Essays on the intelligence explosion — scaling, takeoff dynamics, alignment, and the geopolitics of getting through it. Converted from the authors' freely-published web originals to EPUB for offline / Kindle / e-reader use.
Read these at the source. The canonical home for each essay is on its author's own site, linked below. The EPUBs here are mirrors for convenience — please go to the originals for the latest version, footnotes, and to support the authors directly.
If you are an author of any work below and would prefer it removed, please open an issue and I'll take it down immediately.
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Leopold Aschenbrenner · June 2024 · ~165 pages Nine-part series arguing that AGI by roughly 2027 is plausible from straight-line extrapolation of compute, algorithmic efficiency, and "unhobbling" gains — followed by an intelligence explosion, a national-security race, and the geopolitical implications that follow. 📖 |
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Dario Amodei · October 2024 · ~50 pages The optimistic case. What a post-AGI world looks like if it goes well — biology, neuroscience, economic development, governance, work and meaning. Counterweight to the doom literature. 📖 |
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Dario Amodei · January 2026 · ~70 pages The companion piece to Machines of Loving Grace. The risks side: national security, economic disruption, threats to democracy, and how civilizations defend against the failure modes of powerful AI. 📖 |
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Gwern Branwen · 2020 (revised through 2022) · ~120 pages Pre-GPT-4 essay arguing that scale alone might be sufficient for general intelligence — Sutton's bitter lesson taken to its conclusion, with extensive historical context and a tour through what we already knew when we should have known better. 📖 |
All EPUBs are produced by scraping just the article content from each author's canonical page (with Beautiful Soup), caching figures locally (re-encoding GIFs and WebP to static PNGs that Kindle can render), repairing invalid block-inside-inline HTML left by WordPress / Webflow plugins, and converting via Calibre's ebook-convert to EPUB 3.
All four EPUBs validate clean against epubcheck (0 errors, 0 warnings).
pip install beautifulsoup4 Pillow
brew install --cask calibre # macOS, or install Calibre from elsewhere
brew install epubcheck # optional, for validation
python3 scripts/build_situational_awareness.py
python3 scripts/build_dario_essays.py
python3 scripts/build_gwern_essay.pyDrop any of the .epub files on Send to Kindle, or email as an attachment to your *@kindle.com address. The Send-to-Kindle web uploader has historically been finicky about EPUB 2 and about pages with embedded SVG / animated GIFs / extensionless image refs — every fix here is informed by an epubcheck run.
All essays are © their respective authors (Leopold Aschenbrenner, Dario Amodei, Gwern Branwen). Cover images are from each author's own website. The EPUBs are mirrored here for offline reading convenience with prominent attribution and links to the canonical sources. The authors retain all rights; please respect their preferences if they ask for content to be removed.
The build scripts in this repository are MIT-licensed (see LICENSE).