Eliezer Yudkowsky
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Eliezer Shlomo Yudkowskyis an American artificial intelligence researcher known for popularizing the idea of friendly artificial intelligence. He is a co-founder and research fellow at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, a private research nonprofit based in Berkeley, California...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth11 September 1979
CountryUnited States of America
disappointment real ethos
Part of the rationalist ethos is binding yourself emotionally to an absolutely lawful reductionistic universe a universe containing no ontologically basic mental things such as souls or magic and pouring all your hope and all your care into that merely real universe and its possibilities, without disappointment.
zoos zebras disappointment
If dragons were common, and you could look at one in the zoo - but zebras were a rare legendary creature that had finally been decided to be mythical - then there's a certain sort of person who would ignore dragons, who would never bother to look at dragons, and chase after rumors of zebras. The grass is always greener on the other side of reality. Which is rather setting ourselves up for eternal disappointment, eh? If we cannot take joy in the merely real, our lives shall be empty indeed.
shining darkness driving
...there's something in science like the shine of the Patronus Charm, driving back all sorts of darkness and madness...
real wish dungeons
Singularitarians are the munchkins of the real world. We just ignore all the usual dungeons and head straight for the cycle of infinite wish spells.
technology use feedback
Intelligence is the source of technology. If we can use technology to improve intelligence, that closes the loop and potentially creates a positive feedback cycle.
believe people world
What people really believe doesn't feel like a BELIEF, it feels like the way the world IS.
technology years historical
Since the rise of Homo sapiens, human beings have been the smartest minds around. But very shortly - on a historical scale, that is - we can expect technology to break the upper bound on intelligence that has held for the last few tens of thousands of years.
humble modesty rationality
To confess your fallibility and then do nothing about it is not humble; it is boasting of your modesty.
cancer thinking dying
If you've been cryocrastinating, putting off signing up for cryonics "until later", don't think that you've "gotten away with it so far". Many worlds, remember? There are branched versions of you that are dying of cancer, and not signed up for cryonics, and it's too late for them to get life insurance.
smart book skills
There's a popular concept of 'intelligence' as book smarts, like calculus or chess, as opposed to, say, social skills. So people say that 'it takes more than intelligence to succeed in human society.' But social skills reside in the brain, not the kidneys.
thinking differences individual
We tend to see individual differences instead of human universals. Thus, when someone says the word 'intelligence,' we think of Einstein instead of humans.
machines research charity
I am a full-time Research Fellow at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, a small 501(c)(3) public charity supported primarily by individual donations.
annoyed suffering world
Existential depression has always annoyed me; it is one of the world's most pointless forms of suffering.
facts credit models
There are no surprising facts, only models that are surprised by facts; and if a model is surprised by the facts, it is no credit to that model.