Reasons to Focus on Cognitive Technologies
Posted by Jeriaska on July 31st, 2007Eliezer Yudkowsky is one of the world’s foremost researchers on Friendly AI and recursive self-improvement. He created the Friendly AI approach to AGI, which emphasizes the importance of the structure of an ethical optimization process and its supergoal, in contrast to the common trend of seeking the right fixed enumeration of ethical rules a moral agent should follow.
In 2001, he published the first technical analysis of motivationally stable goal systems, with his book-length Creating Friendly AI: The Analysis and Design of Benevolent Goal Architectures. In 2002, he wrote “Levels of Organization in General Intelligence,” a paper on the evolutionary psychology of human general intelligence, published in the edited volume Artificial General Intelligence (Springer, 2006). He has two papers forthcoming in the edited volume Global Catastrophic Risks (Oxford, 2007), “Cognitive Biases Potentially Affecting Judgment of Global Risks” and “Artificial Intelligence as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk.”
In his Transvision 2007 talk on the power of intelligence, called “Mind Is All That Matters: Reasons to Focus on Cognitive Technologies,” he reminded us that the human brain more than any other development in history has changed the face of the earth, and logically one can expect that improved cognitive technologies will likely have the same dramatic impact on human conception and control over the physical universe.


