Here Bostrom and I discuss applications of his book across any number of fields - from history to philosophy to public policy to practices of everyday life (both now and in millennia to come).ĪNDY FITCH: If we start from a working definition of superintelligence as “any intellect that greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest,” and if we posit this superintelligence’s capacities to include an ability to learn, to deal with uncertainty and to calculate complex probabilistic information (perhaps also to assimilate sensory data and to pursue intuitive reasoning), and if we conceive of ourselves as fitfully approaching an intelligence explosion, one in which intelligent machines will design with increasing skill and speed ever more intelligent machines, and if we hypothesize the potential for this self-furthering machine intelligence to attain strategic dominance over us (the way that we possess such dominance over other species), and we recognize the potential existential risk within such a takeoff scenario (a situation which we must manage with great deftness on our first and only try), we can begin to trace the complicated rhetorical vector of this book - which apparently seeks both to foreground a great urgency, and to counsel a sober, cautious, carefully coordinated plan of long-term deliberative action. He has been listed on Foreign Policy ‘s Top 100 Global Thinkers list, and on Prospect magazine’s World Thinkers list.
Bostrom has an intellectual background in physics, computational neuroscience, mathematical logic, and philosophy. His 200-plus publications include the books Anthropic Bias (Routledge, 2002), Global Catastrophic Risks (Oxford University Press, 2008), and Human Enhancement (Oxford University Press, 2009). Bostrom is Professor at Oxford University, where he is founding Director of the Future of Humanity Institute, and directs the Strategic Artificial Intelligence Research Center. It was reading Superintelligence ’s meticulous, cosmos-encompassing thought experiments, with Bostrom’s lucid prose calmly outlining unprecedented urgencies posed by existential-risk scenarios, that made me want to explore literary aspects of public-intellectual practice in the first place. This conversation, transcribed by Phoebe Kaufmann, focuses on Nick Bostrom’s book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategie s.
Billed Into Silence: Money and the Miseducation of Women.
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