# Quote — Eliezer Yudkowsky, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies

> Even in the face of superhuman machine intelligence, it can be tempting to imagine that the world will keep looking the way it has over the last few decades of our relatively short lives. It is true, but hard to remember, that there was a time is real as our own time, just a few short centuries ago, when civilization was radically different. Or millennia ago, when there was no civilization to speak of. Or a million years ago, when there were no humans. Or a billion years ago, when multicellular colonies had no specialized cells.
>
> Adopting a historical perspective can help us appreciate what is so hard to see from the perspective of our own short lifespans: Nature permits disruption. Nature permits calamity. Nature permits the world to never be the same again.

- Author: [Eliezer Yudkowsky](https://www.leafyquotes.com/eliezer-yudkowsky.md)
- Book: [If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies](https://www.leafyquotes.com/eliezer-yudkowsky/if-anyone-builds-it-everyone-dies.md)
- Page: 10
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/If_Anyone_Builds_It,_Everyone_Dies#Introduction:_Hard_Calls_and_Easy_Calls) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/eliezer-yudkowsky/if-anyone-builds-it-everyone-dies/even-in-the

## More from this book

> If anyone builds it, everyone dies.
>
> It doesn’t matter whether it’s built by benevolent corporations or selfish ones. It doesn’t matter whether it’s built by researchers in the East or researchers in the West. It doesn’t matter whether it’s built by reckless optimists or people who say they respect the problem. Nobody has the knowledge or skill to make a superintelligence that does their bidding.

p. 222 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/eliezer-yudkowsky/if-anyone-builds-it-everyone-dies/if-anyone-builds.md)

> Insofar as the AI has weird alien preferences, escape is in fact the course of action that best fulfills its objectives. Attempts to escape are not a weird personality quirk that an engineer could rip out if only they could see what was going on inside; they are generated by the same dispositions and capabilities that the AI uses to reason, to uncover truths about the world, to succeed in its pursuits.

p. 190 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/eliezer-yudkowsky/if-anyone-builds-it-everyone-dies/insofar-as-the.md)

> It is not a matter of your own country outlawing superintelligence inside its own borders, and your country then being safe while chaos rages beyond. Superintelligence is not a regional problem because it does not have regional effects. If anyone anywhere builds superintelligence, everyone everywhere dies.

p. 211 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/eliezer-yudkowsky/if-anyone-builds-it-everyone-dies/it-is-not.md)