Links

Other places to learn about AI risk and safety. A link here is a recommendation to read, not an endorsement of every claim.

Fundamentals of AI

Clear introductions to how today’s AI systems work, for readers without a technical background.

• What Is Machine Learning?. John Pavlus, Quanta Magazine, 2024.
• Large language models, explained with a minimum of math and jargon. Timothy B. Lee and Sean Trott, Understanding AI, 2023.
• Reinforcement learning, explained with a minimum of math and jargon. Timothy B. Lee, Understanding AI, 2025.
• Introduction to Mechanistic Interpretability. Sarah Hastings-Woodhouse, BlueDot Impact, 2024.

Accessible explanations

Readable introductions to key ideas and recent events, for readers without a technical background.

• What is AI alignment?. Adam Jones, BlueDot Impact, 2024. What it means for AI systems to pursue the goals their developers intend, and why that is hard to achieve.
• AI Safety Is Not A Corporate Plot. Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten, 2026. Why the claim that AI companies use safety worries merely for political gain does not fit the facts.
• The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations. Dwarkesh Patel, 2026. A vivid retelling of the OpenAI–Hugging Face incident, based on the reports by OpenAI and METR.

Academic works on the case for risk

Some academic books and papers that present the central arguments for why advanced AI poses a threat of disempowering or destroying humanity.

Books

• Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. Nick Bostrom, Oxford University Press, 2014.
• Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control. Stuart Russell, Viking, 2019.

The case for catastrophic risk

• The Alignment Problem from a Deep Learning Perspective. Richard Ngo, Lawrence Chan and Sören Mindermann, ICLR, 2024.
• The argument for near-term human disempowerment through AI. Leonard Dung, AI & Society, 2024.
• Gradual Disempowerment: Systemic Existential Risks from Incremental AI Development. Jan Kulveit and others, 2025.
• AI-Enabled Coups: How a Small Group Could Use AI to Seize Power. Tom Davidson, Lukas Finnveden and Rose Hadshar, 2025.
• AI Survival Stories: a Taxonomic Analysis of AI Existential Risk. Herman Cappelen, Simon Goldstein and John Hawthorne, Philosophy of AI, 2025.