MIRI

One year after its release, @ESYudkowsky and @So8res’ book is more relevant than ever.

Get a copy: ifanyonebuilds.it

MIRI researcher Aaron Scher: 20 years ago, the debate was about whether a powerful machine intelligence could be "kept in a box" using airgapped computers.

But now, in 2026, it's standard practice to give frontier models widespread, direct access to the internet.

Two thousand people have now pledged to attend the Don't Build It march, calling for an international agreement to ban the development of superintelligent AI.

The date of the march will be announced once 100,000 have pledged to attend.

Pledge to attend: ifanyonebuildsit.com/march

A nuclear false alarm nearly ended the world 64 years ago today.

How did we survive such incidents? What can it teach us about the current AI crisis?

From IF ANYONE BUILDS IT, EVERYONE DIES:

“There were close calls. During the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, a U.S. ship dropped depth charges to try to force a Soviet submarine to emerge and identify itself. The submarine, B-59, thought a general war had started. B-59 was armed with a nuclear torpedo, use of which required the unanimous vote of three officers. Of the three, Vasily Arkhipov was the lone officer who dissented. But none of the close calls escalated to a full-scale nuclear war.

One way or another, the people who thought that nuclear war would destroy everything in the coming decades ended up wrong.

They were not wrong about the dangers. They weren’t wrong that a hydrogen bomb would flatten and burn a city, or about what it would be like to die of radiation poisoning, or about how an intercontinental rocket tipped with nuclear warheads would penetrate the best available defenses.

Rather, they were wrong about humanity’s ability to decide not to die.

We don’t know for sure why the war-prone peoples of Earth became that little bit wiser. But our guess is that, for the first time in human history, everyone who had the power to choose war expected to personally have a bad time if one broke out. Other wars might have put distant soldiers to ruin, but this one would bring ruin directly to their doorstep. The stronger power would also lose.

Even so, it wasn’t simple or easy to avoid nuclear war. Negotiators worked tirelessly, for decade after decade, to avoid a single misstep that might lead to a fatal nuclear encounter. Countries had arms agreements and monitors. There was a direct line between U.S. leadership and Soviet leadership, in case somebody had to resolve a question very quickly.

Humanity averted nuclear war because people who understood that the world was on track for destruction worked hard to change tracks. They did not see themselves as trying to prevent an improbable unlikely accident. They worked to un-write a fate already written.

And civilization lived.”

"Anyone creating an ultra-intelligent machine anywhere is a threat to American national security, and so we need to somehow prevent that from happening[...] we need to start orienting to this the same way that we orient to preventing rogue actors from getting nukes."