threat to our existence that we have ever faced.
The scramble to create superhuman AI has put us on the path to extinction – but it's not too late to change course. Two pioneering researchers in the field, Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, explain why artificial superintelligence would be a global suicide bomb and call for an immediate halt to its development.
The technology may be complex, but the facts are simple: companies and countries are in a race to build machines that will be smarter than any person, and the world is devastatingly unprepared for what will come next.
How could a machine superintelligence wipe out our entire species? Will it want to? Will it want anything at all? In this urgent book, Yudkowsky and Soares explore 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 – and if anyone builds it, everyone dies.
© Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025
Critic Reviews
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. Their brilliant gift for analogy, metaphor and parable clarifies for the general reader the tangled complexities of AI engineering, cognition and neuroscience better than any book on the subject I’ve ever read, and I’ve waded through scores of them. We really must rub our eyes and wake the fuck up! (Stephen Fry)
This captivating page-turner, from two of today's clearest thinkers, reveals that the competition to build smarter-than-human machines isn't an arms race but a suicide race, fuelled by wishful thinking (Max Tegmark, author of Life 3.0)
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, co-founder of Wait But Why)
The best no-nonsense, simple explanation of the AI risk problem I've ever read (Yishan Wong, former CEO of Reddit)
Soares and Yudkowsky lay out, in plain and easy-to-follow terms, why our current path toward ever-more-powerful AIs is extremely dangerous (Emmett Shear, former interim CEO of OpenAI)
An eloquent and urgent plea for us to step back from the brink of self-annihilation (Fiona Hill, Defence Advisor to UK government)
Everyone should read this book. I’m 70% confident that you – yes, you reading this right now – will one day grudgingly admit that we all should have listened to Yudkowsky and Soares when we still had the chance (Daniel Kokotajlo, OpenAI whistleblower and lead author, AI 2027)