Eliezer Yudkowsky

scientist · 23 mentions across 4 readings

In this course

Yudkowsky is the founder of LessWrong, the rationalist community forum where Roko's Basilisk thought experiment emerged in 2010, catalyzing one of contemporary AI discourse's most psychologically disruptive memes. The course readings use the Basilisk incident—and Yudkowsky's forum's initial panic and subsequent suppression of the idea—to examine how AI anxiety circulates in online communities and how speculative arguments about superintelligent optimization can produce real psychological distress. His work appears here less as direct intellectual contribution than as the infrastructural precondition for a particular form of AI-fueled existential dread that the course positions as symptomatic of contemporary technological anxiety.

Mentioned in 4 readings

Timnit Gebru and Emile P. Torres

The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence

17

Singularitarianism. Around the same time that the WTA was founded, another variant of transhumanism emerged: singularitarianism, whose leading advocates included Ray Kurzweil and Eliezer Yudkowsky. This emphasized the coming “technological …Rationalism. In the late 2000s, yet another community arose: the Rationalists. This centered around the community blogging website LessWrong, founded in 2009 by Yudkowsky, which describes itself as “an online forum and community dedicated t…Discriminatory attitudes. The same discriminatory attitudes that animated first-wave eugenics are pervasive within the TESCREAL literature and community. For example, the Extropian listserv contains numerous examples of alarming remarks by …

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Isabel Millar

from The Psychoanalysis of Artificial Intelligence

3

In 2010 on LessWrong forum, a user named Roko posited a thought experiment. He proposed that in a hypothetical future an all-powerful super-intelligent AI could retrospectively punish anyone who in the present time did not do everything in …This post was STUPID (ibid.).[^1] The post was subsequently removed, and all talk of the Basilisk was banned from the website for over five years. But the Basilisk had already wreaked havoc among the forum’s readers many of whom had starte…Auerbach, D (2014) The Most Terrifying Thought Experiment of All Time. Available (01.03.2020) at: https://slate.com/technology/2014/07/rokos-basilisk-the-most-terrifying-thought-experimentof-all-time.html Lacan, J. (2006a) ‘Logical Time and…

Vincent Le

Spirit in the Crypt: Negarestani vs Land

2

It is worthwhile outlining the book’s appendix at this point since it also takes issue with AI researchers like Nick Bostrom and Eliezer Yudkowsky’s understanding of superintelligence as an ideal Bayesian model of inductive prediction. Nega…contends, because Land is not modelling all intelligent systems in nature on either the human’s contingent aspects or its formal socio-semantic conditions. On the contrary, it is Negarestani who rejects all other self-organizing intelligent…

Nick Bostrom

ARE YOU LIVING IN A COMPUTER SIMULATION?

1

Supposing we live in a simulation, what are the implications for us humans? The foregoing remarks notwithstanding, the implications are not all that radical. Our best guide to how our posthuman creators have chosen to set up our world is th…

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