"Oh, please, you can't take him too seriously. "

- flagamuffin on Eliezer Yudkowsky

I grew interested in Yudkowsky about the time I found out about his box experiment: you get on IRC with Yudkowsky, he pretends to be an AI in a box, you pretend to be the person keeping him in the box, and then through the magic of rationalism he convinces you to let him out and the world ends the end.

Except that's it. That's the joke. His whole schtick is that AI is omnipotent, omnipresent and will go from zero to Skynet faster than you can say "technofuturism."

Over the intervening years I've grown less and less patient with that brand of "rationalism" because really, it's an egocentric insistence that you understand the world better than anybody else except Your Holy God Yudkowsky. And it's shit like this: Fuckin' no less then Denis Diderot pointed out - at the time - that Pascal's Wager only works if there's only one god. Yet Yudikowsky's crew is far more willing to believe in the utter and total domination of a single AI than they are in, you know, ford and chevy.

It's a bunch of surface-level bullshit passed off as profundity and that's about the point where I start looking around to see who's taking this shit seriously. Because honestly I think Yukidikowsky is trolling most of the time.