Nick Bostrom ( ; ; born 10 March 1973) is a philosopher known for his work on existential risk, the anthropic principle, human enhancement ethics, whole brain emulation, superintelligence risks, and the reversal test. He was the founding director of the later defunct Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford and has become Principal Researcher at the Macrostrategy Research Initiative.

Bostrom is the author of Anthropic Bias: Observation Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy (2002), Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014) and Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World (2024).

Bostrom believes that advances in artificial intelligence (AI) may lead to superintelligence, which he defines as "any intellect that greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest". He views this as a major source of opportunities and existential risks.

Early life and education

Born as Niklas Boström in 1973 in Helsingborg, Sweden, he disliked school at a young age and spent his last year of high school learning from home. He was interested in a wide variety of academic areas, including anthropology, art, literature, and science. He then earned an M.A. degree in philosophy and physics from Stockholm University and an MSc degree in computational neuroscience from King's College London in 1996. During his time at Stockholm University, he researched the relationship between language and reality by studying the analytic philosopher W. V. Quine. His thesis was titled Observational selection effects and probability.

Research and writing

Existential risk

Bostrom's research concerns the future of humanity and long-term outcomes. He discusses existential risk,

In 2005, Bostrom founded the Future of Humanity Institute which, He is also an adviser to the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. and the Fermi paradox.

Vulnerable world hypothesis

In a paper called "The Vulnerable World Hypothesis", Bostrom suggests that there may be some technologies that destroy human civilization by default when discovered. Bostrom proposes a framework for classifying and dealing with these vulnerabilities. He also gives counterfactual thought experiments of how such vulnerabilities could have historically occurred, e.g. if nuclear weapons had been easier to develop or had ignited the atmosphere (as Edward Teller had feared).

Digital sentience

Bostrom supports the substrate independence principle, the idea that consciousness can emerge on various types of physical substrates, not only in "carbon-based biological neural networks" like the human brain. He considers that "sentience is a matter of degree" and that digital minds can in theory be engineered to have a much higher rate and intensity of subjective experience than humans, using less resources. Such highly sentient machines, which he calls "super-beneficiaries", would be extremely efficient at achieving happiness. He recommends finding "paths that will enable digital minds and biological minds to coexist, in a mutually beneficial way where all of these different forms can flourish and thrive".

Anthropic reasoning

Bostrom has published numerous articles on anthropic reasoning, as well as the book Anthropic Bias: Observation Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy. In the book, he criticizes previous formulations of the anthropic principle, including those of Brandon Carter, John Leslie, John Barrow, and Frank Tipler.

Bostrom believes that the mishandling of indexical information is a common flaw in many areas of inquiry (including cosmology, philosophy, evolution theory, game theory, and quantum physics). He argues that an anthropic theory is needed to deal with these. He introduces the self-sampling assumption (SSA) and analyzes the self-indication assumption (SIA), shows how they lead to different conclusions in a number of cases, and identifies how each is affected by paradoxes or counterintuitive implications in certain thought experiments. He argues against SIA and proposes refining SSA into the strong self-sampling assumption (SSSA), which replaces "observers" in the SSA definition with "observer-moments".

In later work, he proposed with Milan M. Ćirković and Anders Sandberg the phenomenon of anthropic shadow, an observation selection effect that prevents observers from observing certain kinds of catastrophes in their recent geological and evolutionary past. They suggest that events that lie in the anthropic shadow are likely to be underestimated unless statistical corrections are made.

Simulation argument

Bostrom's simulation argument posits that at least one of the following statements is very likely to be true:

  1. The fraction of human-level civilizations that reach a posthuman stage is very close to zero;
  2. The fraction of posthuman civilizations that are interested in running ancestor-simulations is very close to zero;
  3. The fraction of all people with our kind of experiences that are living in a simulation is very close to one.

Ethics of human enhancement

Bostrom is favorably disposed toward "human enhancement", or "self-improvement and human perfectibility through the ethical application of science", as well as a critic of bio-conservative views. (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 with either of these organisations.

In 2005, Bostrom published the short story "The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant" in the Journal of Medical Ethics. A shorter version was published in 2012 in Philosophy Now. The fable personifies death as a dragon that demands a tribute of thousands of people every day. The story explores how status quo bias and learned helplessness can prevent people from taking action to defeat aging even when the means to do so are at their disposal. YouTuber CGP Grey created an animated version of the story.

With philosopher Toby Ord, he proposed the reversal test in 2006. 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.

Bostrom's work also considers potential dysgenic effects in human populations but he thinks genetic engineering can provide a solution and that "In any case, the time-scale for human natural genetic evolution seems much too grand for such developments to have any significant effect before other developments will have made the issue moot".

Technology strategy

Bostrom has suggested that technology policy aimed at reducing existential risk should seek to influence the order in which various technological capabilities are attained, proposing the principle of differential technological development. This principle states that we ought to retard the development of dangerous technologies, particularly ones that raise the level of existential risk, and accelerate the development of beneficial technologies, particularly those that protect against the existential risks posed by nature or by other technologies.

Bostrom's theory of the unilateralist's curse has been cited as a reason for the scientific community to avoid controversial dangerous research such as reanimating pathogens.

Books

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

In 2014, Bostrom published Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, which became a New York Times Best Seller.

The book argues that superintelligence is possible and explores different types of superintelligences, their cognition, the associated risks. He also presents technical and strategic considerations on how to make it safe.

Characteristics of a superintelligence

Bostrom explores multiple possible paths to superintelligence, including whole brain emulation and human intelligence enhancement, but focuses on artificial general intelligence, explaining that electronic devices have many advantages over biological brains.<!-- Chapter 2: "Paths to superintelligence" + chapter 3 "Forms of superintelligence" section "Sources of advantage for digital intelligence" -->

Bostrom draws a distinction between final goals and instrumental goals. A final goal is what an agent tries to achieve for its own intrinsic value. Instrumental goals are just intermediary steps towards final goals. Bostrom contends there are instrumental goals that will be shared by most sufficiently intelligent agents because they are generally useful to achieve any objective (e.g. preserving the agent's own existence or current goals, acquiring resources, improving its cognition...), this is the concept of instrumental convergence. On the other side, he writes that virtually any level of intelligence can in theory be combined with virtually any final goal (even absurd final goals, e.g. making paperclips), a concept he calls the orthogonality thesis.

He argues that an AI with the ability to improve itself might initiate an intelligence explosion, resulting (potentially rapidly) in a superintelligence. Such a superintelligence could have vastly superior capabilities, notably in strategizing, social manipulation, hacking or economic productivity. With such capabilities, a superintelligence could outwit humans and take over the world, establishing a singleton (which is "a world order in which there is at the global level a single decision-making agency"