Eliezer Yudkowsky Quotes

Since the beginning · Our sole responsibility is to produce something smarter than we are; any problems beyond that are not ours to solve.

By far, the greatest danger of Artificial Intelligence is that people conclude too early that they understand it.
Eliezer Yudkowsky Quotes

I wouldn’t be surprised if tomorrow was the Final Dawn, the last sunrise before the Earth and Sun are reshaped into computing elements.
Eliezer Yudkowsky Quotes

A scientist worthy of a lab coat should be able to make original discoveries while wearing a clown suit, or give a lecture in a high squeaky voice from inhaling helium. It is written nowhere in the math of probability theory that one may have no fun.
Eliezer Yudkowsky Quotes

My successes already accomplished have mostly been taking existing science and getting people to apply it in their everyday lives
Eliezer Yudkowsky Quotes

Anything that could give rise to smarter-than-human intelligence – in the form of Artificial Intelligence, brain-computer interfaces, or neuroscience-based human intelligence enhancement – wins hands down beyond contest as doing the most to change the world. Nothing else is even in the same league.
Eliezer Yudkowsky Quotes

The obvious choice isn’t always the best choice, but sometimes, by golly, it is. I don’t stop looking as soon I find an obvious answer, but if I go on looking, and the obvious-seeming answer still seems obvious, I don’t feel guilty about keeping it. Eliezer Yudkowsky
Eliezer Yudkowsky Quotes

A burning itch to know is higher than a solemn vow to pursue truth. To feel the burning itch of curiosity requires both that you be ignorant, and that you desire to relinquish your ignorance
Eliezer Yudkowsky Quotes

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 Quotes

When something is universal enough in our everyday lives, we take it for granted to the point of forgetting it exists.
Eliezer Yudkowsky Quotes

`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 Quotes

To be clever in argument is not rationality but rationalization.
Eliezer Yudkowsky Quotes

The media thinks that only the cutting edge of science, the very latest controversies, are worth reporting on. How often do you see headlines like ‘General Relativity still governing planetary orbits’ or ‘Phlogiston theory remains false’? By the time anything is solid science, it is no longer a breaking headline.

Eliezer Yudkowsky Quotes

An anthropologist will not excitedly report of a newly discovered tribe: ‘They eat food! They breathe air! They use tools! They tell each other stories!’ We humans forget how alike we are, living in a world that only reminds us of our differences.
Eliezer Yudkowsky Quotes

The purest case of an intelligence explosion would be an Artificial Intelligence rewriting its own source code. The key idea is that if you can improve intelligence even a little, the process accelerates. It’s a tipping point. Like trying to balance a pen on one end – as soon as it tilts even a little, it quickly falls the rest of the way.
Eliezer Yudkowsky Quotes

If our extinction proceeds slowly enough to allow a moment of horrified realization, the doers of the deed will likely be quite taken aback on realizing that they have actually destroyed the world. Therefore I suggest that if the Earth is destroyed, it will probably be by mistake.
Eliezer Yudkowsky Quotes

Nothing you’ll read as breaking news will ever hold a candle to the sheer beauty of settled science. Textbook science has carefully phrased explanations for new students, math derived step by step, plenty of experiments as illustration, and test problems
Eliezer Yudkowsky Quotes

We tend to see individual differences instead of human universals. Thus, when someone says the word ‘intelligence,’ we think of Einstein instead of humans
Eliezer Yudkowsky Quotes

My parents were early adopters, and I’ve been online since a rather young age. You should regard anything from 2001 or earlier as having been written by a different person who also happens to be named ‘Eliezer Yudkowsky.’ I do not share his opinions.
Eliezer Yudkowsky Quotes

Textbook science is beautiful! Textbook science is comprehensible, unlike mere fascinating words that can never be truly beautiful. Elementary science textbooks describe simple theories, and simplicity is the core of scientific beauty. Fascinating words have no power, nor yet any meaning, without the math.
Eliezer Yudkowsky Quotes

I am a full-time Research Fellow at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, a small 501(c)(3) public charity supported primarily by individual donations.

Eliezer Yudkowsky Quotes

The human species was not born into a market economy. Bees won’t sell you honey if you offer them an electronic funds transfer. The human species imagined money into existence, and it exists – for us, not mice or wasps – because we go on believing in it.
Eliezer Yudkowsky Quotes

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 Quotes

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 Quotes

In our skulls, we carry around 3 pounds of slimy, wet, greyish tissue, corrugated like crumpled toilet paper. You wouldn’t think, to look at the unappetizing lump, that it was some of the most powerful stuff in the known universe.

Eliezer Yudkowsky Quotes

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 Quotes

I don’t care where I live, so long as there’s a roof to keep the rain off my books, and high-speed Internet access.
Eliezer Yudkowsky Quotes

Nothing you’ll read as breaking news will ever hold a candle to the sheer beauty of settled science. Textbook science has carefully phrased explanations for new students, math derived step by step, plenty of experiments as illustration, and test problems.
Eliezer Yudkowsky Quotes

My parents were early adopters, and I’ve been online since a rather young age. You should regard anything from 2001 or earlier as having been written by a different person who also happens to be named ‘Eliezer Yudkowsky.’ I do not share his opinions.
Eliezer Yudkowsky Quotes

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 Quotes

If I could create a world where people lived forever, or at the very least a few billion years, I would do so. I don’t think humanity will always be stuck in the awkward stage we now occupy, when we are smart enough to create enormous problems for ourselves, but not quite smart enough to solve them.
Eliezer Yudkowsky Quotes

There’s a popular concept of ‘intelligence’ as book smarts, like calculus or chess, as opposed to, say, social skills. So people say that ‘it takes more than intelligence to succeed in human society.’ But social skills reside in the brain, not the kidneys.
Eliezer Yudkowsky Quotes

I want to carry in my heart forever the key word of the Olympics – ‘passion.’
Eliezer Yudkowsky Quotes

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 Quotes

The purpose of a moral philosophy is not to look delightfully strange and counterintuitive or to provide employment to bioethicists. The purpose is to guide our choices toward life, health, beauty, happiness, fun, laughter, challenge, and learning.
Eliezer Yudkowsky Quotes

Transhumanists are not fond of death. We would stop it if we could. To this end, we support research that holds out hope of a future in which humanity has defeated death.
Eliezer Yudkowsky Quotes