When people explicitly say "do not build this, nobody should build this, under no circumstances build this, slow down and stop, nobody knows how to get this right yet", it's rather a stretch to assume they must mean the exact opposite, "oh, you should absolutely hurry be the first one to build this".
> By collating AI as a doomsday weapon, you necessarily are begging governments to attain it before terrorists do.
False. This is not a bomb where you can choose where it goes off. The literal title of the book is "if anyone builds it, everyone dies". It takes a willful misinterpretation to imagine that that means "if the right people build it, only the wrong people die".
If you want to claim that the book is incorrect, by all means attempt to refute it. But don't claim it says the literal opposite of what it says.
One of my favorite Tweets:
https://x.com/AlexBlechman/status/1457842724128833538
> Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale
> Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus
I think this is a pretty close analogy to Eliezer Yudkowsky's view, and I just don't see how there's any way to read him as urging anyone to build AGI before anyone else does.
That was an actual weapon capable of killing millions of people in the blink of an eye. Countries raced to get one so fast that it was practically a nuclear Preakness Stakes for a few decades there. By collating AI as a doomsday weapon, you necessarily are begging governments to attain it before terrorists do. Which is a facetious argument when AI has yet to prove it could kill a single person by generating text.