
If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies
Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All
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An urgent warning from two artificial intelligence insiders on the reckless scramble to build superhuman AI—and how it will end humanity unless we change course.
In 2023, hundreds of machine-learning scientists signed an open letter warning about our risk of extinction from smarter-than-human AI. Yet today, the race to develop superhuman AI is only accelerating, as many tech CEOs throw caution to the wind, aggressively scaling up systems they don't understand—and won’t be able to restrain. There is a good chance that they will succeed in building an artificial superintelligence on a timescale of years or decades. And no one is prepared for what will happen next.
For over 20 years, two signatories of that letter—Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares—have been studying the potential of AI and warning about its consequences. As Yudkowsky and Soares argue, sufficiently intelligent AIs will develop persistent goals of their own: bleak goals that are only tangentially related to what the AI was trained for; lifeless goals that are at odds with our own survival. Worse yet, in the case of a near-inevitable conflict between humans and AI, superintelligences will be able to trivially crush us, as easily as modern algorithms crush the world’s best humans at chess, without allowing the conflict to be close or even especially interesting.
How could an AI kill every human alive, when it’s just a disembodied intelligence trapped in a computer? Yudkowsky and Soares walk through both argument and vivid extinction scenarios and, in so doing, leave no doubt that humanity is not ready to face this challenge—ultimately showing that, on our current path, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.
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The Sirens' Call
- How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource
- By: Chris Hayes
- Narrated by: Chris Hayes
- Length: 8 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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We all feel it—the distraction, the loss of focus, the addictive focus on the wrong things for too long. We bump into the zombies on their phones in the street, and sometimes they’re us. We stare in pity at the four people at the table in the restaurant, all on their phones, and then we feel the buzz in our pocket. Something has changed utterly: for most of human history, the boundary between public and private has been clear, at least in theory. Now, as Chris Hayes writes, “With the help of a few tech firms, we basically tore it down in about a decade.”
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Thoughtful and captivating
- By Nancy on 02-02-25
By: Chris Hayes
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Butler
- The Untold Story of the Near Assassination of Donald Trump and the Fight for America's Heartland
- By: Salena Zito
- Narrated by: Helen Wynn
- Length: 7 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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From the acclaimed journalist standing only a few feet away from the stage when the gunshots began is this gripping first-hand account of the near assassination of Donald Trump–and the inside story of Trump’s heartland-fueled victory.
By: Salena Zito
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The Haves and Have-Yachts
- By: Evan Osnos
- Narrated by: Evan Osnos
- Length: 10 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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The ultrarich hold more of America’s wealth than they did in the heyday of the Carnegies and Rockefellers. Here, Evan Osnos’s incisive reportage yields an unforgettable portrait of the tactics and obsessions driving this new Gilded Age, in which superyachts, luxury bunkers, elite tax dodges, and a torrent of political donations bespeak staggering disparities of wealth and power. With deft storytelling and meticulous reporting, this is a book about the indulgences, incentives, and psychological distortions that define our economic age.
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Just okay
- By Lara on 07-05-25
By: Evan Osnos
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The AI Con
- How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want
- By: Emily M. Bender, Alex Hanna
- Narrated by: Jade Wheeler
- Length: 7 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Is artificial intelligence going to take over the world? Have big tech scientists created an artificial lifeform that can think on its own? Is it going to put authors, artists, and others out of business? Are we about to enter an age where computers are better than humans at everything? The answer to these questions, linguist Emily M. Bender and sociologist Alex Hanna make clear, is “no,” “they wish,” “LOL,” and “definitely not.” This kind of thinking is a symptom of a phenomenon known as “AI hype.”
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A must read, even if you're an AI optimist
- By Malcolm Gomez on 05-15-25
By: Emily M. Bender, and others
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Confronting Evil
- Assessing the Worst of the Worst
- By: Bill O'Reilly, Josh Hammer
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 9 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Confronting Evil by Bill O'Reilly and Josh Hammer recounts the deeds of the worst people in history: Genghis Khan. The Roman Emperor Caligula. Henry VIII. The collective evil of the 19th century slave traders and the 20th century robber barons. Stalin. Hitler. Mao. The Ayatollah Khomeini. Putin. The Mexican drug cartels. Collectively, these warlords, tyrants, businessmen, and criminals are directly responsible for the death and misery of hundreds of millions of people.
By: Bill O'Reilly, and others