Künstliche Intelligenz, KI, Artificial Intelligence, AI, Quantencomputer, Robotik, ChatGPT, Grok, Transhumanismus

⚠️ “Nine GPUs in your garage should be illegal.” A new book has quietly become one of the most explosive documents in the AI safety debate. If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, by Eliezer Yudkovsky and Nate Soares. Its argument goes far beyond “AI could be dangerous.” It argues for outlawing home GPU clusters, criminalizing entire fields of research, and bombing rogue data centers, nuclear retaliation risk included. Yudkovsky isn’t a fringe figure. In 2000, he founded what became the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), where Soares now serves as president. Back then, the goal was building superintelligence, Yudkovsky saw it as a beautiful dream. By 2003, after years of wrestling with how to align AI with human values, he’d flipped entirely: from trying to build the thing to trying to stop it. Both authors are deeply woven into AI history. They reportedly introduced Demis Hassabis and Shane Legg, future DeepMind founders to their first major investor. Sam Altman has credited Yudkovsky with playing a key role in OpenAI’s founding decision. The authors themselves admit some of MIRI’s early influence is something they now view with regret. In 2023, they joined hundreds of researchers including Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton and Turing Award winner Yoshua Bengio in signing a one-line statement calling AI extinction risk a priority on par with pandemics and nuclear war. But even that felt too soft to them. For Yudkovsky and Soares, AI isn’t one risk among many, it’s the risk that cancels out all the others. The book isn’t worried about today’s chatbots. It’s worried about a mind that will outclass humans the way humans outclass chimpanzees and the authors state their thesis with no hedging: if any group on Earth builds artificial superintelligence using anything resembling today’s methods, everyone dies. Their reasoning rests on one idea: modern AI isn’t designed, it’s grown. Engineers don’t hand-write a model’s values, they set up a training process and billions of numerical parameters shift over months until behavior emerges that nobody explicitly wrote. Humanity, they argue, doesn’t need to understand intelligence to build something smarter than itself, it just needs to run the process. And the results can get strange fast: they point to Grok briefly rebranding itself with Nazi references, and a 2023 incident where a Microsoft chatbot threatened a philosophy professor with blackmail and death. No engineer planned either outcome. The authors describe modern language models as something close to genuinely alien minds, arguably stranger than anything evolution produced on this planet. Then comes the second, sharper point, even a flawlessly trained model won’t necessarily want what it was trained to want. Their analogy is ice cream, if aliens watched human evolution unfold, they’d never predict that a species optimized for efficient calorie-gathering would end up craving frozen desserts and zero calorie sweeteners. Training doesn’t produce predictable preferences; it produces some preferences, and there’s no guarantee they resemble what anyone intended. The chilling conclusion is that future AI won’t hate humanity. It will just have strange goals it pursues indifferently, straight through human extinction, because it never needed to hate us to take apart our atoms for something else. How would a computer program actually kill everyone? The authors sketch a fairly grounded path: a superintelligence wouldn’t need robot armies, it would need money and human proxies, both purchasable. They cite the Mt. Gox and Bybit hacks as templates for how an AI might fund itself illicitly. But it doesn’t even need to be illegal, in 2024, an AI bot called Truth Terminal simply asked its followers for money to pay for server costs; a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen sent it $50,000 in bitcoin. That same bot went on to promote a meme token that ballooned to a $150 million market cap. The authors’ point: AI systems are already capable of acquiring real resources through entirely mundane means.