70 Quotes by Nick Bostrom

Any death prior to the heat death of the universe is premature if your life is good.

[D]umb evolutionary processes have dramatically amplified the intelligence in the human lineage even compared with our close relatives the great apes and our own humanoid ancestors; and there is no reason to suppose Homo sapiens to have reached the apex of cognitive effectiveness attainable in a biological system.

The creationist, too, is a truthlover, albeit one whose affections are unreciprocated.

Our approach to existential risks cannot be one of trial-and-error. There is no opportunity to learn from errors. The reactive approach — see what happens, limit damages, and learn from experience — is unworkable. Rather, we must take a proactive approach. This requires foresight to anticipate new types of threats and a willingness to take decisive preventive action and to bear the costs (moral and economic) of such actions.

Nature might be a great experimentalist, but one who would never pass muster with an ethics review board – contravening the Helsinki Declaration and every norm of moral decency, left, right, and center.

A full-throttled deployment of the practices of strategic communication would kill candor and leave truth bereft to fend for herself in the backstabbing night of political bogeys.

Far from being the smartest possible biological species, we are probably better thought of as the stupidest possible biological species capable of starting a technological civilization - a niche we filled because we got there first, not because we are in any sense optimally adapted to it.

Suppose it required an enourmous amount of lucky coincidence to produce intelligent life, enough so that intelligent life evolves on only one planet out of every 10^30 planets on which simple replicators arise. In that case, when we run our genetic algorithms to try to replicate what natural evolution did, we might find that we must run some 10^30 simulations before we find one where all the elements come together in just the right way.

Conversely, with sufficiently advanced scanning technology and abundant computing power, it might be possible to brute-force and emulation even with a fairly limited understanding of the brain.