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

> History teaches that one kind of relatively easy call about the future involves realizing that something looks theoretically possible according to the laws of physics, and predicting that eventually someone will go do it. Heavier-than-air flight, weapons that release nuclear energy, rocket that go to the Moon with a person on board: these events were called in advance, and for the right reasons, despite pushback from skeptics who sagely observed that these things hadn’t yet happened and therefore probably never would.

- 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: 8
- 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/history-teaches-that

## 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)