Kevin Roose , The New York Times; A.I.’s Prophet of Doom Wants to Shut It All Down
"The first time I met Eliezer Yudkowsky, he said there was a 99.5 percent chance that A.I. was going to kill me.
I didn’t take it personally. Mr. Yudkowsky, 46, is the founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, a Berkeley-based nonprofit that studies risks from advanced artificial intelligence.
For the last two decades, he has been Silicon Valley’s version of a doomsday preacher — telling anyone who will listen that building powerful A.I. systems is a terrible idea, one that will end in disaster.
That is also the message of Mr. Yudkowsky’s new book, “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.” The book, co-written with MIRI’s president, Nate Soares, is a distilled, mass-market version of the case they have been making to A.I. insiders for years.
Their goal is to stop the development of A.I. — and the stakes, they say, are existential...
And what about the good things that A.I. can do? Wouldn’t shutting down A.I. development also mean delaying cures for diseases, A.I. tutors for students and other benefits?
“We totally acknowledge the good effects,” he replied. “Yep, these things could be great tutors. Yep, these things sure could be useful in drug discovery. Is that worth exterminating all life on Earth? No.”"
