Nick Bostrom quotes

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

#Progress #Way #Lasts

Are you living in a computer simulation?
-- Nick Bostrom

#Computer #Simulation

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

#Opportunity #Errors #Risk

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

#People #Healthy #Way

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

#Safety #Want #Problem

There are some problems that technology can't solve.
-- Nick Bostrom

#Technology #Problem #Solve

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

#Humanity #Lasts #Needs

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

#Intelligent #Forever #Bottles

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

#Data #Process #Inference

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

#Mother #Children #Real

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

#Powerful #Technology #Years

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

#Civilization #Firsts #Niche

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

#Library #Research #Digging