The NYT’s Kevin Roose just posted that he will have Eliezer Yudkowsky on Hard Fork tomorrow, saying he “tells us why we’re all going to die.”

I got a message from Yudkowsky’s PR this week offering him up for an interview. Here’s what it said:

“Hi Sharon, Absolutely adore your work at Fortune and remember your work at VentureBeat well, so excited to reach out to you about this as you were one of the first people I thought of for this meeting. I’m reaching out to  let you know that Nate Soares and Eliezer Yudkowsky will be in New York next week (Sept 15 – 19) for the launch of their new book. Would you like to meet with them to discuss the rising risks of AI and existential threats?

Eliezer Yudkowsky, a pioneer of AI risk research, was featured in the New York Times’ controversial 2023 article as one of the key figures shaping the AI movement, alongside Geoffrey Hinton, Sam Altman, and Demis Hassabis, and was named to Time’s Most Influential People in AI. Soares, formerly at Google and Microsoft, is now President of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. Together, they have spent decades warning policymakers, technologists, and the public about the dangers of artificial superintelligence. Their new book,  If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies (Little, Brown, Sept. 16), lays out why any path to superintelligence built on today’s methods is an extinction-level threat.  

Would you like me to connect you for an interview while they are in New York?”

My answer is NO - any guesses as to why?