The NIck Bostrom Effect

In the spirit of my conversation with Nick Bostrom yesterday, I wanted to post his TED talk from 2007, which I don’t believe has been posted yet on this site. I also want to mention that prior the the video clip I uploaded yesterday I did get to talk to him in more detail about our repeated attempts to contact him. He was nice enough to grant us an email interview which will be done at a later date.

I must say that I thoroughly enjoyed talking to Nick, so much so that I used up all of my time talking to him when I also had the option to speak with Brian Green. In the end I believe it was worth it. I got a feel for his character and from what it seems he is a man that not only seeks all these technologies for his own beneficial purposes, but may actually want to minimize risk.

This also leads me to something that I believe is important that we must establish on this site. We don’t wish to impose any thought or philosophy on this site. Being the co-founder of this site I did not set out to push any type of philosophical thought on the development of transhumanism, but instead to help minimize the potential dangers of creating a “Utopian” society. There is currently an overabundance of optimism that has very few serious rebuttals to all the things that could go wrong in the process.

Regardless of how insignificant humans may end up being, in the grand scope of the universe, I believe that all sentient life should have rights. I’m sure this will one day enter the political sphere of debate as we begin facing heavy competition by creatures of our own design. Personally, I feel it’s always been more of a “life” issue, rather than one of sentience, because nonbiological beings could end up in the middle of this conversation. This is a much bigger topic, and will have to be explored later on its own.

In the end, speaking to Nick was very inspiring to me in my personal quest to protect us from being accidentally or purposely going extinct. This is why my first question to nick was about the prolonged existence of the human race:

He responded that it’s logical that humans may exist past the Singularity, but to me that’s not enough. We have to continue discussing these topics and their potential to render the human species obsolete. The technologies are pressing forward every day. We try our best to show you that this is in fact coming, yet the conversations to ensure a positive singularity for the human race have not advanced in my eyes. This deeply saddens me, because it appears that in our blind arrogance to achieve godhood we are willing to bet the farm.

That’s like going to Vegas and coming back with a brand new car only to tell your wife that your first born was sacrificed in the process to obtain it.

And to Nick I say this; Please keep the existential risk conversation growing. Seek out more opinions, and don’t overlook the grassroots efforts. 😉