"Singularitarians are the munchkins of the real world. We just ignore all the usual dungeons and head straight for the cycle of infinite wish spells."
Eliezer Shlomo Yudkowsky (born September 11, 1979) is an American writer and Artificial Intelligence researcher.
Author of Three Worlds Collide and Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, coauthor of Project Lawful, and author of the shorter works Trust in God/The Riddle of Kyon, The Finale of the Ultimate Meta Mega Crossover, and various other fiction
. Helped found and is probably the most prolific poster to the blog/discussion site Less Wrong, and is currently writing a book on rationality.
His day job is with the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, specifically working on how to make an Artificial Intelligence that won't just kill us all accidentally, and make AI less of a crapshoot.
Tropes describing Yudkowsky's work:
- Author Tract: His theories and avatars crop up a fair bit in his fictional works.
- Living Forever Is Awesome: Eliezer's hatred of death appears as a recurring theme in his stories.
- Mind Screwdriver: "The Finale of the Ultimate Meta Mega Crossover" is this for the ending of Permutation City by Greg Egan. On the other hand, the explanation involves quite a bit of theoretical computer science.
- Reference Overdosed: Eliezer loves his Shout Outs. Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality has at least one in most chapters, while the first half of "The Finale of the Ultimate Meta Mega Crossover" has several per paragraph. Even Three Worlds Collide includes Fate/stay night in a list of "classic" literature.
