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
strong determination zero
The human brain cannot release enough neurotransmitters to feel emotion a thousand times as strong as the grief of one funeral. A prospective risk going from 10,000,000 deaths to 100,000,000 deaths does not multiply by ten the strength of our determination to stop it. It adds one more zero on paper for our eyes to glaze over.
fighting blow wind
Let the winds of evidence blow you about as though you are a leaf, with no direction of your own. Beware lest you fight a rearguard retreat against the evidence, grudgingly conceding each foot of ground only when forced, feeling cheated. Surrender to the truth as quickly as you can.
book reality long-ago
Most Muggles lived in a world defined by the limits of what you could do with cars and telephones. Even though Muggle physics explicitly permitted possibilities like molecular nanotechnology or the Penrose process for extracting energy from black holes, most people filed that away in the same section of their brain that stored fairy tales and history books, well away from their personal realities: Long ago and far away, ever so long ago.
hate love-you atoms
The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.
baseball people reason-why
If people got hit on the head by a baseball bat every week, pretty soon they would invent reasons why getting hit on the head with a baseball bat was a good thing.
lying believe people
You cannot rationalize what is not rational to begin with - as if lying were called truthization. There is no way to obtain more truth for a proposition by bribery, flattery, or the most passionate argument - you can make more people believe the proposition, but you cannot make it more true.
college thinking games
When you think of intelligence, don't think of a college professor; think of human beings as opposed to chimpanzees. If you don't have human intelligence, you're not even in the game.
light world rationality
There is light in the world, and it is us!
marketing scams ifs
If cryonics were a scam it would have far better marketing and be far more popular.
firsts ordinary doe
When you are older, you will learn that the first and foremost thing which any ordinary person does is nothing.
hero names important
Science has heroes, but no gods. The great Names are not our superiors, or even our rivals, they are passed milestones on our road; and the most important milestone is the hero yet to come.
ignorance sacred mystery
To worship a sacred mystery was just to worship your own ignorance.
people danger artificial-intelligence
By far the greatest danger of Artificial Intelligence is that people conclude too early that they understand it.
skills people effort
The people I know who seem to make unusual efforts at rationality, are unusually honest, or, failing that, at least have unusually bad social skills.