Nick Bostrom
Nick Bostrom
Nick Bostrom is a Swedish philosopher at the University of Oxford known for his work on existential risk, the anthropic principle, human enhancement ethics, superintelligence risks, the reversal test, and consequentialism. He holds a PhD from the London School of Economics. In 2011, he founded the Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology, and he is currently the founding director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University...
NationalitySwedish
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth10 March 1973
CountrySweden
Are you living in a computer simulation?
I personally don't think of myself as either an optimist or a pessimist.
Once a discovery has been published, there is no way of un-publishing it.
Discovering traces of life on Mars would be of tremendous scientific significance: The first time that any signs of extraterrestrial life had ever been detected. Many people would also find it heartening to learn that we're not entirely alone in this vast, cold cosmos.
Traits acquired during one's lifetime - muscles built up in the gym, for example - cannot be passed on to the next generation. Now with technology, as it happens, we might indeed be able to transfer some of our acquired traits on to our selected offspring by genetic engineering.
Nanotechnology has been moving a little faster than I expected, virtual reality a little slower.
For healthy adult people, the really big thing we can foresee are ways of intervening in the ageing process, either by slowing or reversing it.
There are some problems that technology can't solve.
The cognitive functioning of a human brain depends on a delicate orchestration of many factors, especially during the critical stages of embryo development-and it is much more likely that this self-organizing structure, to be enhanced, needs to be carefully balanced, tuned, and cultivated rather than simply flooded with some extraneous potion.
The Internet is a big boon to academic research. Gone are the days spent in dusty library stacks digging for journal articles. Many articles are available free to the public in open-access journal or as preprints on the authors' website.
It’s unlikely that any of those natural hazards will do us in within the next 100 years if we’ve already survived 100,000. By contrast, we are introducing, through human activity, entirely new types of dangers by developing powerful new technologies. We have no record of surviving those.
We would want the solution to the safety problem before somebody figures out the solution to the AI problem.
We should not be confident in our ability to keep a super-intelligent genie locked up in its bottle forever.
The challenge presented by the prospect of superintelligence, and how we might best respond is quite possibly the most important and most daunting challenge humanity has ever faced. And-whether we succeed or fail-it is probably the last challenge we will ever face.