Nick Bostrom is a Swedish philosopher at the University of Oxford. He believes that humanity may unexpectedly become outmatched by a smarter competitor and that “human enhancement”, or “self-improvement and human perfectibility can be developed through the ethical application of science”.

He is a transhumanist, joining a fractious quasi-utopian movement united by the expectation that accelerating advances in technology will result in drastic changes—social, economic, and, most strikingly, biological—which could converge at a moment of epochal transformation known as the Singularity. He questions Will artificial intelligence bring us utopia or destruction?

He wrote Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies in 2014 and in this book he argues that if a machine brains surpass human brains in general intelligence, then this superintelligence could replace humans as the dominant life form on Earth.