Openai

When most people start screaming that the sky is falling, they can safely be ignored. But Eliezer Yudkowsky is not most people. He was one of the first to take the idea of superintelligent AI – artificial intelligence that greatly surpasses humanity – seriously. He played a role in introducing the founders of Google DeepMind to their first funder; and Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, credited Yudkowsky as a man who was ‘critical in the decision’ to start the organisation. His influence goes still further – he was a key thinker motivating the effective altruism movement and its founders, and the wider rationalist movement to which they belonged. Through

The law doth punish man or woman That steals the goose from off the common But lets the greater felon loose Who steals the common from the goose The authors of a fascinating new look at the patchwork chaos called copyright begin their book with this epigraph from an ancient English protest song against fencing, and thereby privatising, common land. David Bellos, a comparative literature professor at Princeton University and winner of the first International Booker Prize in 2005 for his translations of Ismail Kadare, and Alexandre Montagu, a lawyer specialising in intellectual property and new media law, have written a timely history of a ‘relatively simple idea – that