Editors note: As part of CNBCs 20 Under 20: Transforming Tomorrow TV documentary, we interviewed thought leaders and visionaries who have paved the way for the next generation of entrepreneurs. In a series of Q&As called 5 Minutes with a Visionary, we discover what has shaped and molded the careers of these innovators. The following interview was conducted via email.

Eliezer Yudkowsky is an artificial intelligence researcher focused on the singularity. Yudkowsky co-founded the nonprofit Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence in 2000, where he is currently employed as a full-time research fellow. He has no formal education, never having attended high school or college.

If you are a truly obsessed Harry Potter fan, its possible you have stumbled across Yudkowskys fan fiction story entitled, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, in which he takes the original story and retells it in an attempt to explain Harry Potters wizardry through science. As Yudkowskys website states, he is a man who wears more than one hat.

Q: What do you consider to be your greatest success as a technology/science leader?

My successes already accomplished have mostly been taking existing science and getting people to apply it in their everyday lives. Thanks to LessWrong.com there is now an active, growing community of people interested in refining their epistemic and instrumental rationality through the study of the cognitive science of known bugs in human reasoning, and comprehending the mathematics of probability theory and decision theory.

Q: What innovation in the last 20 years has had the most positive impact on your life?

I can’t honestly say that I believe in the standard trope that change is accelerating; keeping things to just the last 20 years seems very restrictive. The cognitive science that has had such a huge impact on my life had its beginnings in the 1970s. Bayes’s Rule, the central theorem of probability theory, though it’s just now beginning to get popular, is two and a half centuries old. There are exceptions, like Google

Q: What current challenge, when resolved, would do the most to change the world?

Anything that could give rise to smarter-than-human intelligencein the form of Artificial Intelligence, brain-computer interfaces, or neuroscience-based human intelligence enhancementwins hands down beyond contest as doing the most to change the world. Nothing else is even in the same league.

Q: If you had the world’s intellectual elite all in one room, what thought-provoking questions would you pose for debate?

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