By William Leiss and Richard Smith

This forthcoming book presents a comprehensive analysis of the risks associated with Artificial Intelligence (AI), in the context of the impending transition of artificial intelligence from a passive tool to an autonomous agent.

The authors argue that while current AI provides significant benefits in medicine and science, there is an underlying risk that humans could lose control over the advanced AI systems (also known as frontier AI) which are now being created, leading to potentially catastrophic outcomes for humanity. The book’s chapter 9, which presents an original probabilistic safety assessment of loss of control, estimates a 1 in 8 chance of this eventuality occurring by the mid-21st century.

The second important underlying risk is the ongoing effort to create superintelligence, defined as a machine whose cognitive and operational capacities exceed that of humans by a wide margin. The authors argue that this development represents a credible risk of human extinction and call for an immediate global prohibition on developing superintelligent systems*.*

Finally, they contend that existing and proposed government regulations of AI are structurally inadequate because they treat AI as a controllable product rather than an adaptive, and sometimes deceptive, entity. The work emphasizes that internal self-control must be architecturally guaranteed before such powerful technologies are integrated into society.

The companion website will launch fully at publication, with ongoing commentary, an annotated bibliography, interactive tools, and resources for readers.

Publication details forthcoming. Expected publication date Fall 2026

Preface

Part One: Artificial Intelligence

• Introduction

• Chapter 1: The Good

• Chapter 2: The Bad

• Chapter 3: The Ugly

• Chapter 4: The Superhuman Machine

Part 2: Risk Policy and Analysis

• Chapter 5: The Risk-Based Approach
• Chapter 6: The Control Problem
• Chapter 7: Catastrophic and Existential Risks
• Chapter 8: Risk Estimation
• Chapter 9: Quantitative Risk Assessment for Loss of Control (By Michael G. Tyshenko)

Part Three: Governance and Risk Management

• Chapter 10: Regulation
• Chapter 11: Risk Mitigation Options
• Chapter 12: Heart of Darkness
• Chapter 13: Blaming the Victims
• Chapter 14: What Should the Public Do?
• Chapter 15: What Should Governments Do?
• Chapter 16: Risk Management Summary

References

Acknowledgements

How we used AI

Early in the process of writing this book we used a variety of commercial generative AI tools (NotebookLM and Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude) along with a few open source/open weight models (Gemma, deepseek, kimi, qwen, and gpt-oss), mainly for experimenting with and learning how models work - nothing like running a model on your laptop to give you an appreciation for the energy they consume (and cooling they require)!

In a practical sense, generative AI was involved in our online research, especially as Gemini became more and more integrated into the Google search results. The configuration for this web site (built in Markdown for Hugo and deployed using Workers/Pages on Cloudflare) was also largely done by ChatGPT and Claude, with help from CloudFlare’s in-house AI tool and Docker’s AI tool.

Generative AI also provided essential help early in the project when a mistake resulted in the entire bibliography having to be redone in Chicago (as required by MQUP) and converted from APA (as formatted by one of the authors - whose initials are RKS). Ahem.