# Eliezer and I wrote a book: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies

Eliezer and I wrote a book. It’s titled _If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies._ Unlike a lot of other writing either of us have done, it’s being professionally published. It’s hitting shelves on September 16th.

It’s a concise (~60k word) book aimed at a broad audience. It’s been well-received by people who received advance copies, with some endorsements including:

> 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 **** up!

\- Stephen Fry, actor, broadcaster, and writer

> 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, Wait But Why

> This is the best no-nonsense, simple explanation of the AI risk problem I've ever read.

\- Yishan Wong, former CEO of Reddit

Lots of people are alarmed about AI, and many of them are worried about sounding alarmist. With our book, we’re trying to break that logjam, and bring this conversation into the mainstream.

This is our big push to get the world onto a different track. We’ve been working on it for over a year. The time feels ripe to me. I don’t know how many more chances we’ll get. MIRI’s dedicating a lot of resources towards making this push go well. If you share any of my hope, I’d be honored by you doing whatever you can to help the book make a huge splash, once it hits shelves.

One thing that our publishers tell us would help is preorders. Preorders count towards first-week sales, which determine a book’s ranking on the best-seller list, which has a big effect on how many people read it. And, inconveniently, _early_ pre-orders affect the number of copies that get printed, which affects how much stock publishers and retailers wind up having on hand, which affects how much they promote the book and display it prominently. So preorders are valuable,[^1][^2] and they’re especially valuable before the first print (mid-June) and the second print (mid-July). We’re told that 10,000 pre-orders constitutes a good chance of being on the best-seller list (depending on the competition), and 20,000 would be a big deal. Those numbers seem to me like they’re inside the range of possibility, and they’re small enough that each individual preorder makes a difference.

[^1]: Bulk preorders don’t count. The people who compile bestseller lists distinguish and discount bulk preorders.
[^2]: We're told that hardcover preorders count for a little more than e-book preorders, if it's all the same to you. I mostly recommend just buying whichever versions you actually want.

If you’ve been putting off sharing your views on AI with your friends and family, this summer might be a good time for it. Especially if your friends and family are the sort of people who’d pre-order a book in June even if it won’t hit shelves until September.

Another thing that I expect to help is discussing the book once it comes out, to help generate buzz that helps increase the impact. Especially if you have a social media platform. If you’ve got a big or interesting platform, I’d be happy to coordinate about what timings are most impactful (according to the publicists) and perhaps even provide an advance copy (if you want to have content queued up), though we can't offer that to everyone.

Some of you have famous friends that might provide endorsements to match or exceed the ones above. Extra endorsements would be especially valuable if they come in before May 30, in which case they could be printed in or on the book; but they’re still valuable later for use on the website and in promotional material. If you have an idea, I invite you to DM me and we might be able to share an advance copy with your contact.

(And, of course, maybe you don’t share my hope that this book can bring the conversation to the mainstream, or are reserving judgement until you’ve read the dang thing. To state the obvious, that’d make sense too.)

I’ve been positively surprised by the reception the book has gotten thus far. If you're a LessWrong regular, you might wonder whether the book contains anything new for you personally. The content won’t come as a shock to folks who have read or listened to a bunch of what Eliezer and I have to say, but it nevertheless contains some new articulations of our arguments, that I think are better articulations than we’ve ever managed before. For example, Rob Bensinger (of MIRI) read a draft and said:

> I've spent years trying to make these same arguments and I was frequently floored while reading the book at how much better you did at arguing for things I've been struggling to communicate this whole time. XD YOU SOLVED THE PROBLEM. This is how we should be making these arguments!

Other MIRI staff report that the book helped them fit the whole argument in their head better, or that it made sharp some intuitions they had that were previously vague. So you might get something out of it even if you’ve been around a while. And between these sorts of reactions among MIRI employees and the reactions from others quoted at the top of this post, you might consider that this book really does have a chance of blowing the Overton window wide open.

As Rob said in the MIRI newsletter recently:

> 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.
>
> [...] If public figures woke up tomorrow and just started talking about this issue, that would make it stop feeling like an issue that has to be discussed in hushed tones.

That’s what we’re going for. And seeing the reception of early drafts, I have a glimmer of hope. Perhaps humanity can yet jolt into action and change our course before it’s too late. If you, too, see that glimmer of hope, I’d be honored by your aid.

Also we have a stellar website made by LessWrong’s very own Oliver Habryka, where you can preorder the book today: [IfAnyoneBuildsIt.com](https://ifanyonebuildsit.com/?ref=nslmay).