Episode Details

tl;dr: Lens Academy offers a new course introducing ASI x-risk for AI safety newcomers, centered around the book IABIED. We share our hypothesis of why IABIED seems more appreciated by AI Safety newbies than by AI Safety insiders.

Lens Academy's new intro course uses IABIED to teach newbies about ASI x-risk

Lens Academy is launching "Superintelligence 101"[1], a 6-week introductory course covering existential risks from misaligned artificial superintelligence (ASI x-risk) using the book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies (IABIED), plus 1-on-1 AI Tutoring and extra resources[2] on our platform to engage with key claims.[3] Each week ends with a facilitated group meeting.

Anyone can enroll, and everyone is accepted. We're set up to be highly scalable, so we don't reject any applications. In, fact, we don't even have applications.

Sign-up here as a participant or navigator (facilitator): https://lensacademy.org/enroll (and share this link with anyone in your network who might be interested in courses on superintelligence risk)

Teaching ASI x-risk to AI safety newcomers is different from teaching to insiders:

1. Good resources explaining ASI x-risk barely exist

When creating our first course (Navigating Superintelligence), we repeatedly ran into the problem that for most of the learning outcomes we [...]

---

Outline:

(00:29) Lens Academys new intro course uses IABIED to teach newbies about ASI x-risk

(01:34) Teaching ASI x-risk to AI safety newcomers is different from teaching to insiders:

(01:41) 1. Good resources explaining ASI x-risk barely exist

(02:06) 2. IABIED seems to be pretty successful in convincing newbies to worry about AI x-risk.

(02:33) 3. IABIED seems less successful at convincing AI safety insiders that alignment is hard

(02:53) Insiders dont like IABIED because it wasnt written for them

(04:19) If Everyone Reads It, Nobody Dies.

The original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

---

First published:
April 23rd, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uX5go9R5Zx5S6EmhP/if-everyone-reads-it-nobody-dies-course-launch

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---

Images from the article:

Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.