Top 50 Nick Bostrom Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Are you living in a computer simulation?”

— Nick Bostrom

2. “Machine intelligence is the last invention that humanity will ever need to make.”

— Nick Bostrom

3. “Human nature is a work in progress.”

— Nick Bostrom

4. “The challenge presented by the prospect of superintelligence, and how we might best respond is quite possibly the most important and most daunting challenge humanity has ever faced. And-whether we succeed or fail-it is probably the last challenge we will ever face.”

— Nick Bostrom

5. “We would want the solution to the safety problem before somebody figures out the solution to the AI problem.”

— Nick Bostrom

6. “Knowledge about limitations of your data collection process affects what inferences you can draw from the data.”

— Nick Bostrom

7. “When we are headed the wrong way, the last thing we need is progress.”

— Nick Bostrom

8. “There are some problems that technology can’t solve.”

— Nick Bostrom

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

— Nick Bostrom

10. “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

11. “Had Mother Nature been a real parent, she would have been in jail for child abuse and murder.”

— Nick Bostrom

12. “The first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.”

— Nick Bostrom

13. “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

14. “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

15. “When horses became obsolete as a source of moveable power, many were sold off to meatpackers to be processed into dog food, bone meal, leather, and glue. These animals had no alternative employment through which to earn their keep. In the United States, there were about 26 million horses in 1915. By the early 1950s, 2 million remained.2 Capital.”

— Nick Bostrom

16. “We find ourselves in a thicket of strategic complexity, surrounded by a dense mist of uncertainty.”

— Nick Bostrom

17. “Choosing the criteria for choosing.”

— Nick Bostrom

18. “An emulation operating at a speed of ten thousand times that of a biological brain would be able to read a book in a few seconds and write a PhD thesis in an afternoon.”

— Nick Bostrom

19. “We know that blind evolutionary processes can produce human-level general intelligence, since they have already done so at least once. Evolutionary processes with foresight – that is, genetic programs designed and guided by an intelligent human programmer – should be able to achieve a similar outcome with far greater efficiency.”

— Nick Bostrom

20. “Human working memory is able to hold no more than some four or five chunks of information at any given time.”

— Nick Bostrom

21. “Two decades is a sweet spot for prognosticators of radical change: near enough to be attention-grabbing and relevant, yet far enough to make it possible to suppose that a string of breakthroughs, currently only vaguely imaginable, might by then have occurred.”

— Nick Bostrom

22. “The bouillon cubes of discrete human-like intellects thus melt into an algorithmic soup.”

— Nick Bostrom

23. “The first is that brains, by contrast to the kinds of program we typically run on our computers, do not use standardized data storage and representation formats. Rather, each brain develops its own idiosyncratic representations of higher-level content.”

— Nick Bostrom

24. “Any death prior to the heat death of the universe is premature if your life is good.”

— Nick Bostrom

25. “One sympathizes with John McCarthy, who lamented: “As soon as it works, no one calls it AI anymore.”

— Nick Bostrom

26. “Expert chess playing, for example, was once thought to epitomize human intellection. In the view of several experts in the late fifties: “If one could devise a successful chess machine, one would seem to have penetrated to the core of human intellectual endeavor.”

— Nick Bostrom

27. “Before the prospect of an intelligence explosion, we humans are like small children playing with a bomb. Such is the mismatch between the power of our plaything and the immaturity of our conduct. Superintelligence is a challenge for which we are not ready now and will not be ready for a long time. We have little idea when the detonation will occur, though if we hold the device to our ear we can hear a faint ticking sound.”

— Nick Bostrom

28. “Some little idiot is bound to press the ignite button just to see what happens.”

— Nick Bostrom

29. “The computer scientist Donald Knuth was struck that “AI has by now succeeded in doing essentially everything that requires ‘thinking’ but has failed to do most of what people and animals do ‘without thinking’ – that, somehow, is much harder!”

— Nick Bostrom

30. “The orthogonality thesis Intelligence and final goals are orthogonal: more or less any level of intelligence could in principle be combined with more or less any final goal.”

— Nick Bostrom

31. “We do not need to plug a fiber optic cable into our brains in order to access the Internet. Not only can the human retina transmit data at an impressive rate of nearly 10 million bits per second, but it comes pre-packaged with a massive amount of dedicated wetware, the visual cortex, that is highly adapted to extracting meaning from this information torrent and to interfacing with other brain areas for further processing.”

