Eliezer Yudkowsky

Eliezer Shlomo Yudkowsky ( ; born September 11, 1979) is an American artificial intelligence researcher He is the founder of and a research fellow at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), a private research nonprofit based in Berkeley, California.

His work on the prospect of a runaway intelligence explosion influenced philosopher Nick Bostrom's 2014 book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. He is best known for If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All, a New York Times Best Seller he co-authored with Nate Soares, as well as the Harry Potter fanfiction Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. Work in artificial intelligence safety

Goal learning and incentives in software systems Yudkowsky's views on the safety challenges future generations of AI systems pose are discussed in Stuart Russell's and Peter Norvig's undergraduate textbook Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. Noting the difficulty of formally specifying general-purpose goals by hand, Russell and Norvig cite Yudkowsky's proposal that autonomous and adaptive systems be designed to learn correct behavior over time:

Yudkowsky (2008) goes into more detail about how to design a Friendly AI. He asserts that friendliness (a desire not to harm humans) should be designed in from the start, but that the designers should recognize both that their own designs may be flawed, and that the robot will learn and evolve over time. Thus the challenge is one of mechanism design—to design a mechanism for evolving AI under a system of checks and balances, and to give the systems utility functions that will remain friendly in the face of such changes.

In Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, Russell and Norvig raise the objection that there are known limits to intelligent problem-solving from computational complexity theory; if there are strong limits on how efficiently algorithms can solve various tasks, an intelligence explosion may not be possible. He suggested that participating countries should be willing to take military action, such as "destroy[ing] a rogue datacenter by airstrike", to enforce such a moratorium. The article helped introduce the debate about AI alignment to the mainstream, leading a reporter to ask President Joe Biden a question about AI safety at a press briefing.

Rationality writing Between 2006 and 2009, Yudkowsky and Robin Hanson were the principal contributors to Overcoming Bias, a cognitive and social science blog sponsored by the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University. In February 2009, Yudkowsky founded LessWrong, a "community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality". Overcoming Bias has since functioned as Hanson's personal blog, while LessWrong has grown into the main online hub for the rationalist community.

Over 300 blog posts by Yudkowsky on philosophy and science (originally written on LessWrong and Overcoming Bias) were released as an ebook, Rationality: From AI to Zombies, by MIRI in 2015. This book is also referred to as The Sequences. MIRI has also published Inadequate Equilibria, Yudkowsky's 2017 ebook on societal inefficiencies.

Yudkowsky has also written several works of fiction. His fanfiction novel Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality uses plot elements from J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series to illustrate topics in science and rationality.

Personal life Yudkowsky is an autodidact and did not attend high school or college. He is Jewish and was raised as a Modern Orthodox Jew, but is now secular.

Published works Books

Selected publications