For years I've been saying that MIRI needs some basic intro texts that people can be pointed to when they first hear about these ideas. Ideally, there should be multiple such texts: Blurb length, short article, short book, and weighty tome say 200 words, 2000, 20000, a 200,000 words.

In recent years, this has started to happen.

Stuart Armstrong's book is the short-book-length overview we need -- perfect. Nick Bostrom's maybe the long-book overview.

Luke Muehlhauser's Facing the Singularity and James Barrat's The Final Invention can fill this role to some extent.

Several good intro articles have been written over the last two years. I'm not sure which is the article I'd point people to -- MIRI should probably choose one and push it as the basic overview article, as they have done for Stuart's book.

I'll be sending people to Stuart's book from now on.