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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.



About the Author

Nick Bostrom

Nick Bostrom is Professor at Oxford University, where he is the founding Director of the Future of Humanity Institute, a multidisciplinary research center which enables a set of exceptional mathematicians, philosophers, and scientists to think about global priorities and big questions for humanity. He also directs the Strategic Artificial Intelligence Research Center.

Bostrom has a background in physics, computational neuroscience, and mathematical logic as well as philosophy. He is the author of some 200 publications, including Anthropic Bias (Routledge, 2002) , Global Catastrophic Risks (ed., OUP, 2008) , Human Enhancement (ed., OUP, 2009) , and the academic book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (OUP, 2014) , which became a New York Times bestseller. He is best known for his work in five areas: (i) existential risk; (ii) the simulation argument; (iii) anthropics (developing the first mathematically explicit theory of observation selection effects) ; (iv) impacts of future technology, especially machine intelligence; and (v) implications of consequentialism for global strategy.

He is recipient of a Eugene R. Gannon Award (one person selected annually worldwide from the fields of philosophy, mathematics, the arts and other humanities, and the natural sciences) . He has been listed on Foreign Policy's Top 100 Global Thinkers list twice; and he was included on Prospect magazine's World Thinkers list, the youngest person in the top 15 from all fields and the highest-ranked analytic philosopher. His writings have been translated into 24 languages. There have been more than 100 translations and reprints of his works.

For more, see www.nickbostrom.com



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