Artificial Intelligence: Friend or Foe?

by Charles Rosenbauer

This essay appears in Issue 4 of the Mars Review of Books. Visit the MRB store here.

---

Anti-Yudkowsky: Toward Harmony with Machines

by Harmless

Independently Published, 249 pp., Free

---

Anti-Yudkowsky, by the pseudonymous author “Harmless,” presents a case for a much more optimistic future with AI, one that does not end in human extinction or Butlerian Jihad,¹ but rather in “AI Harmony.” It is a response to the ideas of Eliezer Yudkowsky, a very influential internet writer, AI safety researcher, and founder of LessWrong, among other things. Yudkowsky’s views on the future of AI technology are notoriously bleak and extreme, including calls for airstrikes on rogue data centers to mitigate the risk of human extinction.

Anti-Yudkowsky is a book with quite a range—providing critiques of Rationalist ideology, Bayesian reasoning, game theory, utilitarianism, evolutionary psychology, and more. The critiques of game theory and the exploration of the history of its application are particularly interesting. “Harmless” highlights deep similarities between the viewpoints of people like the father of the modern computer John Von Neumann and philosopher Bertrand Russell on the subject of the Cold War, and the attitudes of Yudkowsky and friends on the subject of AI. He shows how the strategic vision of thinkers like von Neumann and Russell at the time of first-strike nuclear attacks was well-informed in theory, but in retrospect would have resulted in catastrophe if it had actually been implemented.