Cognitive Biases Potentially Affecting Judgment of Global Risks

by Eliezer Yudkowsky

All else being equal, not many people would prefer to destroy the world. Even faceless corporations, meddling governments, reckless scientists, and other agents of doom, require a world in which to achieve their goals of profit, order, tenure, or other villainies. If our extinction proceeds slowly enough to allow a moment of horrified realization, the doers of the deed will likely be quite taken aback on realizing that they have actually destroyed the world. Therefore I suggest that if the Earth is destroyed, it will probably be by mistake.

27 pages, ebook

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Eliezer Yudkowsky is a founding researcher of the field of AI alignment and played a major role in shaping the public conversation about smarter-than-human AI. He appeared on Time magazine's 2023 list of the 100 Most Influential People In AI, was one of the twelve public figures featured in The New York Times's "Who's Who Behind the Dawn of the Modern Artificial Intelligence Movement," and has been discussed or interviewed in The New Yorker, Newsweek, Forbes, Wired, Bloomberg, The Atlantic, The Economist, The Washington Post, and many other venues.