Luke Muehlhauser

Luke Muehlhauser is a Research Analyst at Open Philanthropy Project. His investigative research spans a wide range of topics - especially the social sciences, global catastrophic risks, and technical and philosophical issues that are relevant to Open Philanthropy’s overall giving strategy.

Muehlhauser is an atheist who owns the website Common Sense Atheism. He is an outspoken advocate of naturalism. Previously, he was an evangelical Christian.

Formerly, he was the Executive Director of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute which was formerly called the Singularity Institute (see: Atheism, transhumanism and the hypothesized technological singularity and Atheism and consciousness ]]).

Luke Melhauser wrote about a future hypothesized technological singularity:

“

When humanity builds machines with greater-than-human intelligence, they will also be better than we are at creating still smarter machines. Those improved machines will be even more capable of improving themselves or their successors. This is a positive feedback loop that could, before losing steam, produce a machine with vastly greater than human intelligence: machine superintelligence. Such a superintelligence would have enormous powers to make the future unlike anything that came before it. Event horizon: All social and technological progress thus far has come from human brains. When technology creates entirely new kinds of intelligence, this will cause the future to be stranger than we can imagine. So there is an ‘event horizon’ in the future beyond which our ability to predict the future rapidly breaks down.

”

Muehlhauser does concede that a technological singularity may never occur.

See also

• Atheism and transhumanism
• Atheist fear of death
• Atheism and life after death
• Atheism and death