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

> The problem with making AIs want – and ultimately do – the exact, complicated things that humans want is a major facet of what’s known as the “AI alignment problem.” It’s what we had in mind when we were brainstorming terminology with the AI professor Stuart Russell back in 2014, and settled on the term “alignment.”
>
> Most everyone who is building AIs, however, seems to be operating as if the alignment problem doesn’t exist – as if the preferences the AI winds up with will be exactly what they train into it. This assumption lurks in the background whenever someone says, “The USA needs to build superintelligence before China, because we don’t trust China,” as if the factional allegiance of whoever ran the gradient descent determined what the resulting AI wanted.

- 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: 74
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/If_Anyone_Builds_It,_Everyone_Dies#Chapter_4:_You_Don%E2%80%99t_Get_What_You_Train_For) ([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/the-problem-with

## 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)