Top 41 Nick Bostrom Quotes
#1. 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
#2. Granted, there is still that picture of the Terminator jeering over practically every journalistic attempt to engage with the subject.
Nick Bostrom
#3. The bouillon cubes of discrete human-like intellects thus melt into an algorithmic soup.
Nick Bostrom
#4. Any death prior to the heat death of the universe is premature if your life is good.
Nick Bostrom
#5. Had Mother Nature been a real parent, she would have been in jail for child abuse and murder.
Nick Bostrom
#6. Biological neurons operate at a peak speed of about 200 Hz, a full seven orders of magnitude slower than a modern microprocessor (~ 2 GHz).
Nick Bostrom
#7. When we are headed the wrong way, the last thing we need is progress.
Nick Bostrom
#8. 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
#9. Once a discovery has been published, there is no way of un-publishing it.
Nick Bostrom
#10. 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
#11. Machine intelligence is the last invention that humanity will ever need to make.
Nick Bostrom
#12. Some little idiot is bound to press the ignite button just to see what happens.
Nick Bostrom
#13. There is more scholarly work on the life-habits of the dung fly than on existential risks [to humanity].
Nick Bostrom
#14. We find ourselves in a thicket of strategic complexity, surrounded by a dense mist of uncertainty.
Nick Bostrom
#15. 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
#16. Human working memory is able to hold no more than some four or five chunks of information at any given time.
Nick Bostrom
#17. We should not be confident in our ability to keep a super-intelligent genie locked up in its bottle forever.
Nick Bostrom
#18. 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
#19. Traits acquired during one's lifetime - muscles built up in the gym, for example - cannot be passed on to the next generation. Now with technology, as it happens, we might indeed be able to transfer some of our acquired traits on to our selected offspring by genetic engineering.
Nick Bostrom
#20. Solving the value-loading problem is a research challenge worthy of some of the next generation's best mathematical talent.
Nick Bostrom
#22. the orthogonality thesis speaks not of rationality or reason, but of intelligence.
Nick Bostrom
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. There are some problems that technology can't solve.
Nick Bostrom
#26. We would want the solution to the safety problem before somebody figures out the solution to the AI problem.
Nick Bostrom
#27. (On one estimate, the adult human brain stores about one billion bits - a couple of orders of magnitude less than a low-end smartphone.
Nick Bostrom
#28. I personally don't think of myself as either an optimist or a pessimist.
Nick Bostrom
#29. 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
#30. But what of the seemingly more fanciful idea that the internet might one day "wake up"? Could the internet become something more than just the backbone of a loosely integrated collective superintelligence - something more like a virtual skull housing an emerging unified super-intellect? (This
Nick Bostrom
#31. Table 2 When will human-level machine intelligence be attained?81
Nick Bostrom
#32. 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
#33. Knowledge about limitations of your data collection process affects what inferences you can draw from the data.
Nick Bostrom
#34. 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
#36. 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
#37. Nanotechnology has been moving a little faster than I expected, virtual reality a little slower.
Nick Bostrom
#38. Discovering traces of life on Mars would be of tremendous scientific significance: The first time that any signs of extraterrestrial life had ever been detected. Many people would also find it heartening to learn that we're not entirely alone in this vast, cold cosmos.
Nick Bostrom
#40. 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
#41. The first period of excitement, which began with the Dartmouth meeting, was later described by John McCarthy (the event's main organizer) as the "Look, Ma, no hands!" era.
Nick Bostrom
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