Eliezer Shlomo Yudkowsky ( ; born September 11, 1979) is an American artificial intelligence researcher He is the founder of and a research fellow at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), a private research nonprofit based in Berkeley, California.
His work on the prospect of a runaway intelligence explosion influenced philosopher Nick Bostrom's 2014 book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. He is best known for If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All, a New York Times Best Seller he co-authored with Nate Soares, as well as the Harry Potter fanfiction Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.
Work in artificial intelligence safety
Goal learning and incentives in software systems
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: