Nick Bostrom

philosopher · 36 mentions across 6 readings

In this course

Bostrom is a philosopher known for analyzing existential risks posed by superintelligent AI systems, particularly through the concept of the "Singularity" and ultraintelligent machines that might exceed human control. He appears in these readings as a framing reference for debates about whether AI development represents a genuinely discontinuous rupture in human history, helping position AI not merely as a technical achievement but as a threshold event with civilizational stakes. His work enables these course materials to situate machine learning within broader questions about technological acceleration and the boundaries between controllable systems and emergent intelligence.

Mentioned in 6 readings

Timnit Gebru and Emile 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

--- <sup>1</sup>: 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. Kurzw…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…Supposing we live in a simulation, what are the implications for us humans? The foregoing remarks notwithstanding, the implications are not all that radical. Our best guide to how our posthuman creators have chosen to set up our world is th…

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…

Vincent Le

Spirit in the Crypt: Negarestani vs Land

2

It is worthwhile outlining the book’s appendix at this point since it also takes issue with AI researchers like Nick Bostrom and Eliezer Yudkowsky’s understanding of superintelligence as an ideal Bayesian model of inductive prediction. Nega…contends, because Land is not modelling all intelligent systems in nature on either the human’s contingent aspects or its formal socio-semantic conditions. On the contrary, it is Negarestani who rejects all other self-organizing intelligent…

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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