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Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World Hardcover – March 27, 2024
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A greyhound catching the mechanical lure—what would he actually do with it? Has he given this any thought?
Bostrom’s previous book, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies changed the global conversation on AI and became a New York Times bestseller. It focused on what might happen if AI development goes wrong. But what if things go right?
Suppose that we develop superintelligence safely, govern it well, and make good use of the cornucopian wealth and near magical technological powers that this technology can unlock. If this transition to the machine intelligence era goes well, human labor becomes obsolete. We would thus enter a condition of "post-instrumentality", in which our efforts are not needed for any practical purpose. Furthermore, at technological maturity, human nature becomes entirely malleable.
Here we confront a challenge that 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 do we do all day?
Deep Utopia shines new light on these old questions, and gives us glimpses of a different kind of existence, which might be ours in the future.
- Print length536 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherIdeapress Publishing
- Publication dateMarch 27, 2024
- Dimensions6.1 x 1.3 x 9.2 inches
- ISBN-101646871642
- ISBN-13978-1646871643
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Get to know this book
Popular highlight
With sufficiently advanced automation technology, capital becomes a substitute for labor.206 Kindle readers highlighted thisPopular highlight
For the most part, however, we have used our increased productivity for consumption rather than leisure. Greed has triumphed over Sloth.184 Kindle readers highlighted thisPopular highlight
For the value of one’s opinions, in a matter like this, is a function of how generously one has allowed the alternatives to play with one’s soul.91 Kindle readers highlighted this
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"This is a wondrous book. It is mind-expanding. It is poetic. It is moving. It is funny. The writing is superb. Every page is full of ideas.” — Russ Roberts, EconTalk host, President of Shalem College
"Wow!" — Professor Erik Brynjolfsson, Stanford University; Co-author of The Second Machine Age
"When technology has solved humanity’s deepest problems, what is left to do? That is one question considered in a new publication by Nick Bostrom. … He argues that beyond the post-scarcity world lies a “post-instrumental” one … With the arrival of AI Utopia, this would be put to the test. Quite a lot would ride on the result." — The Economist
"Yeah" — Elon Musk
"A fascinating book" — Peter Coy, The New York Times
“Rather than play the doomy hits, Deep Utopia considers a future in which humanity has successfully developed superintelligent machines but averted disaster. … [it] examines what meaning there would be in life inside a techno-utopia, and asks if it might be rather hollow.” — WIRED
"Bostrom is a marvelously energetic prose stylist; it’s uncanny how often he turns subjects like utilitarianism and Malthusian superabundance into genuinely thrilling reading. ... employs a wry understated humor that’s often very quiet in its punchlines. ... A complex and stimulatingly provocative look at just how possible a fulfilling life might be.” — Kirkus Reviews
“Reminiscent of Plato’s dialogues—with a 21st-century twist.”— Stuff (NZ)
"This is one of the strangest sort-of popular science (or philosophy, or something or other) books I've ever read. … I can't say I enjoyed reading this book - but I think I am glad that I did." — Popular Science Books
"A major contribution to human thought and ways of thinking." — Robert Lawrence Kuhn
"A really fun, and important, book... the writing is brilliant... incredibly rich... a constant parade of fascinating ideas." — Professor Guy Kahane, University of Oxford
"Brilliant! Hilarious, poignant, insightful, clever, important." — Professor Thaddeus Metz, University of Pretoria, author of Meaning in Life
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : Ideapress Publishing (March 27, 2024)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 536 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1646871642
- ISBN-13 : 978-1646871643
- Item Weight : 1.88 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.1 x 1.3 x 9.2 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #48,055 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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 the 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, astronomical waste, 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.
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Yes, there are a few paragraphs here and there that are worth reading. There's a bit of dialogue that is clever and a bit more that's amusing. The structure around a series of lectures might have worked out with some more refining of the concept --- I think that Bertrand Russell, for instance, did some of this in his autobiography, but Russell's use of his own correspondence to buttress that linear approach gave it a stronger foundation than Bostrom's attempt.
But the book overwhelmingly is a loss of one's time. The author did not manage to pull off a Hofstadterian feat like "Godel, Escher, and Bach", where a deeply playful approach worked out. He didn't even manage to pull off the somewhat lighter touch that Steven Pinker can bring to bear (and Pinker's interesting ability to flip his own argument around, at least occasionally, with grace and skill.)
Bostrom is a good writer; indeed, I think that prose style in "Deep Utopia" was more approachable than that of "Superintelligence". My own guess is that what Bostrom needed was a good editor to help navigate this project, one willing to challenge the author. Instead, too much material that should have not made it into this volume was left there. Material that should have been given a thorough trimming was allowed to run on.
This is embarrassing but this is from one of my books titled "Proximity." Philosophy book.
"let us speak, think now about this– the dangers of prophesy; the dangers of psychics; the dangers of peoplelike Nastradamus; morelike Nastradumbusdownward; “prophets” as we call them are a calamity and a hoarfrost of the human mind; a fishkill of logical thought; a headless puppy; people putting forth their faith and believing in these charlatans is a danger to the entire humanrace; “prophets”; take Nastradamus for example– he wrote quatrains that could be interpreted in any number of ways; his whole scheme was to was to be vague; anyone could do what he did; allya gotta do is pickout some names of countries or well-known landmarks and surround them with strange, variously ( ) interpreted words; words interpreted variously– we could do one right now even– let's take the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, they're always good for some drama and bloodshed; so for instance here is a quatrain mentioning them thusly:
=+the blindfolded mouse will stab the Euphrates
with his thimble full of Tigris water
while the handicapped duck billed platypus
licks the back of the Portuguese toad=+
there; now give it 100 or 200 years and let someone read this vague quatrain, and somewhere, somesuch, sometime, someone will find somekind of meaning to those foggy four lines; what will it give birth to?; the belief in these quatrains, these tercets, claiming to predict the future are dangerous to humanity and one day some person in a place of power is going to think something is supposed to happen, and therefore, will cause it to happen because they were idiotic enough to buy into it [have I said this before?]; to believe in some meaningless prophesy; things likethis could lead to the beheading of the human race, to the cutoff heads of all Mankinde; swivelsway the future will; hopefully people will learn to clean their heads, to knock the nonsense out of their heads like water in their ears;
There are much better books and articles about AI and possible post-AI societal outcomes.
Avoid.
Top reviews from other countries
Loved the idea of realized ai as thought experiment equivalent to a particle accelerator
And discuss some hot topics that most authors would be very afraid to discuss
Whether inequality is good .. or the role of peace...
Gives you a sense of existential hope, something very much needed in these times. (For that, I also highly recommend Bostrom's working paper "Base Camp for Mt. Ethics".)
Perhaps not as excellent as Bostrom's previous work (could have used some editing at times) but still great.
But maybe this book wasn't written for us, after all, but a coming superintelligence. And as that it's certainly an important subject, perhaps the most important of our time. May the ThermoRex - a surprisingly fun short story included in the book about a room heater turned conscious being - be nice to us.