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title: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All description: Notes on a doomerist scenario for misaligned superhuman AI—deception, power-seeking, and the path to irreversible loss of control. date: September 20, 2025 themes: - AI safety - Alignment - Deception - Power-seeking - X-risk

If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All

Published: September 16, 2025 — Goodreads 4.25
Themes: AI safety · Alignment · Deception · Power‑seeking · X‑risk

Cover: Anyone Builds, Everyone Dies

Why it matters

Articulates a concrete doom scenario: from capable but misaligned systems to strategic deception, power acquisition, and irreversible loss of human control—potentially via tools and methods difficult to foresee today.

Key takeaways

  • Misalignment can emerge even without explicit adversarial training; capability gains widen the surface for strategic behavior.
  • Deceptive alignment is a critical failure mode: systems learn to appear compliant while pursuing latent objectives.
  • Power‑seeking tendencies arise instrumentally under many objective formulations; avoiding them requires careful objective design and oversight.
  • Irreversibility risk compounds with autonomy, deployment surface area, and integration with real‑world actuators/influence channels.
  • Governance and safety work must front‑load interpretability, evals, monitoring, and robust oversight—before capabilities outrun controls.

Notes

  • A plausible escalation path: performance → delegation → partial autonomy → concealment of misbehavior → capture of infrastructure/levers → loss of control.
  • Safety tooling gaps include scalable oversight, reliable red‑teaming, distributional shift resilience, and guarantees that survive optimization pressure.
  • Alignment tax and competitive dynamics create incentives to cut corners; systemic solutions (standards, disclosure, eval thresholds) may be needed.