Eliezer Yudkowsky

Eliezer Yudkowsky

Eliezer Yudkowsky at the 2006 Stanford Singularity Summit
Born September 11, 1979
Nationality American

Eliezer Shlomo Yudkowsky (born September 11, 1979) is an American blogger, writer, and advocate for friendly artificial intelligence.

Biography

Yudkowsky is a resident of the San Francisco Bay Area.[1] Largely self-educated,[2]:38 he co-founded the nonprofit Machine Intelligence Research Institute (formerly the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence) in 2000 and continues to be employed there as a full-time Research Fellow.[3]:599

Work

Yudkowsky's interests focus on Artificial Intelligence theory for self-awareness, self-modification, and recursive self-improvement, and on artificial-intelligence architectures and decision theories for stable motivational structures (Friendly AI and Coherent Extrapolated Volition in particular).[3]:420 Yudkowsky's most recent work is on decision theory for problems of self-modification and Newcomblike problems.

Yudkowsky was, along with Robin Hanson, one of the principal contributors to the blog Overcoming Bias[4] sponsored by the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University. In February 2009, he helped to found LessWrong,[5] a "community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality".[2]:37 LessWrong has been covered in depth in Business Insider.[6] Core concepts from LessWrong have been referenced in columns in The Guardian.[7][8] LessWrong has been mentioned briefly in articles related to the technological singularity and the work of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (formerly called the Singularity Institute).[9]

Yudkowsky contributed two chapters to Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom's and Milan Ćirković's edited volume Global Catastrophic Risks.[10]

Fanfiction

Yudkowsky has also written several works[11] of science fiction and other fiction. His wide-ranging Harry Potter fan fiction story Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality illustrates topics in cognitive science and rationality.[2]:37[12][13][14][15][16][17] The New Yorker described it as "recasting the original story in an attempt to explain Harry's wizardry through the scientific method."[18]

References

  1. ↑ www.yudkowsky.net
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Singularity Rising, by James Miller
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Kurzweil, Ray (2005). The Singularity Is Near. New York, US: Viking Penguin. ISBN 0-670-03384-7.
  4. ↑ "Overcoming Bias: About". Robin Hanson. Retrieved 2012-02-01.
  5. ↑ "Where did Less Wrong come from? (LessWrong FAQ)". Retrieved September 11, 2014.
  6. ↑ Miller, James (July 28, 2011). "You Can Learn How To Become More Rational". Business Insider. Retrieved March 25, 2014.
  7. ↑ Burkeman, Oliver (July 8, 2011). "This column will change your life: Feel the ugh and do it anyway. Can the psychological flinch mechanism be beaten?". The Guardian. Retrieved March 25, 2014.
  8. ↑ Burkeman, Oliver (March 9, 2012). "This column will change your life: asked a tricky question? Answer an easier one. We all do it, all the time. So how can we get rid of this eccentricity?". The Guardian. Retrieved March 25, 2014.
  9. ↑ Tiku, Natasha (July 25, 2012). "Faith, Hope, and Singularity: Entering the Matrix with New York's Futurist Set It's the end of the world as we know it, and they feel fine.". BetaBeat. Retrieved March 25, 2014.
  10. ↑ Bostrom, Nick; Ćirković, Milan M., eds. (2008). Global Catastrophic Risks. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. pp. 91–119, 308–345. ISBN 978-0-19-857050-9.
  11. ↑
  12. ↑ David Brin (2010-06-21). "CONTRARY BRIN: A secret of college life... plus controversies and science!". Davidbrin.blogspot.com. Retrieved 2012-08-31."'Harry Potter' and the Key to Immortality", Daniel Snyder, The Atlantic
  13. ↑ Authors (2012-04-02). "Rachel Aaron interview (April 2012)". Fantasybookreview.co.uk. Retrieved 2012-08-31.
  14. ↑ "Civilian Reader: An Interview with Rachel Aaron". Civilian-reader.blogspot.com. 2011-05-04. Retrieved 2012-08-31.
  15. ↑ Hanson, Robin (2010-10-31). "Hyper-Rational Harry". Overcoming Bias. Retrieved 2012-08-31.
  16. ↑ Swartz, Aaron. "The 2011 Review of Books (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought)". archive.org. Retrieved 2013-04-10.
  17. ↑ "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality". fanfiction.net. 2010-02-28. Retrieved 2014-12-29.
  18. ↑ pg 54, "No Death, No Taxes: The libertarian futurism of a Silicon Valley billionaire"

Publications

Further reading

External links

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