“If you want to build a recursively self-improving AI, have it go through a billion sequential self-modifications, become vastly smarter than you, and not die, you've got to work to a pretty precise standard.”
Question 12 in Less Wrong Q&A with Eliezer Yudkowsky (January 2010) http://lesswrong.com/lw/1lq/less_wrong_qa_with_eliezer_yudkowsky_video_answers/
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Eliezer Yudkowsky 56
American blogger, writer, and artificial intelligence resea… 1979Related quotes

“You've got to let go of who you were, to become who you will be.”

Source: Peace of Soul (1949), Ch. 6, p. 103

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Context: You are your own forerunner, and the towers you have builded are but the foundation of your giant-self. And that self too shall be a foundation.
And I too am my own forerunner, for the long shadow stretching before me at sunrise shall gather under my feet at the noon hour. Yet another sunrise shall lay another shadow before me, and that also shall be gathered at another noon.
Always have we been our own forerunners, and always shall we be. And all that we have gathered and shall gather shall be but seeds for fields yet unploughed. We are the fields and the ploughmen, the gatherers and the gathered.

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“Be so busy Improving your self that you have no time to criticize others.”

Podcast Interview with Ward Cunningham (2006)
Section 1.10 <!-- p. 32 -->
Source: The Crosswicks Journal, A Circle of Quiet (1972)
Context: We do have to use our minds as far as they will take us, yet acknowledging that they cannot take us all the way.
We can give a child a self-image. But is this a good idea? Hitler did a devastating job at that kind of thing. So does Chairman Mao. … I haven't defined a self, nor do I want to. A self is not something static, tied up in a pretty parcel and handed to the child, finished and complete. A self is always becoming.

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