Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Eliezer Yudkowsky
Age: 45
Born: 1979
Born: September 11
Artificial Intelligence Researcher
Blogger
Computer Scientist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Eliezer Shlomo Yudkowsky
Instead
Utility
Society
Diseases
Future
Cute
Intergalactic
Money
Rare
Donating
Trying
Expected
Puppies
World
Save
Curing
Disease
Maximize
Civilization
Puppy

More quotes by Eliezer Yudkowsky

Image
- 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
Image
To worship a sacred mystery was just to worship your own ignorance.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Remember, if you succeed in everything you try in life, you're living below your full potential and you should take up more difficult or daring things.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Image
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
Image
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.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Image
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.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Image
I'm wondering if there's a spell to make lightning flash in the background whenever I make an ominous resolution.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Image
Litmus test: If you can't describe Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage and explain why people find it counterintuitive, you don't know enough about economics to direct any criticism or praise at capitalism because you don't know what other people are referring to when they use that word.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Image
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.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Image
World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Image
I keep trying to explain to people that the archetype of intelligence is not Dustin Hoffman in 'The Rain Man' it is a human being, period. It is squishy things that explode in a vacuum, leaving footprints on their moon.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Image
If you don’t sign up your kids for cryonics then you are a lousy parent.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Image
There were mysterious questions, but a mysterious answer was a contradiction in terms.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Image
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
Image
After all, if you had the complete decision process, you could run it as an AI, and I'd be coding it up right now.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Image
Reality has been around since long before you showed up. Don't go calling it nasty names like 'bizarre' or 'incredible'. The universe was propagating complex amplitudes through configuration space for ten billion years before life ever emerged on Earth. Quantum physics is not 'weird'. You are weird.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Image
The important graphs are the ones where some things are not connected to some other things. When the unenlightened ones try to be profound, they draw endless verbal comparisons between this topic, and that topic, which is like this, which is like that until their graph is fully connected and also totally useless.
Eliezer Yudkowsky