Judgment day

We are hugely underestimating the nature of AI, and human extinction is a serious possibility, say two tech researchers.

- BY DANYL McLAUCHLAN

Eliezer Yudkowsky - Big Yud to his enemies, of whom there are many - is one of the brightest lights in the alien constellation of Silicon Valley's intelligentsia: the blaze of tech-adjacent druids, fascists, Buddhists, vegans, accelerationists and anarchocapitalists gleefully imagining the future the rest of us will have to live - or die - in.

Yudkowsky became internet-famous in the early 2010s when he published Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, a 2000-page fan-fiction serial in which the boy wizard is instructed in logic, cognitive psychology, game theory and rationalist thought. You can read this online and if you enjoy it you can donate money to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in San Francisco, which was founded by Yudkowsky and promotes the argument animating much of his life's work: that if anyone builds artificial superintelligence the human race will be destroyed.

This isn't an original observation; the entire genre of science fiction has been sounding this warning for more than 100 years. But in the books and movies, the plucky humans generally pull through. Perhaps we short-circuit the computer by presenting it with a paradox; sometimes we teach it to love and cherish all life. Other times we blow it up.