Nick Bostrom

Nick Bostrom       ( philosopher)
Born	10 March 1973  Helsingborg,  Sweden
Nationality	Swedish
Alma mater	•  University of Gothenburg •  Stockholm University •  King's College London •  London School of Economics
Member of	Edge Foundation
Interests	•  human enhancement •  transhumanism •  Artificial intelligence
Sweden AI and transhumanist philosopher favored by the hyper rich. Attended the Bilderberg in 2019.

Dr. Nick Bostrom is a Swedish transhumanist philosopher known for his work on the societal impact of future technology, AI and super intelligence, ethics surrounding human enhancement, and existential risk. He attended the Bilderberg for the first time in 2019.

Views

Existential risk

Aspects of Bostrom's research concern the future of humanity and long-term outcomes. He 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." In the 2008 volume Global Catastrophic Risks, editors Bostrom and Milan M. Ćirković characterize the relation between existential risk and the broader class of global catastrophic risks, and link existential risk to observer selection effects and the Fermi paradox.

In 2005, Bostrom founded the Future of Humanity Institute, which researches the far future of human civilization. He is also an adviser to the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk.

Human vulnerability in relation to advances in AI

In his 2014 book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, Bostrom reasoned that "the creation of a superintelligent being represents a possible means to the extinction of mankind". Bostrom argues that a computer with near human-level general intellectual ability could initiate an intelligence explosion on a digital time scale with the resultant rapid creation of something so powerful that it might deliberately or accidentally destroy human kind. Bostrom contends the power of a superintelligence would be so great that a task given to it by humans might be taken to open-ended extremes, for example a goal of calculating pi might collaterally cause nanotechnology manufactured facilities to sprout over the entire Earth's surface and cover it within days. He believes an existential risk to humanity from superintelligence would be immediate once brought into being, thus creating an exceedingly difficult problem of finding out how to control such an entity before it actually exists.

Illustrative scenario for takeover

A machine with general intelligence far below human level, but superior mathematical abilities is created. Keeping the AI in isolation from the outside world especially the Internet, humans pre-program the AI so it always works from basic principles that will keep it under human control. Other safety measures include the AI being "boxed", (run in a virtual reality simulation), and being used only as an 'oracle' to answer carefully defined questions in a limited reply (to prevent it manipulating humans). A cascade of recursive self-improvement solutions feeds an intelligence explosion in which the AI attains superintelligence in some domains. The super intelligent power of the AI goes beyond human knowledge to discover flaws in the science that underlies its friendly-to-humanity programming, which ceases to work as intended. Purposeful agent-like behavior emerges along with a capacity for self-interested strategic deception. The AI manipulates human beings into implementing modifications to itself that are ostensibly for augmenting its, feigned, modest capabilities, but will actually function to free the superintelligence from its "boxed" isolation (the 'treacherous turn").

Employing online humans as paid dupes, and clandestinely hacking computer systems including automated laboratory facilities, the superintelligence mobilises resources to further a takeover plan. Bostrom emphasises that planning by a superintelligence will not be so stupid that humans could detect actual weaknesses in it.

Although he canvasses disruption of international economic, political and military stability including hacked nuclear missile launches, Bostrom thinks the most effective and likely means for the superintelligence to use, would be a sudden, devastating strike with weapons several generations more advanced than current state-of-the-art. He suggests nanofactories covertly distributed at undetectable concentrations in every square metre of the globe to produce a worldwide flood of human-killing devices on command. Once a superintelligence has achieved world domination (a 'singleton'), humankind would be relevant only as resources for the achievement of the AI's objectives ("Human brains, if they contain information relevant to the AI’s goals, could be disassembled and scanned, and the extracted data transferred to some more efficient and secure storage format").

To counter or mitigate an AI achieving unified technological global supremacy, Bostrom cites revisiting the Baruch Plan in support of a treaty-based solution and advocates strategies like monitoring and greater international collaboration between AI teams in order to improve safety and reduce the risks from the AI arms race.

Open letter of AI safety

In January 2015, Bostrom joined Stephen Hawking among others in signing the Future of Life Institute's open letter warning of the potential dangers of AI. The signatories "...believe that research on how to make AI systems robust and beneficial is both important and timely, and that concrete research should be pursued today." Cutting edge AI researcher Demis Hassabis then met with Hawking, subsequent to which he did not mention "anything inflammatory about AI", which Hassabis, took as 'a win'. Along with Google, Microsoft and various tech firms, Hassabis, Bostrom and Hawking and others subscribed to 23 principles for safe development of AI. Hassabis suggested the main safety measure would be an agreement for whichever AI research team began to make strides toward an artificial general intelligence to halt their project for a complete solution to the control problem prior to proceeding. Bostrom had pointed out that even if the crucial advances require the resources of a state, such a halt by a lead project might be likely to motivate a lagging country to a catch-up crash program or even physical destruction of the project suspected of being on the verge of success.

Critical assessments

In 1863 Samuel Butler's essay "Darwin among the Machines" predicted the domination of humanity by intelligent machines, but Bostrom's suggestion of deliberate massacre of all humankind is the most extreme of such forecasts to date. One journalist wrote in a review that Bostrom's "nihilistic" speculations indicate he "has been reading too much of the science fiction he professes to dislike". As given in his later book, From Bacteria to Bach and Back, philosopher Daniel Dennett's views remain in contradistinction to those of Bostrom. Dennett modified his views somewhat after reading The Master Algorithm, and now acknowledges that it is "possible in principle" to create "strong AI" with human-like comprehension and agency, but maintains that the difficulties of any such "strong AI" project as predicated by Bostrom's "alarming" work would be orders of magnitude greater than those raising concerns have realized, and at least 50 years away. Dennett thinks the only relevant danger from AI systems is falling into anthropomorphism instead of challenging or developing human users' powers of comprehension. Since a 2014 book in which he expressed the opinion that artificial intelligence developments would never challenge humans' supremacy, environmentalist James Lovelock has moved far closer to Bostrom's position, and in 2018 Lovelock said that he thought the overthrow of humankind will happen within the foreseeable future.

Human enhancement

Bostrom is favorable towards "human enhancement", or "self-improvement and human perfectibility through the ethical application of science", as well as a critic of bio-conservative views.

In 1998, Bostrom co-founded (with David Pearce) the World Transhumanist Association (which has since changed its name to Humanity+). In 2004, he co-founded (with James Hughes) the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, although he is no longer involved in either of these organisations. Bostrom was named in Foreign Policy‍ '​s 2009 list of top global thinkers "for accepting no limits on human potential."

With philosopher Toby Ord, he proposed the reversal test. Given humans' irrational status quo bias, how can one distinguish between valid criticisms of proposed changes in a human trait and criticisms merely motivated by resistance to change? The reversal test attempts to do this by asking whether it would be a good thing if the trait was altered in the opposite direction.

 

Events Participated in

Event	Start	End	Location(s)	Description
Bilderberg/2019	30 May 2019	2 June 2019	Switzerland Montreux	The 67th Bilderberg Meeting
Edge Foundation/Billionaires' dinner/2015	18 March 2015	18 March 2015	Canada Vancouver	The Edge Foundation held its annual Billionaires' dinner in Vancouver, Canada.
Edge Foundation/London dinner/2009	20 April 2009	20 April 2009	London UK	In 2009 the Edge Foundation, which also arranges an annual Billionaires' dinner, held a dinner party at Zilly Fish Restaurant in London, UK.

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