1. Nick Bostrom is a philosopher known for his work on existential risk, the anthropic principle, human enhancement ethics, whole brain emulation, superintelligence risks, and the reversal test.
36 Facts About Nick Bostrom
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Nick Bostrom was the founding director of the now dissolved Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford and is Principal Researcher at the Macrostrategy Research Initiative.
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Nick Bostrom was interested in a wide variety of academic areas, including anthropology, art, literature, and science.
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Nick Bostrom did some turns on London's stand-up comedy circuit.
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Nick Bostrom's thesis was titled Observational selection effects and probability.
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Nick Bostrom held a teaching position at Yale University from 2000 to 2002, and was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford from 2002 to 2005.
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Nick Bostrom discusses existential risk, which he defines as one in which an "adverse outcome would either annihilate Earth-originating intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential".
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Nick Bostrom is mostly concerned about anthropogenic risks, which are risks arising from human activities, particularly from new technologies such as advanced artificial intelligence, molecular nanotechnology, or synthetic biology.
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In 2005, Nick Bostrom founded the Future of Humanity Institute which, until its shutdown in 2024, researched the far future of human civilization.
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Nick Bostrom is an adviser to the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk.
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Nick Bostrom proposes a framework for classifying and dealing with these vulnerabilities.
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Nick Bostrom considers that "sentience is a matter of degree" and that digital minds can in theory be engineered to have a much higher rate and intensity of subjective experience than humans, using less resources.
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Nick Bostrom recommends finding "paths that will enable digital minds and biological minds to coexist, in a mutually beneficial way where all of these different forms can flourish and thrive".
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Nick Bostrom has published numerous articles on anthropic reasoning, as well as the book Anthropic Bias: Observation Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy.
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Nick Bostrom believes that the mishandling of indexical information is a common flaw in many areas of inquiry.
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Nick Bostrom argues that an anthropic theory is needed to deal with these.
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Nick Bostrom introduces the self-sampling assumption and analyzes the self-indication assumption, shows how they lead to different conclusions in a number of cases, and identifies how each is affected by paradoxes or counterintuitive implications in certain thought experiments.
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Nick Bostrom argues against SIA and proposes refining SSA into the strong self-sampling assumption, which replaces "observers" in the SSA definition with "observer-moments".
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Nick Bostrom is favorably disposed toward "human enhancement", or "self-improvement and human perfectibility through the ethical application of science", as well as a critic of bio-conservative views.
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In 1998, Nick Bostrom co-founded the World Transhumanist Association.
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In 2005, Nick Bostrom published the short story "The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant" in the Journal of Medical Ethics.
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Nick Bostrom's work considers potential dysgenic effects in human populations but he thinks genetic engineering can provide a solution and that "In any case, the time-scale for human natural genetic evolution seems much too grand for such developments to have any significant effect before other developments will have made the issue moot".
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Nick Bostrom has suggested that technology policy aimed at reducing existential risk should seek to influence the order in which various technological capabilities are attained, proposing the principle of differential technological development.
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In 2011, Nick Bostrom founded the Oxford Martin Program on the Impacts of Future Technology.
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In 2014, Nick Bostrom published Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, which became a New York Times Best Seller.
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Nick Bostrom explores multiple possible paths to superintelligence, including whole brain emulation and human intelligence enhancement, but focuses on artificial general intelligence, explaining that electronic devices have many advantages over biological brains.
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Nick Bostrom argues that an AI with the ability to improve itself might initiate an intelligence explosion, resulting in a superintelligence.
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Nick Bostrom argues that giving simplistic final goals to a superintelligence could be catastrophic:.
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Nick Bostrom explores several pathways to reduce the existential risk from AI.
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Nick Bostrom emphasizes the importance of international collaboration, notably to reduce race to the bottom and AI arms race dynamics.
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Nick Bostrom thus suggests that in order to be safe for humanity, superintelligence must be aligned with morality or human values so that it is "fundamentally on our side".
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Nick Bostrom warns that an existential catastrophe can occur from AI being misused by humans for destructive purposes, or from humans failing to take into account the potential moral status of digital minds.
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Nick Bostrom has provided policy advice and consulted for many governments and organizations.
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Nick Bostrom gave evidence to the House of Lords, Select Committee on Digital Skills.
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Nick Bostrom is an advisory board member for the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, Future of Life Institute, and an external advisor for the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk.
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In January 2023, Nick Bostrom issued an apology for a 1996 listserv email he sent as a postgrad where he had stated that he thought "Blacks are more stupid than whites", and where he used the word "niggers" in a description of how he thought this statement might be perceived by others.