Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

Nick Bostrom

Jul 2014 · OUP Oxford

About this ebook

The human brain has some capabilities that the brains of other animals lack. It is to these distinctive capabilities that our species owes its dominant position. Other animals have stronger muscles or sharper claws, but we have cleverer brains. If machine brains one day come to surpass human brains in general intelligence, then this new superintelligence could become very powerful. As the fate of the gorillas now depends more on us humans than on the gorillas themselves, so the fate of our species then would come to depend on the actions of the machine superintelligence. But we have one advantage: we get to make the first move. Will it be possible to construct a seed AI or otherwise to engineer initial conditions so as to make an intelligence explosion survivable? How could one achieve a controlled detonation? To get closer to an answer to this question, we must make our way through a fascinating landscape of topics and considerations. Read the book and learn about oracles, genies, singletons; about boxing methods, tripwires, and mind crime; about humanity's cosmic endowment and differential technological development; indirect normativity, instrumental convergence, whole brain emulation and technology couplings; Malthusian economics and dystopian evolution; artificial intelligence, and biological cognitive enhancement, and collective intelligence. This profoundly ambitious and original book picks its way carefully through a vast tract of forbiddingly difficult intellectual terrain. Yet the writing is so lucid that it somehow makes it all seem easy. After an utterly engrossing journey that takes us to the frontiers of thinking about the human condition and the future of intelligent life, we find in Nick Bostrom's work nothing less than a reconceptualization of the essential task of our time.

Ratings and reviews

I am pretty technical and have read about AI (Expert Systems) in the past. I had to delete the book at page 23. Too many assumptions by the author to make the book interesting unless you know the subject well already.

Very thorough book on the future and risks of AI. Takes it very seriously and goes through a plethora of ideas. Can be a bit dense and repetitious at times but that may be a good thing depending on what you're looking for.

Read this book if you want to: - Learn everything you need to know about the theory behind developing and managing an AI - Think about what's actually important to our species - Go to sleep really fast at the slower parts of the book you're too dumb to understand

About the author

Nick Bostrom is Professor in the Faculty of Philosophy at Oxford University and founding Director of the Strategic Artificial Intelligence Research Centre and of the Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology within the Oxford Martin School. He is the author of some 200 publications, including Anthropic Bias (Routledge, 2002), Global Catastrophic Risks (ed., OUP, 2008), and Human Enhancement (ed., OUP, 2009). He previously taught at Yale, and he was a Postdoctoral Fellow of the British Academy. Bostrom has a background in physics, computational neuroscience, and mathematical logic as well as philosophy.