The cognitive functioning of a human brain depends on a delicate orchestration of many factors, especially during the critical stages of embryo development-and it is much more likely that this self-organizing structure, to be enhanced, needs to be carefully balanced, tuned, and cultivated rather than simply flooded with some extraneous potion.

Nick Bostrom

Categorized in : Needs Brain Self

The first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.

Nick Bostrom

machines men needs

Machine intelligence is the last invention that humanity will ever need to make.

Nick Bostrom

machines humanity needs

The challenge presented by the prospect of superintelligence, and how we might best respond is quite possibly the most important and most daunting challenge humanity has ever faced. And-whether we succeed or fail-it is probably the last challenge we will ever face.

Nick Bostrom

important humanity challenges

When we are headed the wrong way, the last thing we need is progress.

Nick Bostrom

progress lasts needs

In the next century, we will be inventing radical new technologies - machine intelligence, perhaps nanotech, great advances in synthetic biology and other things we haven't even thought of yet. And those new powers will unlock wonderful opportunities, but they might also bring with them certain risks. And we have no track record of surviving those risks. So if there are big existential risks, I think they are going to come from our own activities and mostly from our own inventiveness and creativity.

Nick Bostrom

creativity technology opportunity

Are you living in a computer simulation?

Nick Bostrom

simulation computer

Far from being the smartest possible biological species, we are probably better thought of as the stupidest possible biological species capable of starting a technological civilization - a niche we filled because we got there first, not because we are in any sense optimally adapted to it.

Nick Bostrom

niche civilization firsts

Human nature is a work in progress.

Nick Bostrom

work-in-progress progress human-nature

The greatest existential risks over the coming decades or century arise from certain, anticipated technological breakthroughs that we might make in particular, machine super intelligence, nanotechnology and synthetic biology. Each of these has an enormous potential for improving the human condition by helping cure disease, poverty, etc. But one could imagine them being misused, used to create powerful weapon systems, or even some kind of accidental destructive scenario, where we suddenly are in possession of some technology that's far more powerful than we are able to control or use wisely.

Nick Bostrom

risk technology powerful

We should not be confident in our ability to keep a super-intelligent genie locked up in its bottle forever.

Nick Bostrom

bottles intelligent forever

Knowledge about limitations of your data collection process affects what inferences you can draw from the data.

Nick Bostrom

inference data-collection process

Our approach to existential risks cannot be one of trial-and-error. There is no opportunity to learn from errors. The reactive approach - see what happens, limit damages, and learn from experience - is unworkable. Rather, we must take a proactive approach. This requires foresight to anticipate new types of threats and a willingness to take decisive preventive action and to bear the costs (moral and economic) of such actions.

Nick Bostrom

risk errors opportunity

We would want the solution to the safety problem before somebody figures out the solution to the AI problem.

Nick Bostrom

safety problem want

Had Mother Nature been a real parent, she would have been in jail for child abuse and murder.

Nick Bostrom

real mother children

It’s unlikely that any of those natural hazards will do us in within the next 100 years if we’ve already survived 100,000. By contrast, we are introducing, through human activity, entirely new types of dangers by developing powerful new technologies. We have no record of surviving those.

Nick Bostrom

technology powerful years

For healthy adult people, the really big thing we can foresee are ways of intervening in the ageing process, either by slowing or reversing it.

Nick Bostrom

adults healthy people

The Internet is a big boon to academic research. Gone are the days spent in dusty library stacks digging for journal articles. Many articles are available free to the public in open-access journal or as preprints on the authors' website.

Nick Bostrom

digging library research

There are some problems that technology can't solve.

Nick Bostrom

solve technology problem

How can we trace out the links between actions that people take today and really long-term outcomes for humanity - outcomes that stretch out indefinitely into the future? I call this effort macrostrategy - that is, to think about the really big strategic situation for having a positive impact on the long-term future. There's the butterfly effect: A small change in an initial condition could have arbitrarily large consequences.

Nick Bostrom

butterfly people thinking

Traits acquired during one's lifetime - muscles built up in the gym, for example - cannot be passed on to the next generation. Now with technology, as it happens, we might indeed be able to transfer some of our acquired traits on to our selected offspring by genetic engineering.

Nick Bostrom

generation engineering gym technology