Nick Bostrom discusses pleasure as the first ring of defence of meaning in a plastic utopia. 5-ringed defence: Transcript: Like imagine working your way through that point where you think this actually doesn’t look appealing at all, this kind of solved world where we like, what’s the point? But then we can start to rebuild…
Are we living in the final moments of the slow era? Nick Bostrom: Superintelligence Could Be a Year Away – or Not Back in 2012, when I first chatted with Nick Bostrom, AI risk was a fringe academic curiosity, rarely surfacing in mainstream discourse. That changed in 2014 with Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence, which established a…
Nick Bostrom dropped a bombshell that cuts through some of the haze around AI doom-and-gloom: “I think ultimately this transition to the superintelligence era is one we should do.” That’s right—should. Not “might” or “could,” but a firm nudge toward a future where humanity doesn’t just survive AI but thrives with it. Even more striking?…
In short: Satiable values have diminishing returns with more resources, while insatiable values always want more, potentially leading to risky AI behaviour – it seems likely that AI with insatiable values could make existential trades, like gambling the world for a chance to double resources. Therefore potentially design AI with satiable values to ensure stability,…
Key Points Understanding UBI and Its Challenges Universal Basic Income (UBI) is a system where everyone gets regular cash payments, no strings attached. It’s seen as a way to help people in an AI-driven economy where jobs might disappear. But there are worries. For example, if landlords know everyone has extra money, they might raise…
The interview has now been released! We covered a lot of stuff which at the time of writing hasn’t been covered elsewhere in detail. Super excited that I’ll be interviewing Nick Bostrom again in a few days – last time was in 2012 (on XRisks of AI and the Simulation Argument). This time we will…
“I argue that there is a realistic possibility that some AI systems will be conscious and/or robustly agentic in the near future. That means that the prospect of AI welfare and moral patienthood, i.e. of AI systems with their own interests and moral significance, is no longer an issue only for sci-fi or the distant…
Some argue that without mathematical precision AI safety will come down to a cosmic roll of the dice with steep odds of failing – I hope they are wrong. The debate over whether AI morality should be achieved through mathematical precision or software design reveals a tension over whether human values can be perfectly specified…
We’ve built machines that can out-calculate, out-predict, and soon out-think us. But could they ever out-care us – or will they, with all that power, remain indifferent? We lack the experience with something smarter than us. Fair enough. We’ve never met an entity that verifiably outstrips our cognitive sophistication across the board – after all,…
Nick Bostrom addresses concerns about biased influence on the extrapolation base in his discussions on indirect normativity (IN – i.e., an approach where the AI deduces ideal values or states of affairs rather than running with current values and states of affairs) esp. coherent extrapolated volition (CEV) and value alignment in his magnum opus Superintelligence….