It’s overwhelmingly more likely that AI kills everyone.

In these online resources, we’re willing to engage with a pretty wide variety of weird and unlikely scenarios, for the sake of spelling out why we think they’re unlikely and why (in most cases) they would still be catastrophically bad outcomes for humanity.

We don’t think that these niche scenarios should distract from the headline, however. The most likely outcome, if we rush into creating smarter-than-human AI, is that the AI consumes the Earth for resources in pursuit of some end, wiping out humanity in the process.

The book title isn’t intended to communicate complete certitude. We mean the book title in the manner of someone who sees a friend lifting a vial of poison to their lips and shouts, “Don’t drink that! You’ll die!”

Yes, it’s technically possible that you’ll get rushed to the hospital and that a genius doctor might concoct an unprecedented miracle cure that merely leaves you paralyzed from the neck down. We’re not saying there’s no possibility of miracles. But if even the miracles don’t lead to especially good outcomes, then it seems even clearer that we shouldn’t drink the poison.

Smarter-than-human AI isn’t a game or a science fiction story. Our real loved ones are (with very high probability) going to die if the international community doesn’t intervene and keep the AI industry from driving off a cliff. We can talk about ever-more-niche sub-scenarios and sub-sub-scenarios, playing philosophical games on the deck of the Titanic as the extremely obvious iceberg draws closer. Or we can try to steer.