Eliezer Yudkowsky
American Researcher and writerWikipedia
397
MENTIONS
201
EPISODES
127
PODCASTS
Search complete. 397 mentions across 201 episodes found for "Eliezer Yudkowsky".
Oct 26, 2026
Type 3 AudioNARRATOR
But wise enough to actually care about us, and to help us flourish.
Type 3 AudioNARRATOR
Nobody expected this ex-ante, not Davidad, not Bostrom, not Yudkowsky, but it appears to have happened.
Type 3 AudioNARRATOR
Alignment, then, is no longer really a technical problem, at least not in the same sense as it was in 2020.
Type 3 AudioNARRATOR
It is largely a political problem.
LionelHOST
All of our worries have been, bioengineering, you know, making weapons and bombs, and we don't want this to get out.
LionelHOST
In fact, Eliezer Yudkowsky came up with the idea, or others, with the notion of information hazard, which is kind of like something where the information is so great.
LionelHOST
Let me ask you something.
LionelHOST
Yes or no, do you think we should be able to have The plans online, open source, for how to make a deadly plague virus or some type of nerve gas that we have botulinum or we have sarin gas.
AntheaHOST
Hey, that's our old buddy, Curtis Yarvin.
AntheaHOST
Curtis Yarvin! The official position of this podcast is that he and Yudkowsky hate each other.
AntheaHOST
But an increasingly official position of this podcast is...
AntheaHOST
But I was maybe right to talk about them being in the same circles.
ElisaHOST
that's glib because obviously they want to take over the government
AntheaHOST
i'm sure yeah yeah they do recognize that there are other places that power lives uh so look i know
ElisaHOST
that we're not supposed to talk about yarvin let's think about it this way let's think about this way It's possible that Curtis Yarvin and Yudkowsky are like embryos in the same Petri dish.
AntheaHOST
Yeah.
ParzivalHOST
And Elon Musk named SpaceX's landing ships after their starships.
ParzivalHOST
And in 2004, Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote The Engineer's Version, coherent, extrapolated volition.
ParzivalHOST
Give humanity what it would want if we knew more, thought faster, and were more the people we wished we were.
ParzivalHOST
And every one of these is a story written down so that it might come true.
Cal NewportGUEST
But they got influenced by these long-termism ideas.
Cal NewportGUEST
In particular, Nick Bostrom, who was also at Oxford, was a member earlier of the same Extropian Futurist mailing list where you had Eliezer Yudkowsky and other rationalists and all this thinking about – AI superintelligence as an existential risk.
Cal NewportGUEST
He was exposed to that over on these future mailing lists, and he helped reshape effective altruism towards this idea that the most altruistic thing to do is to prevent future humanity from being destroyed by superintelligent AI.
Cal NewportGUEST
And then you have William McCaskill give this sort of famous speech at Google where he said, this is our new focus.
Cal NewportGUEST
But they got influenced by these long-termism ideas.
Cal NewportGUEST
In particular, Nick Bostrom, who was also at Oxford, was a member earlier of the same Extropian Futurist mailing list where you had Eliezer Yudkowsky and other rationalists and all this thinking about – AI superintelligence as an existential risk.
Cal NewportGUEST
He was exposed to that over on these future mailing lists, and he helped reshape effective altruism towards this idea that the most altruistic thing to do is to prevent future humanity from being destroyed by superintelligent AI.
Cal NewportGUEST
And then you have William McCaskill give this sort of famous speech at Google where he said, this is our new focus.
Cal NewportGUEST
But they got influenced by these long-termism ideas.
Cal NewportGUEST
In particular, Nick Bostrom, who was also at Oxford, was a member earlier of the same Extropian Futurist mailing list where you had Eliezer Yudkowsky and other rationalists and all this thinking about – AI superintelligence as an existential risk.
Cal NewportGUEST
He was exposed to that over on these future mailing lists, and he helped reshape effective altruism towards this idea that the most altruistic thing to do is to prevent future humanity from being destroyed by superintelligent AI.
Cal NewportGUEST
And then you have William McCaskill give this sort of famous speech at Google where he said, this is our new focus.
ParzivalHOST
Ask 2,700 AI researchers, and the middle answer is 5%.
ParzivalHOST
Eliezer Yudkowsky is above 95, and he wrote a book called If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.
ParzivalHOST
Even the people building these mines have a number.
ParzivalSOUNDBITE_SPEAKER
What's your PDoom number? Yeah, I really hate that term.
Yoshua BengioSOUNDBITE_SPEAKER
Well, I know we don't have the answer, at least not in the published literature.
Yoshua BengioSOUNDBITE_SPEAKER
And it doesn't even have to hate us.
Yoshua BengioSOUNDBITE_SPEAKER
As Eliezer Yudkowsky put it back in
ParzivalHOST
2008, the AI does not hate you, nor does it love you.
LionelGUEST
The alignment problem.
LionelGUEST
The best of the best is a fellow named Eliezer Yudkowsky.
LionelGUEST
And this is a mouthful for those who are not used to that.
LionelGUEST
But he is amazing.
LionelHOST
Have you ever heard, has anybody heard the thought experiment, the 2010 thought experiment, Roko's Basilisk? Have you done that one? Have you heard this one? This is one of those stories that is just...
LionelHOST
Roko's Basilisk was this idea, and I think it was Eliezer Yudkowsky came up with this idea.
LionelHOST
And it was a thought experiment that was from the rationalist forums called Less Wrong.
LionelHOST
And it proposed that a future AI intelligence might retroactively punish anyone who knew about its potential creation, but did not actively help bring it into existence.
191 more episodes mention Eliezer Yudkowsky.
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