1.1 Preliminaries

Some preliminaries and caveats (those eager for the main content can skip):

• I’m focused, here, on a very speciﬁc type of worry. There are lots of other ways to be
worried about AI—and even, about existential catastrophes resulting from AI. And there are
lots of ways to be excited about AI, too.

1See e.g. Yudkowsky (2008), Bostrom (2014), Hawking (2014), Tegmark (2017), Christiano (2019), Russell
(2019), Ord (2020), and Ngo (2020). This deﬁnition of “existential catastrophe” is from Ord (2020, p. 27); see
section 7 for a bit more discussion.

2Let’s assume 2021 dollars.

3
Is Power-Seeking AI an Existential Risk?