Stephen McAleese

IAB Book Review.

Core Arguments and Counter-Arguments.

By Stephen McAleese.

Published on January 24, 2026.

The recent book If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies, September 2025, by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Suarez argues that creating super-intelligent AI in the near future would almost certainly cause human extinction.

Quote.

If any company or group, anywhere on the planet, builds an artificial superintelligence using anything remotely like current techniques, based on anything remotely like the present understanding of AI, then everyone, everywhere on Earth, will die.

End quote.

The goal of this post is to summarize and evaluate the book's key arguments and the main counter-arguments critics have made against them.

Although several other book reviews have already been written I found many of them unsatisfying because a lot of them are written by journalists who have the goal of writing an entertaining piece and only lightly cover the core arguments, or don't seem understand them properly, and instead resort to weak arguments like strawmanning, ad hominem attacks or criticizing the style of the book.

So my goal is to write a book review that has the following properties.

Written by someone who has read a substantial amount of AI alignment and less wrong content and won't make AI alignment beginner mistakes or misunderstandings, for example not knowing about the orthogonality thesis or instrumental convergence.

Focuses on deeply engaging solely with the book's main arguments and offering high-quality counter-arguments without resorting to the absurdity heuristic or ad hominem arguments.

Covers arguments both for and against the book's core arguments without arguing for a particular view.

aims to be truth-seeking, rigorous and rational rather than entertaining.

In other words, my goal is to write a book review that many less wrong readers would find acceptable and interesting.

The book's core thesis can be broken down into 4.

Claims about how the future of AI is likely to go 1.

General intelligence is extremely powerful and potentially dangerous.

Intelligence is very powerful and can completely change the world or even destroy it.