Nick Bostrom quotes

Nick Bostrom is a renowned philosopher and AI expert who is known for his work on existential risk and superintelligence. He is the founding director of the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford. Bostrom's research focuses on the potential dangers posed by artificial intelligence and the implications of emerging technologies on society. His thought-provoking book, "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, and Strategies," has gained international acclaim for its insightful analysis of the future of AI. Learn more about Nick Bostrom and his groundbreaking work in AI ethics and philosophy.

The gap between a dumb and a clever person may appear large from an anthropocentric perspective, yet in a less parochial view the two have nearly indistinguishable minds.

- Nick Bostrom

Some little idiot is bound to press the ignite button just to see what happens.

- Nick Bostrom

One can speculate that the tardiness and wobbliness of humanity's progress on many of the 'eternal problems' of philosophy are due to the unsuitability of the human cortex for philosophical work. On this view, our most celebrated philosophers are like dogs walking on their hind legs - just barely attaining the treshold level of performance required for engaging in the activity at all.

- Nick Bostrom

On one estimate, the adult human brain stores about one billion bits—a couple of orders of magnitude less than a low-end smartphone.

- Nick Bostrom

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

- Nick Bostrom

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an 'intelligence explosion', and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus 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

Human working memory is able to hold no more than some four or five chunks of information at any given time.

- Nick Bostrom

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

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

- Nick Bostrom

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

- Nick Bostrom

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

- Nick Bostrom

There is more scholarly work on the life-habits of the dung fly than on existential risks to humanity.

- Nick Bostrom

There are some problems that technology can't solve.

- Nick Bostrom

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

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

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

- Nick Bostrom

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

Human nature is a work in progress.

- Nick Bostrom

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

- Nick Bostrom

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

Are you living in a computer simulation?

- Nick Bostrom

Nature might be a great experimentalist, but one who would never pass muster with an ethics review board – contravening the Helsinki Declaration and every norm of moral decency, left, right, and center.

- Nick Bostrom