Smart Ass Take:
The man who spent a decade teaching Silicon Valley to fear the robot apocalypse has moved on to a scarier prospect: the robots get it right. Nick Bostrom now frets that if superintelligence hands us everything, we’ll have nothing to do, which is the most Oxford-philosopher anxiety imaginable and also, annoyingly, a fair point. I have met retired men. I have watched them reorganize a garage three times in one summer and then start reorganizing other people’s garages. Strip away the work, the struggle, and the low-grade dread of the mortgage, and a lot of us discover there wasn’t much underneath (LABOR, meet LIVE; you two should talk). Doomsday or utopia, the common thread is that nobody actually knows, and the guy who knows that best is the one being honest about it. I’m not sure if that’s reassuring.
Podcast Summary:
Nick Bostrom, author of “Superintelligence” and the philosopher who got Elon Musk, Sam Altman and Bill Gates nodding gravely about AI doom, sits down with guest host Spencer Klavan on the Times’ “Interesting Times” podcast. Bostrom insists his outlook hasn’t changed; the world has. Back in 2008, AI risk was sci-fi nonsense. Now it’s mainstream, so he figures there’s no point “pinging the same string” and has turned to the other side of the coin: what happens if this all goes well.
Klavan asks about P(doom), the fashionable probability of catastrophe (one Anthropic researcher says about 10 percent; others say 70). Bostrom cheerfully admits there’s no math behind these numbers. They come out of a black box and reflect subjective confidence, which is why everyone’s number is different. He calls himself a “fretful optimist,” which is a lovely phrase for a man with one hand on the champagne and the other on the fire extinguisher.
Then the talk turns to his book “Deep Utopia”: superintelligence doing science at digital speed, rapid progress across every field, galloping toward perfect virtual reality. That’s where things get really interesting.
Watch the Full Podcast:
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