Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World - Hardcover

Bostrom, Nick

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1646871642 ISBN 13: 9781646871643

Publisher: Ideapress Publishing, 2024

Synopsis

Gold Medal Winner, Living Now Book Awards 2024

Best Books 2024, Kirkus Reviews

Winner, Independent Press Awards 2024

Bostrom’s previous book, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (OUP, 2014) sparked a global conversation on AI that continues to this day. That book, which became a surprise New York Times bestseller, focused on what might happen if AI development goes wrong.

But what if things go right? Suppose we develop superintelligence safely and ethically, and that we make good use of the almost magical powers this technology would unlock. We would transition into an era in which human labor becomes obsolete—a “post-instrumental” condition in which human efforts are not needed for any practical purpose. Furthermore, human nature itself becomes fully malleable.

The challenge we confront here is not technological but philosophical and spiritual. In such a “solved world”, what is the point of human existence? What gives meaning to life? What would we do and experience?

Deep Utopia—a work that is again decades ahead of its time—takes the reader who is able to follow on a journey into the heart of some of the profoundest questions before us, questions we didn’t even know to ask. It shows us a glimpse of a different kind of existence, which might be ours in the future.

About this title

About the Author

NICK BOSTROM is a Professor at Oxford University, where he is the founding director of the Future of Humanity Institute.  Bostrom is the world’s most cited philosopher aged 50 or under.  He is the author of more than 200 publications, including Anthropic Bias (2002), Global Catastrophic Risks (2008), Human Enhancement (2009), and Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014), a New York Times bestseller which sparked a global conversation about the future of AI.  His work has pioneered many of the ideas that frame current thinking about humanity’s future (such as the concept of an existential risk, the simulation argument, the vulnerable world hypothesis, the unilateralist’s curse, etc.), while some of his recent work concerns the moral status of digital minds.  His writings have been translated into more than 30 languages; he is a repeat main-stage TED speaker; and he has been interviewed more than 1,000 times by media outlets around the world.  He has been on Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Global Thinkers list twice and was included in Prospect’s World Thinkers list, the youngest person in the top 15.  He has an academic background in theoretical physics, AI, and computational neuroscience as well as philosophy.

Edition details

• Publisher: Ideapress Publishing
• Publication date: 2024
• ISBN 10: 1646871642
• ISBN 13: 9781646871643
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 536