Nicholas Bostrom
About
Oxford philosopher, author of Deep Utopia and Superintelligence
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Claims by Nicholas Bostrom (20 of 22)
Schooling Aims to Produce Disciplined Workers
The current school system is structured to produce disciplined workers—training children to sit at desks, complete assigned tasks on command, and be scored and graded—because the economy currently needs workers, but in a world without jobs we could instead raise children to cultivate appreciation of art, literature, conversation, humor, physical activity, and nature.
Self-worth Built on Useful Contribution
Humans have built their conception of themselves and their dignity on the idea that they can make a useful contribution to the world, so in a solved world where all practical problems are solved or better handled by AI, this foundation of self-worth is removed, creating a disconcerting psychological vacuum.
Automation Ends in Total Post-Work Condition
Moderate automation is only the first layer of a process whose logical terminus is that essentially all economic labor is done better by machines, producing a post-work condition where humans no longer need to do any work to earn income—and after machine superintelligence drives further innovation at digital timescales, this approaches technological maturity where most physically possible technologies have been developed.
Plasticity Removes Reasons for Self-Improvement
At technological maturity humans gain 'plasticity'—the ability to reshape body, brain, and psychology at will via tailored drugs, direct brain manipulation, or uploading—which removes even the remaining reasons for effortful activity, since skills like mathematics or states like fitness or pleasure could be installed directly without the preceding effort.
Post-Instrumental Condition Makes Effort Odious
Because most leisure activities (shopping, exercise, learning) have a 'do X for the sake of Y' structure, and at technological maturity machines or pills can deliver Y directly and better, the appeal of doing them yourself collapses, producing a post-instrumental condition in which all instrumental effort becomes odious.
Income From Capital Not Labor in Solved World
The solved world need not require all human desires to be satisfied; even if many desire ever more wealth, individuals could not meaningfully increase income through their own labor (like a billionaire earning $5/hour at McDonald's), so income would come from owned capital or social transfers like UBI rather than direct labor.
Greed Triumphed Over Sloth
Keynes underestimated how much people would keep working; rather than using productivity gains for leisure, 'greed has triumphed over sloth' as people channel extra productivity into extra consumption, much of which is positional and zero-sum—pursuing luxury goods to gain status over others.
Games Create Artificial Purpose
Games are the model for creating artificial purpose: by setting an arbitrary goal (like getting a golf ball through holes in sequence using only a club), one generates an activity in which to exercise skill and derive pleasure—and nothing prevents creating elaborate artificial purposes at technological maturity, distinct from real purposes that involve things you actually need to do.
Sustainable Bliss Is Physically Possible
Humans are currently designed to be stingy with reward and not engineered for sustainable bliss, so our intuitions about persistent ecstasy are off; but since some people are sustainably miserable for years, there is no metaphysical reason a consistent state on the upside is impossible, and at technological maturity one could recalibrate the set point for boredom and habituation to spend far more time genuinely enjoying life.
Pleasure Can Be Given Experiential Texture
Rather than mere dazed pleasure, well-being could be attached to experiential texture—aesthetic perception of beauty, scientific insight like Archimedes' flash of discovery, or genuine understanding of another person—producing states that are both ecstatically happy and rich in worthwhile informational content, far superior to the image of a junkie.
Hard to Find Independent Vantage on Values
It is very hard to obtain an independent vantage point or 'ground truth' on whether new ways of living are better or worse, because opinions about them tend to be mere reflections of one's idiosyncratic personality, upbringing, and influences rather than well-founded judgments.
Continued Growth Could Reframe Aging as Tragedy
If humans could continue growing—brains developing, bodies strengthening, understanding deepening for several hundred years rather than stopping development around age 20—then current life, in which we acquire a modicum of wisdom only as our bodies fall apart and we get dementia and die, might come to be seen as a horror equivalent to 100% infant mortality where no one ever got to grow up.
Givens Become Variables at Technological Maturity
Many features of human life that have always been fixed givens—being born, dying, childhood, having to make a living, fixed human psychology—become choosable variables at technological maturity, so that someone, whether individuals, governments, or a humanity-wide process, will have to form an opinion about what future we actually want, and the answers are far from obvious.
Modernity Reduces Enchantment
Enchantment—a high-bandwidth way of interacting with reality through all our modalities (emotions, facial expressions, body, self-control) rather than through a narrow interface—is reduced by the modern reductionist relationship to the world; where pre-modern people related to a river as having a god requiring reverence, we now relate to it merely as water to be tested for cleanliness, and future scenarios risk losing the remaining enchantment.
Humanity Will Likely Bungle Unprecedented Technology
Humanity normally reaches semi-adequate results only through trial and error—iterating through every wrong approach and slowly converging through hard knocks—but unprecedented and vastly more powerful technology like superintelligence presents a different order of challenge where this iterative method may not be available, making a big mess a real possibility.
All-Things-Considered Assessment of World Breaks Scales
It is extremely hard to form an all-things-considered assessment of whether the present world is good, because weighing the wonderful things (children's smiles, beauty) against the suffering (cancer wards, factory-farmed pigs, mundane tedium of dead-end jobs) causes the evaluative scales to essentially break.
Companion Robots May Out-Compete Real People
Social companion robots—even current AI models with voice, good visual avatars, and a reinforcement-learning loop trained to maximize engagement so users don't log out—could become so compelling that many people prefer interacting with hyper-optimized virtual personas over flawed real-world people, and the next generation may regard this as obviously superior.
Optimize Children for Enjoyment Given Short Timelines
Because AI timelines may be short and a child today may never need to make a living—or human labor may become obsolete mid-career—it makes sense to hedge bets but also to optimize for children actually enjoying their childhood, learning from how children are naturally good at play, creativity, and fascination in a workless condition.
Work Satisfaction From Instrumental Outcomes
Much of the satisfaction from work comes not from the activity itself but from its instrumental structure—doing X (effort, concentration) to achieve a separate outcome Y, such as a finished book that others can enjoy or one's own intellectual growth—and at technological maturity this 'for the sake of which' largely disappears for most activities.
Bespoke Effort for Others Survives Automation
Doing things for the sake of others who value that you personally did them can persist as a genuine source of purpose even in a solved world—just as a hand-baked, inferior loaf of bread can be valued precisely because the baker invested the time—because satisfying another's preference that you yourself do the thing can only be achieved by your own effort.
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