Nick Bostrom is the Director of the Oxford Future of Humanity Institute and the Director at the Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology.
He is the author of over 200 publications including Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014), a New York Times bestseller and Anthropic Bias: Observation Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy (2002).
In 2009 and 2015, he was included in Foreign Policy‘ Top 100 Global Thinkers list “for accepting no limits on human potential.”
Bostrom’s work on superintelligence – and his concern for its existential risk to humanity over the coming century – has brought both Elon Musk and Bill Gates to similar thinking.
In 1998, Bostrom co-founded the World Transhumanist Association (which has since changed its name to Humanity+. In 2004, he co-founded the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, although he is no longer involved in either of these organisations.
Videos:
What happens when our computers get smarter than we are?
On Our Biggest Problems
In the media:
New Research Found There’s a 50% Chance We’re Living in a Simulation
Curious Kids: could our entire reality be part of a simulation created by some other beings?
The grim fate that could be ‘worse than extinction
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.
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