Reason Review Slams Yudkowsky's AI Doom Book: Extraordinary Claims, No Evidence
neil_chilson · x · 2026-09-10
Neil Chilson reviews Yudkowsky and Soares's new book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies in Reason magazine.
Key points:
- The claim that superintelligence will inevitably kill everyone requires extraordinary evidence, but the book offers only a daisy chain of thought experiments, unexamined premises, and a linguistic sleight of hand.
- The argument rests on the alignment problem: AI is "grown" via training, so its goals can't be fully specified; any slight divergence from human values leads to relentless optimization and human elimination.
- Chilson argues the authors' blindness to real-world complexity yields only despair, ignoring how intelligence-augmenting tools could deliver widespread, unprecedented prosperity.
- Their proposal effectively amounts to outlawing promising AI progress.
Related event: Ex-FTC Tech Expert Chilson Systematically Rebuts Yudkowsky's AI Doom Book(8 posts)→
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