Harvard Science Book Talk: Nate Soares, in conversation with Greg Kestin, "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All"

The scramble to create superhuman AI has put us on the path to extinction—but it’s not too late to change course, as two of the field’s earliest researchers explain in this clarion call for humanity.

In 2023, hundreds of AI luminaries signed an open letter warning that artificial intelligence poses a serious risk of human extinction. Since then, the AI race has only intensified. Companies and countries are rushing to build machines that will be smarter than any person. And the world is devastatingly unprepared for what would come next.
 
For decades, two signatories of that letter—Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares—have studied how smarter-than-human intelligences will think, behave, and pursue their objectives. Their research says that sufficiently smart AIs will develop goals of their own that put them in conflict with us—and that if it comes to conflict, an artificial superintelligence would crush us. The contest wouldn’t even be close.
 
How could a machine superintelligence wipe out our entire species? Why would it want to? Would it want anything at all? In this urgent book, Yudkowsky and Soares walk through the theory and the evidence, present one possible extinction scenario, and explain what it would take for humanity to survive. 

Nate Soares is the President of Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI). He has been working in the field for over a decade, after previous experience at Microsoft and Google. Soares is the author of a large body of technical and semi-technical writing on AI alignment, has been interviewed in Vanity Fair and the Financial Times, and has spoken on conference panels alongside many of the AI field’s leaders.

Greg Kestin earned his physics Ph.D. from Harvard, as a member of The Center for the Fundamental Laws of Nature, focusing on theoretical particle physics and quantum field theory. He then joined the faculty of Harvard’s Physics Department as a College Fellow and Preceptor and is currently the Associate Director of Science Education and a Lecturer on Physics. Over his career, he has conducted research in nuclear physics, particle physics, fusion energy, gravitational wave physics, and science education. As a Digital Producer at NOVA | PBS he created award-winning media, from documentaries to educational interactives to an original video series, “What the Physics?!” In his time at NOVA |PBS, nearly a decade, he served as a director, producer, screenwriter, scientific consultant, on-screen talent, author, grant writer, animator, public speaker, and more.  

For more information and videos of Harvard Science Book Talks, see https://science.fas.harvard.edu/book-talks.

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