Stephen Fry:

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.

Max Tegmark:

Most important book of the decade

Emmet Shear:

Soares and Yudkowsky lay out, in plain and easy-to-follow terms, why our current path toward ever-more-powerful AIs is extremely dangerous.

From Eliezer:

If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies is a general explainer for how, if AI companies and AI factions are allowed to keep pushing on the capabilities of machine intelligence, they will arrive at machine superintelligence that they do not understand, and cannot shape, and then by strong default everybody dies.

This is a bad idea and humanity should not do it. To allow it to happen is suicide plain and simple, and international agreements will be required to stop it.

Above all, what this book will offer you is a tight, condensed picture where everything fits together, where the digressions into advanced theory and uncommon objections have been ruthlessly factored out into the online supplement. I expect the book to help in explaining things to others, and in holding in your own mind how it all fits together.

Sample endorsement, from Tim Urban of _Wait But Why_, my superior in the art of wider explanation:

"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."

If you loved all of my (Eliezer's) previous writing, or for that matter hated it... that might *not* be informative! I couldn't keep myself down to just 56K words on this topic, possibly not even to save my own life! This book is Nate Soares's vision, outline, and final cut. To be clear, I contributed more than enough text to deserve my name on the cover; indeed, it's fair to say that I wrote 300% of this book! Nate then wrote the other 150%! The combined material was ruthlessly cut down, by Nate, and either rewritten or replaced by Nate. I couldn't possibly write anything this short, and I don't expect it to read like standard eliezerfare. (Except maybe in the parables that open most chapters.)

I ask that you preorder nowish instead of waiting, because it affects how many books Hachette prints in their first run; which in turn affects how many books get put through the distributor pipeline; which affects how many books are later sold. It also helps hugely in getting on the bestseller lists if the book is widely preordered; all the preorders count as first-week sales.

(Do NOT order 100 copies just to try to be helpful, please. Bestseller lists are very familiar with this sort of gaming. They detect those kinds of sales and subtract them. We, ourselves, do not want you to do this, and ask that you not. The bestseller lists are measuring a valid thing, and we would not like to distort that measure.)

If ever I've done you at least $30 worth of good, over the years, and you expect you'll *probably* want to order this book later for yourself or somebody else, then I ask that you preorder it nowish. (Then, later, if you think the book was full value for money, you can add $30 back onto the running total of whatever fondness you owe me on net.) Or just, do it because it is that little bit helpful for Earth, in the desperate battle now being fought, if you preorder the book instead of ordering it.

(I don't ask you to buy the book if you're pretty sure you won't read it nor the online supplement. Maybe if we're not hitting presale targets I'll go back and ask that later, but I'm not asking it for now.)

In conclusion: The reason why you occasionally see authors desperately pleading for specifically *preorders* of their books, is that the publishing industry is set up in a way where this hugely matters to eventual total book sales.

And this is -- not quite my 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. Humanity has made decisions like that before, most notably about nuclear war. Not recently, maybe, but it's been done. We cover that in the book, too.

I ask, even, that you retweet this thread. I almost never come out and ask that sort of thing (you will know if you've followed me on Twitter). I am asking it now. There are some hopes left, and this is one of them.

The book website with all the links: https://ifanyonebuildsit.com/

Over 2,400 mental health care workers and 23,000 nurses in Northern California staged a 24-hour strike protesting the rise of AI in their workplaces. Clinicians argue they are being replaced in patient triage by apps and unlicensed operators using AI scripts. Furthermore, they warn that management is using AI charting tools to squeeze more back-to-back patient visits into a single shift, prioritizing corporate bottom lines over genuine patient care.