Eliezer Yudkowsky

Template:Short description Template:Use mdy dates Template:Infobox person Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (Template:IPAc-en Template:Respell;<ref>Template:YouTube. February 16, 2012. Timestamp 1:18.</ref> born September 11, 1979) is an American artificial intelligence researcher<ref name=":0">Template:Cite news</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref name=":1" /> and writer on decision theory and ethics, best known for popularizing ideas related to friendly artificial intelligence.<ref name="aima">Template:Cite book</ref><ref name="auto1">Template:Cite book</ref> He is the founder of and a research fellow at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), a private research nonprofit based in Berkeley, California.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> His work on the prospect of a runaway intelligence explosion influenced philosopher Nick Bostrom's 2014 book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.<ref>Template:Cite magazine</ref>

Work in artificial intelligence safetyEdit

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Goal learning and incentives in software systemsEdit

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)<ref name="gcr">Template:Cite book</ref> 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.<ref name="aima"/>{{#if:|{{#if:|}}
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In response to the instrumental convergence concern, that autonomous decision-making systems with poorly designed goals would have default incentives to mistreat humans, Yudkowsky and other MIRI researchers have recommended that work be done to specify software agents that converge on safe default behaviors even when their goals are misspecified.<ref name="corrigibility">Template:Cite conference</ref><ref name="auto1"/>

Capabilities forecastingEdit

In the intelligence explosion scenario hypothesized by I. J. Good, recursively self-improving AI systems quickly transition from subhuman general intelligence to superintelligent. Nick Bostrom's 2014 book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies sketches out Good's argument in detail, while citing Yudkowsky on the risk that anthropomorphizing advanced AI systems will cause people to misunderstand the nature of an intelligence explosion. "AI might make an apparently sharp jump in intelligence purely as the result of anthropomorphism, the human tendency to think of 'village idiot' and 'Einstein' as the extreme ends of the intelligence scale, instead of nearly indistinguishable points on the scale of minds-in-general."<ref name="aima"/><ref name="gcr"/><ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

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.<ref name="aima"/>

Time op-edEdit

In a 2023 op-ed for Time magazine, Yudkowsky discussed the risk of artificial intelligence and advocated for international agreements to limit it, including a total halt on the development of AI.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref>Template:Cite news</ref> 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.<ref name=":1">Template:Cite magazine</ref> 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.<ref name=":0" />

If Anyone Builds It, Everyone DiesEdit

Together with Nate Soares, Yudkowsky wrote If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, which is being published by Little, Brown and Company on September 16, 2025.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Rationality writingEdit

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".<ref name="miller">Template:Cite book</ref><ref name="businessinsider">Template:Cite news</ref> Overcoming Bias has since functioned as Hanson's personal blog.

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.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> MIRI has also published Inadequate Equilibria, Yudkowsky's 2017 ebook on societal inefficiencies.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

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.<ref name="miller"/><ref>Template:Cite magazine</ref> The New Yorker described Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality as a retelling of Rowling's original "in an attempt to explain Harry's wizardry through the scientific method".<ref>Template:Cite magazine</ref>

Personal lifeEdit

Yudkowsky is an autodidact<ref name="vox">Template:Cite news</ref> and did not attend high school or college.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> He is Jewish and was raised as a Modern Orthodox Jew, but is now secular.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>