— Nick Bostrom

32. “One can speculate that the tardiness and wobbliness of humanity’s progress on many of the “eternal problems” of philosophy are due to the unsuitability of the human cortex for philosophical work. On this view, our most celebrated philosophers are like dogs walking on their hind legs – just barely attaining the treshold level of performance required for engaging in the activity at all.”

— Nick Bostrom

33. “Solving the value-loading problem is a research challenge worthy of some of the next generation’s best mathematical talent.”

— Nick Bostrom

34. “The ground for preferring superintelligence to come before other potentially dangerous technologies, such as nanotechnology, is that superintelligence would reduce the existential risks from nanotechnology but not vice versa.4 Hence, if we create superintelligence first, we will face only those existential risks that are associated with superintelligence; whereas if we create nanotechnology first, we will face the risks of nanotechnology and then, additionally, the risks of superintelligence.”

— Nick Bostrom

35. “The existence of birds demonstrated that heavier-than-air flight was physically possible and prompted efforts to build flying machines. Yet the first functioning airplanes did not flap their wings. The jury is out on whether machine intelligence will be like flight, which humans achieved through an artificial mechanism, or like combustion, which we initially mastered by copying naturally occurring fires.”

— Nick Bostrom

36. “Nature might be a great experimentalist, but one who would never pass muster with an ethics review board – contravening the Helsinki Declaration and every norm of moral decency, left, right, and center.”

— Nick Bostrom

37. “Though this might cause the AI to be terminated, it might also encourage the engineers who perform the postmortem to believe that they have gleaned a valuable new insight into AI dynamics – leading them to place more trust in the next system they design, and thus increasing the chance that the now-defunct original AI’s goals will be achieved.”

— Nick Bostrom

38. “Some technical problems in the field of artificial intelligence, for instance, might be negative-value inasmuch as their solution would speed the development of machine intelligence without doing as much to expedite the development of control methods that could render the machine intelligence revolution survivable and beneficial.”

— Nick Bostrom

39. “Presumably, these agents are still too primitive to have any moral status. But how confident can we really be that this is so? More importantly, how confident can we be that we will know to stop in time, before our programs become capable of experiencing morally relevant suffering?”

— Nick Bostrom

40. “Instead of trying to produce a programme to simulate the adult mind, why not rather try to produce one which simulates the child’s? If this were then subjected to an appropriate course of education one would obtain the adult brain.3.”

— Nick Bostrom

41. “We can think of wisdom as the ability to get the important things approximately right.”

— Nick Bostrom

42. “The gap between a dumb and a clever person may appear large from an anthropocentric perspective, yet in a less parochial view the two have nearly indistinguishable minds.”

— Nick Bostrom

43. “Our demise may instead result from the habitat destruction that ensues when the AI begins massive global construction projects using nanotech factories and assemblers – construction.”

— Nick Bostrom

44. “Granted, there is still that picture of the Terminator jeering over practically every journalistic attempt to engage with the subject.”

— Nick Bostrom

45. “There are anthropogenic state risks at the existential level as well: the longer we live in an internationally anarchic system, the greater the cumulative chance of a thermonuclear Armageddon or of a great war fought with other kinds of weapons of mass destruction, laying waste to civilization.”

— Nick Bostrom

46. “A full-throttled deployment of the practices of strategic communication would kill candor and leave truth bereft to fend for herself in the backstabbing night of political bogeys.”

— Nick Bostrom

47. “Moral goodness might be more like a precious metal than an abundant element in human nature, and even after the ore has been processed and refined in accordance with the prescriptions of the CEV proposal, who knows whether the principal outcome will be shining virtue, indifferent slag, or toxic sludge?”

— Nick Bostrom

48. “Even with task variety and regular holidays, it is not certain that a human-like mind could live for thousands of subjective years without developing psychological problems.”

— Nick Bostrom

49. “Newer systems use statistical machine learning techniques that automatically build statistical models from observed usage patterns.”

— Nick Bostrom

50. “Human life, at its best, is fantastic. I’m asking you to create something even greater. Life that is truly humane.”

— Nick Bostrom