Nick Bostrom's Home Page
- Professor, Director, Future of Humanity Institute
- Faculty of Philosophy & James Martin 21st Century School
- Oxford University
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Nick Bostrom's Home Page
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I want to make it possible to think more rationally about big picture questions. Some of these questions are about ethics and value. Others have to do with methodology and how we make predictions or deal with uncertainty. Still others pertain to specific concerns and possibilities, such as existential risks, the simulation hypothesis, artificial intelligence, human enhancement, and transhumanism. Others are more mundane. Suppose we get many little things right and make progress. What use, if we are marching in the wrong direction? Or squandering our resources on projects of limited utility while pivotal (maybe unconventional) tasks are left unfunded and undone? What if we are attending mainly to matters that don’t matter? My working assumption: Macro-questions are at least as important as micro-questions, and therefore deserve to be studied with at least the same level of scholarship, creativity, and academic rigor. This assumption might be wrong. Perhaps we are so irredeemably inept at thinking about the big picture that it is good that we usually don’t. Perhaps attempting to wake up will only result in bad dreams. Perhaps. But how will we know unless we try? |
Whole Brain Emulation: A Roadmap. w Anders Sandberg
The Future of Humanity. Book chapter on macro-prospects for humanity
Three Ways to Advance Science. For Nature podcast [also audio]
The
Wisdom of Nature: An Evolutionary Heuristic for Human Enhancement,
with Anders Sandberg
Where Are They? Why I hope that the search for extraterrestrial life finds nothing. Published in the MIT Technology Review
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ETHICS & POLICY
Astronomical
Waste: The Opportunity Cost of Delayed Technological Development
 
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TRANSHUMANISM & THE FUTURE & RISKS
Existential
Risks: Analyzing Human Extinction Scenarios and Related Hazards
 Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?  This paper argues that at least
one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is
very likely to go extinct before reaching the posthuman stage; (2) any
posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run significant number
of simulations or (variations) of their evolutionary history; (3) we
are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that
the naïve transhumanist dogma that there is a significant chance that
we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false,
unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences
of this result are also discussed. [Philosophical
Quarterly, 2003, Vol. 53, No. 211, pp. 243-255] [pdf
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Also with a Reply
to Brian Weatherson's comments [Philosophical Quarterly,
Vol. 55, No. 218, pp. 90-97] |
PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE & PROBABILITY
Beyond
the Doomsday Argument: Reply to Sowers and Further Remarks
Observer-relative
chances in anthropic reasoning?
A paradoxical thought experiment [Erkenntnis, 2000, Vol. 52, pp. 93-108] Examines the implications
of recent evidence for a cosmological constant for the prospects of
indefinite information processing in the multiverse. Co-authored with
Milan M. Cirkovic. [Astrophysics and Space Science, 2000, Vol.
279, No. 4, pp. 675-687] [pdf]
PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
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FAILED STAND-UP COMEDIAN Prior to taking up my current post as Director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, I was a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Faculty of Philosophy. Before that, I was a lecturer at Yale University, in the Department of Philosophy and the Institute for Social and Policy Studies. Beside philosophy, I also have a background in physics, computational neuroscience, mathematical logic, and artificial intelligence. My performance as an undergraduate set a national record in Sweden. I was a busy young man. Before becoming a tweedy academic, I also dabbled in painting and poetry, and for a while I did stand-up comedy in London. I co-founded the World Transhumanist Association in 1998 to encourage public engagement with the prospect of future technologies being used to enhance human capacities. The WTA, a non-profit grassroots organization, now has some 5,000 members from all over the world, and local chapters in many countries. In 2004, I co-founded the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, a virtual think tank on technology-policy topics. In the early days, a common reaction was "this is just science fiction". But in the last few years, academia (and to some extent the wider public) has been gradually ceasing to ignore what is arguably one of the most important issues of our time: how we might use our growing technological powers to improve human lives by changing not only the world around us but also ourselves (e.g. by developing and ensuring wide access to a set of options for prolonging healthy lifespan, augmenting cognition, and improving emotional well-being). Discussions no longer get stuck on whether human enhancement will ever be possible. Instead, the focus is increasingly on ethics: whether it ought to be done. This is a bit of progress. The enhancement debate frequently gets polarized into two opposing ideological camps, transhumanists vs. bioconservatives. That is unfortunate. Hopefully, a further few years hence, we will finally enter the more constructive phase where we ask not whether human enhancement is good in general, yes or no, but rather questions like: Which enhancements, exactly? How to solve the myriad technical problems? What kind of regulation and public policy and funding priorities do we need? THE BIG PICTURE My real focus, however, is research. Since 2006, I’ve been directing a unique multidisciplinary research institute at Oxford University, the (preposterously but descriptively named) Future of Humanity Institute; and I was made full professor in the Faculty of Philosophy in 2008. The FHI is part of the Faculty of Philosophy and the James Martin 21st Century School. As this page reveals, my research interests are multifarious. The common denominator is that they are all parts of a quest to think more rationally about big picture questions for humanity. This is theoretically fascinating. But ultimately, I’m working on these issues because I believe that it is practically very important to get them right. In the end, the goal is to help make the world better place. And for me, I think the best way to contribute (at least at my present life stage) is by doing this kind of intellectual work. Let’s try a little credo: I see philosophy and science as overlapping parts of a continuum. Many of the questions that I am interested in lie in the intersection. I tend to think in terms of probability distributions rather than dichotomous epistemic categories. I guess that in the far future the human condition will have changed profoundly (for better or worse). I think there is a non-trivial chance that this "far" future will be reached in this century, within the lifespan of some currently existing people. Regarding many big picture questions, I think there is a very real possibility that our views are very wrong. Improving the ways in which we reason, act, and prioritize under uncertainty would have wide relevance to many of our biggest challenges. I’m probably best known for my work in four areas (i) as an intellectual leader of the transhumanist movement, with many related writings in bioethics and on consequences of future technologies; (ii) as originator of the concept of existential risk; (iii) as originator of the simulation argument; and (iv) as developer of the first mathematically explicit theory of observation selection effects. A fifth area of my work, which has attracted less attention but which I think of as also significant, is on the question of what a consequentialist should do (e.g. Astronomical Waste, Infinite Ethics, Technological Revolutions). I am happy but frequently find myself wondering: Am I spending my energies in the right place? Am I doing the most meaningful thing I could be doing? |
CONTACT For administrative matters, or if you are a reporter who wishes to schedule a non-urgent interview, please contact Nancy Patel, FHI Projects Officer: Email: fhi@philosophy.ox.ac.uk
Phone (office): +44 (0)1865 286279 To contact me directly (but please, only if it's necessary):
Fax:
+44 (0)1865 27 69 32
Snailmail:
Nick
Bostrom
St.
Cross College
St. Giles,
Oxford, OX1 3LZ, United Kingdom
VIRTUAL ESTATE
Future of Humanity Institute
Papers
on observational selection effects
World Transhumanist Association
Devoted
to the question, Are you living in a computer simulation?
Blog
run together with Robin Hanson and Eliezer Yudkowsky
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ON THE BANK On the bank at the end (2002) |
PYTHAGOREAN JAMBOREE The astral glockenspiel quivers (2007) |
UNPRETTY POEM See the plucked chicken See the man running See the fountain gushing (2008) |
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DRAFTS
POLICY
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POWERPOINTS, VIDEO, INTERVIEWS, ...
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MISCELLANEOUS Fictional
interview of an uploaded dog by Larry King. [html]
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Introduction
to Transhumanism
(POWERPOINT)
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Anthropic
Bias: Observation Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy
