Deep Utopia

Autorentext

NICK BOSTROM is a Professor at Oxford University, where he is the founding director of the Future of Humanity Institute.  Bostrom is the world’s most cited philosopher aged 50 or under.  He is the author of more than 200 publications, including Anthropic Bias (2002), Global Catastrophic Risks (2008), Human Enhancement **(2009), and Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014), a New York Times bestseller which sparked a global conversation about the future of AI.  His work has pioneered many of the ideas that frame current thinking about humanity’s future (such as the concept of an existential risk, the simulation argument, the vulnerable world hypothesis, the unilateralist’s curse, etc.), while some of his recent work concerns the moral status of digital minds.  His writings have been translated into more than 30 languages; he is a repeat main-stage TED speaker; and he has been interviewed more than 1,000 times by media outlets around the world.  He has been on Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Global Thinkers list twice and was included in Prospect’s World Thinkers list, the youngest person in the top 15.  He has an academic background in theoretical physics, AI, and computational neuroscience as well as philosophy.

Klappentext

Bostrom’s last book, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (OUP, 2014), sparked a global conversation on AI that continues and widens to this day. That book, which despite its academic style became a New York Times bestseller, focused on what would happen if AI goes wrong.

But what if AI goes right? Suppose we succeed in developing superintelligence safely and that we make good use of the almost magical powers this unlocks. We would then achieve full unemployment. More than that, we would transition into a “post-instrumental condition," in which human effort is not needed for any practical purpose. This would be a condition of material abundance. Human nature itself would become fully malleable.

In such a solved world, what would be the point of human existence? What could give meaning to our lives? Which old values will we have to sacrifice, and which new values will we be able to realize to wonderful degrees?

Deep Utopia—a work that is again years ahead of its time—takes the readers on a journey into some of the most profound questions that arise as we dissolve the limits of our current mode of being. It is a lush, playful, difficult, and human text that interleaves fiction stories and philosophical lectures that show us a glimpse of a different kind of existence–one that might be ours in the not-so-distant future.

Winner of 7 Book Awards!
2024 AMERICAN LEGACY BOOK AWARDS WINNER
2024 LIVING NOW BOOK AWARD EVERGREEN GOLD MEDAL WINNER
2024 PENCRAFT BOOK AWARDS 1ST PLACE WINNER

Zusammenfassung

A greyhound catching the mechanical lure—what would he actually do with it?  Has he given this any thought? Bostrom’s previous book, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies changed the global conversation on AI and became a New York Times bestseller.  It focused on what might happen if AI development goes wrong.  But what if things go right? Suppose that we develop superintelligence safely, govern it well, and make good use of the cornucopian wealth and near magical technological powers that this technology can unlock.  If this transition to the machine intelligence era goes well, human labor becomes obsolete.  We would thus enter a condition of "post-instrumentality", in which our efforts are not needed for any practical purpose.  Furthermore, at technological maturity, human nature becomes entirely malleable. Here we confront a challenge that is not technological but philosophical and spiritual.  In such a solved world, what is the point of human existence?  What gives meaning to life?  What do we do all day? Deep Utopia shines new light on these old questions, and gives us glimpses of a different kind of existence, which might be ours in the future.