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If you want to build a recursively self-improving AI, have it go through a billion sequential self-modifications, become vastly smarter than you, and not die, you've got to work to a pretty precise standard.

Eliezer Yudkowsky

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Eliezer Yudkowsky
Age: 45
Born: 1979
Born: September 11
Artificial Intelligence Researcher
Blogger
Computer Scientist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Eliezer Shlomo Yudkowsky
Build
Vastly
Pretty
Improving
Dies
Precise
Become
Smarter
Self
Billion
Work
Standard
Sequential
Billions
Modifications
Standards
Modification

More quotes by Eliezer Yudkowsky

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Boys, said Hermione Granger, should not be allowed to love girls without asking them first! This is true in a number of ways and especially when it comes to gluing people to the ceiling!
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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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.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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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.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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I'm lazy! I hate work! Hate hard work in all its forms! Clever shortcuts, that's all I'm about!
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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What people really believe doesn't feel like a BELIEF, it feels like the way the world IS.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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There were mysterious questions, but a mysterious answer was a contradiction in terms.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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There is no justice in the laws of nature, no term for fairness in the equations of motion. The Universe is neither evil, nor good, it simply does not care. The stars don't care, or the Sun, or the sky. But they don't have to! WE care! There IS light in the world, and it is US!
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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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.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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If you handed [character] a glass that was 90% full, he'd tell you that the 10% empty part proved that no one really cared about water.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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- Every time someone cries out in prayer and I can't answer, I feel guilty about not being God. - That doesn't sound good. - I understand that I have a problem, and I know what I need to do to solve it, all right? I'm working on it. Of course, Harry hadn't said what the solution was. The solution, obviously, was to hurry up and become God.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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We underestimate the distance between ourselves and others. Not just inferential distance, but distances of temperament and ability, distances of situation and resource, distances of unspoken knowledge and unnoticed skills and luck, distances of interior landscape.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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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.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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If I'm teaching deep things, then I view it as important to make people feel like they're learning deep things, because otherwise, they will still have a hole in their mind for deep truths that needs filling, and they will go off and fill their heads with complete nonsense that has been written in a more satisfying style.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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Do not flinch from experiences that might destroy your beliefs. The thought you cannot think controls you more than thoughts you speak aloud. Submit yourself to ordeals and test yourself in fire. Relinquish the emotion which rests upon a mistaken belief, and seek to feel fully that emotion which fits the facts.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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I am tempted to say that a doctorate in AI would be negatively useful, but I am not one to hold someone’s reckless youth against them – just because you acquired a doctorate in AI doesn’t mean you should be permanently disqualified.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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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.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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Our coherent extrapolated volition is our wish if we knew more, thought faster, were more the people we wished we were, had grown up farther together where the extrapolation converges rather than diverges, where our wishes cohere rather than interfere extrapolated as we wish that extrapolated, interpreted as we wish that interpreted.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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If you want to maximize your expected utility, you try to save the world and the future of intergalactic civilization instead of donating your money to the society for curing rare diseases and cute puppies.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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By and large, the answer to the question How do large institutions survive? is They don't! The vast majority of large modern-day institutions - some of them extremely vital to the functioning of our complex civilization - simply fail to exist in the first place.
Eliezer Yudkowsky