Published: 6 May 2026
If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies
- Release date: 2025
- Genre: Nonfiction, Technology
- Themes/Moods: Medium-paced, Informative, Challenging, Dark
- Rating: 1/5
As someone who counts themselves as relatively persuasive to the argument portrayed, this was an extremely unimpressive read given the purported credentials behind it - I’m unsure if this due to the authors dumbing down the argument for the masses or is merely a reflection of AI research’s “blind optimism”, merely replacing it with blind pessimism. There’s simply way too much reliance and emphasis on bad-sounding sci-fi stories or historical analogies to make a point, sometimes tortuously so, and a total lack of potential anything outside of analogies or stories as a method to convince you - and given what the solutions proposed require global consensus and cooperation (whilst being frustratingly vague on what that would look like) I struggle to work out who this book is for, but it certainly isn’t for me. If this is a good message, it is delivered extremely poorly, to the point of being detrimental.
