Nick Bostrom

philosopher · 36 mentions across 6 readings

In this course

Bostrom is a philosopher known for thinking through existential risks posed by advanced artificial intelligence, particularly scenarios where machines surpass human intelligence. The course readings invoke him in discussions of the "Singularity" and transformative futures—his work frames the speculative stakes of AI development as a civilizational threshold rather than merely a technical problem. His concerns about ultraintelligent machines anchor debates about whether AI represents a new mode of knowledge production or an existential turning point for humanity itself.

Mentioned in 6 readings

Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres

The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence

27

Transhumanism and Extropianism. We begin our discussion with transhumanism, a version of second-wave eugenics that affirms the feasibility and desirability of radical “human enhancement.” The word “transhumanism” may have been coined in 194…The first organized group of modern transhumanists was the Extropian movement. It can be traced back to the late 1980s, after Max More and T.O. Morrow founded the Extropy Institute in 1988. The neologism “extropy” was defined by More as “th…Effective Altruism and Longtermism. The last two components of the TESCREAL bundle are Effective Altruism (EA) and longtermism. The former emerged around the same time as Rationalism, and can be seen as its sibling: whereas the Rationalists…

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Nick Bostrom

Are You Living In A Computer Simulation?

3

--- [^1]: See e.g. K. E. Drexler, Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology, London, Forth Estate, 1985; N. Bostrom, “How Long Before Superintelligence?” International Journal of Futures Studies, vol. 2, (1998); R. Kurzweil, The…The amount of computing power needed to emulate a human mind can likewise be roughly estimated. One estimate, based on how computationally expensive it is to replicate the functionality of a piece of nervous tissue that we have already unde…If (1) is true, then we will almost certainly go extinct before reaching posthumanity. If (2) is true, then there must be a strong convergence among the courses of advanced civilizations so that virtually none contains any relatively wealth…

Isabel Millar

from The Psychoanalysis of Artificial Intelligence

2

of science and fiction in the ‘Singularity’. Others argue we are about to enter a “Fourth Industrial Revolution”: an era heralding the gradual fusion of digital, physical, and biological worlds (Schwab 2016). For many philosophers and theor…that we arrive at the point of raising the question how to make the One into something that holds up, that is, that is counted without being. Mathematization alone reaches a real [...] a real that has nothing to do with what traditional kno…

Pandaemonium Architecture 6.0 syllabus Fall 2025

2

Edward Bernays, Walter Lippmann, Propaganda, and Public Relations; The XX Committee, counterintelligence, ‘black propaganda’, and James Jesus Angleton’s “wilderness of mirrors”; early social engineering, parasociality and inducement, mis/di…What’s the Deal with Birds? v. Birds Aren’t Real– predatory journals, internet hoaxing “Birds are very strange. Some people are like “whoa they’re flying around and stuff, what’s the deal with that?” This sentiment is shared by people acros…

Dan McQuillan

from Resisting AI, an Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence

1

AI, as we know it, is a kind of computing, but it’s also a form of knowledge production, a paradigm for social organization and a political project. While it might be interesting in another context to ask philosophical questions about the m…

I.J. Good

Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine

1

THE FIRST ULTRAINTELLIGENT MACHINE

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