Why “Everyone Dies” Gets AGI All Wrong
Why “Everyone Dies” Gets AGI All WrongA Response to Yudkowsky and Soares from the Front Lines of AGI DevelopmentBen GoertzelOct 01, 2025762716ShareBeing: A reaction to Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares’s book “If anybody builds it everyone dies” which is getting a bit of media attentionI’ve known Eliezer Yudkowsky since the late 1990s. In 2000, he visited my AI company Webmind Inc. in New York City, where we were explicitly trying to build AGI alongside various commercial applications. His mission? To convince us to maybe stop. Or, failing that, to get us thinking really hard about AGI safety and how to make the AGI good for everyone.While he was encouraging us to slow down and work on ethics instead of building AGI, he also showed me his new programming language called Flare…
