Nick Bostrom
For Bostrom, some risks could end humanity’s whole future, so reducing them – including the risk from AI smarter than us – may be among the most important things we can do.
Placement
Swedish philosopher, founding director of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute (2005–2024): we may live in a computer simulation; “existential risks” that could end humanity’s future – above all superintelligent AI – deserve priority.
Key ideas
- Existential risk
- Simulation argument
- Superintelligence and AI alignment
Influence
Influenced by 1
Derek Parfit
influenced by
Bostrom used Parfit’s comparison of a war killing 99 per cent of humanity with one killing everyone to argue that reducing existential risk is a global priority (2013). N. Bostrom, “Existential Risk Prevention as Global Priority”, Global Policy 4 (2013); D. Parfit, Reasons and Persons (1984)
Evidence: AI draft
Derek Parfit › 1942–2017
Position
Bostrom’s work spans probability theory, the philosophy of technology and ethics. “Anthropic Bias” examines observation selection effects: how the fact that we exist as observers should shape our reasoning about the universe. His “simulation argument” claims that at least one of three propositions is true: almost all civilisations at our level die out before reaching technological maturity; almost none of those that reach it are interested in simulating their ancestors; or we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. He introduced the concept of “existential risk” – a risk that would annihilate Earth-originating intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential – and argued that, given the vast number of future lives at stake, reducing such risks should be a global priority. “Superintelligence” argued that machine intelligence surpassing ours could arrive suddenly and that aligning its goals with human values is an unsolved problem of the first importance; the book shaped public debate on AI safety. Critics question the speculative character of these scenarios, the use of expected-value reasoning about the far future and his transhumanist assumptions. “Deep Utopia” asks what could give life meaning in a world where technology has solved our problems.
Life & context
Nick Bostrom (born Niklas Boström in 1973 in Helsingborg, Sweden) studied philosophy, physics and computational neuroscience in Gothenburg, Stockholm and London and took his doctorate at the London School of Economics in 2000. After teaching at Yale he moved to Oxford, where in 2005 he founded the Future of Humanity Institute; he directed it until the university closed it in April 2024 and now leads the Macrostrategy Research Initiative, a nonprofit. In 1998 he co-founded the World Transhumanist Association. In January 2023 he published an apology for a racist email he had sent to a mailing list in the mid-1990s.
Main works
- Existential Risks (2002)
- Anthropic Bias (2002)
- Are You Living in a Computer Simulation? (2003)
- Superintelligence (2014)
- The Vulnerable World Hypothesis (2019)
- Deep Utopia (2024)
Appears in
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