Who is Nick Bostrom?

Professor Nick Bostrom is a philosopher who was the director of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, tasked with anticipating and preventing threats to human civilization.

He has been studying the risks of artificial intelligence for over twenty years. In his 2014 book Superintelligence

Superintelligence

An AI with cognitive abilities far greater than those of humans in a wide range of important domains.

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• First, why is superintelligence a topic of concern

• Second, what is a “hard takeoff

  Takeoff speed

  How quickly the first AI with roughly human-level intelligence leads to the first AI with vastly superhuman intelligence.

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  ” and how does it impact our concern about superintelligence?

• Third, what measures can we take to make superintelligence safe and beneficial for humanity?