New York Times Review Slams AI Doomerism Book as "Scientology Manual"

New York, NY – A recent New York Times book review has delivered a scathing critique of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, describing it as reading "like a Scientology manual." The highly critical assessment, published on August 27, 2025, was highlighted on social media by Dr. Nirit Weiss-Blatt, a communication researcher specializing in tech discourse.

The review, part of a broader article titled "Is A.I. a Dire Threat or a Lot of Hype? Three New Books Span the Gamut," targets the book's alarmist predictions about artificial intelligence. It suggests that the authors' "unspooling tangents evokes the feeling of being locked in a room with the most annoying students you met in college while they try mushrooms for the first time." This strong language underscores the reviewer's skepticism towards the "AI doomerism" presented in the work.

Eliezer Yudkowsky, a prominent AI researcher, co-founded the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, an organization focused on mitigating AI risks, with Nate Soares serving as its president. Their book posits that "If any company or group, anywhere on the planet, builds an artificial superintelligence using anything remotely like current techniques... then everyone, everywhere on Earth, will die." The New York Times review categorizes this as an expression of the "robot overlord" hypothesis.

The critique further notes that If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies suffers from conceptual flaws, including a failure to define key terms like "intelligence" and "superintelligence," leading to a vacuous and unspecific argument. The reviewer also points out the book's use of "weird, unhelpful parables and extra notes available via QR codes," contributing to its perceived resemblance to a pseudoscientific text.

Dr. Nirit Weiss-Blatt, author of The TECHLASH and Tech Crisis Communication, amplified the review's content, drawing attention to the intense polarization within the current AI discourse. Her tweet underscores the ongoing debate between those who view AI as an existential threat and those who see it as a transformative, albeit complex, technology. The New York Times review itself acknowledges this "extreme polarization," noting that AI has become a subject onto which anxieties and hopes are projected.