Nick Bostrom(b. 1973)

Nick Bostrom (born 1973) is a Swedish-born philosopher known for his work on existential risk, the simulation argument, and superintelligence. He is a professor at Oxford University and director of the Future of Humanity Institute.

Bostrom earned his PhD from the London School of Economics and has published influential papers on the anthropic principle, human enhancement ethics, and the future of intelligence. His book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies examines the potential risks and opportunities of artificial general intelligence.

His simulation argument⁠—that we might be living in a computer simulation⁠—has generated significant philosophical discussion about the nature of reality and has been compared to religious cosmologies that see the physical world as embedded within a larger spiritual reality.

Quotations by Nick Bostrom

Further rumination on these themes could climax in a naturalistic theogony that would study the structure of this hierarchy, and the constraints imposed on its inhabitants by the possibility that their actions on their own level may affect the treatment they receive from dwellers of deeper levels. For example, if nobody can be sure that they are at the basement-level, then everybody would have to consider the possibility that their actions will be rewarded or punished, based perhaps on moral criteria, by their simulators. An afterlife would be a real possibility. Because of this fundamental uncertainty, even the basement civilization may have a reason to behave ethically. The fact that it has such a reason for moral behavior would of course add to everybody else’s reason for behaving morally, and so on, in truly virtuous circle. One might get a kind of universal ethical imperative, which it would be in everybody’s self-interest to obey, as it were ‘from nowhere.’