Nick Bostrom

1973-present · Swedish · Existential Risk, AI Safety, Anthropic Reasoning, Transhumanism, Decision Theory

Machine intelligence is the last invention that humanity will ever need to make.

When Nick Bostrom argues that we might already be living inside a computer simulation, he is not writing science fiction — he is doing rigorous probability theory. Born in Helsingborg, Sweden in 1973, he trained across physics, neuroscience, mathematics, and philosophy before founding Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute in 2005, a research hub that for nearly two decades produced much of the early academic work on the threats facing our species, until it closed in 2024.

Topics Nick Bostrom addresses

• existential risk
• the simulation argument
• superintelligence and AI alignment
• orthogonality thesis
• instrumental convergence
• observation selection effects
• the Self-Sampling Assumption
• anthropic reasoning
• the Doomsday Argument
• the Vulnerable World Hypothesis
• transhumanism and posthuman dignity
• longtermism
• astronomical waste
• the treacherous turn
• unaligned artificial intelligence
• the singleton hypothesis
• crucial considerations
• information hazards
• the Reversal Test
• embryo selection and cognitive enhancement
• the unilateralist's curse
• civilizational collapse and recovery
• dystopian lock-in
• anthropic shadow

Converse with Nick Bostrom on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Nick Bostrom's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.