Nick Bostrom
Nick Bostrom is a Swedish philosopher and university teacher, born on March 10, 1973, in Helsingborg, whose work engages with existential risk, superintelligence risks, and the ethics of human enhancement.
Bostrom received his education at the University of Gothenburg, King's College London, and the London School of Economics and Political Science. He uses both Swedish and English, and his scholarly output spans several distinct areas of philosophical inquiry, including the anthropic principle, whole brain emulation, superintelligence risks, and existential risk. His work as a philosopher has been carried out alongside his role as a university teacher.
The specific subjects his work addresses include human enhancement ethics, the reversal test, whole brain emulation, and the anthropic principle. These topics collectively represent the recurring conceptual territory of his philosophical career, with human enhancement ethics and superintelligence risks serving as particularly prominent reference points in his output as a philosopher.
Quotes by Nick Bostrom
The clear feasibility of biological enhancement should increase our confidence that machine intelligence is ultimately achievable, since enhanced human scientists and engineers will be able to make more and faster progress than their au naturel counterparts.
An emulation operating at a speed of ten thousand times that of a biological brain would be able to read a book in a few seconds and write a PhD thesis in an afternoon.
Presumably, these agents are still too primitive to have any moral status. But how confident can we really be that this is so? More importantly, how confident can we be that we will know to stop in time, before our programs become capable of experiencing morally relevant suffering?
We do not need to plug a fiber optic cable into our brains in order to access the Internet. Not only can the human retina transmit data at an impressive rate of nearly 10 million bits per second, but it comes pre-packaged with a massive amount of dedicated wetware, the visual cortex, that is highly adapted to extracting meaning from this information torrent and to interfacing with other brain areas for further processing.
Moral goodness might be more like a precious metal than an abundant element in human nature, and even after the ore has been processed and refined in accordance with the prescriptions of the CEV proposal, who knows whether the principal outcome will be shining virtue, indifferent slag, or toxic sludge?
The existence of birds demonstrated that heavier-than-air flight was physically possible and prompted efforts to build flying machines. Yet the first functioning airplanes did not flap their wings. The jury is out on whether machine intelligence will be like flight, which humans achieved through an artificial mechanism, or like combustion, which we initially mastered by copying naturally occurring fires.
We should resist the temptation to roll every normatively desirable attribute into one giant amorphous concept of mental functioning, as though one could never find one admirable trait without all the others being equally present. Instead, we should recognize that there can exist instrumentally powerful information processing systems – intelligent systems – that are neither inherently good nor reliably wise.
Newer systems use statistical machine learning techniques that automatically build statistical models from observed usage patterns.
Granted, there is still that picture of the Terminator jeering over practically every journalistic attempt to engage with the subject.
One can speculate that the tardiness and wobbliness of humanity’s progress on many of the “eternal problems” of philosophy are due to the unsuitability of the human cortex for philosophical work. On this view, our most celebrated philosophers are like dogs walking on their hind legs – just barely attaining the treshold level of performance required for engaging in the activity at all.