Nick Bostrom

At work on a magnum opus. Also doing research for a potential book on the philosophy and ethics of digital minds. The Unilateralist's Curse: The Case for a Principle of Conformity , w/ Anders Sandberg & Tom Douglas, in Social Epistemology Humans are relatively expensive but absolutely cheap. [w/ Carl Shulman] [v. 1.8 (2020)] [in Rethinking Moral St... atus, eds. Stephen Clarke & Julian Savulescu (Oxford University Press, forthcoming)] [ pdf ] An analysis of the global desirability of different forms of openness (including source code, science, data, safety techniques, capabilities, and goals). We present a heuristic for correcting for one kind of bias (status quo bias), which we suggest affects many of our judgments about the consequences of modifying human nature. We apply this heuristic to the case of cognitive enhancements, and argue that the consequentialist case for this is much stronger than commonly recognized. Recounts the Tale of a most vicious Dragon that ate thousands of people every day, and of the actions that the King, the People, and an assembly of Dragonologists took with respect thereto. Suns are illuminating and heating empty rooms, unused energy is being flushed down black holes, and our great common endowment of negentropy is being irreversibly degraded into entropy on a cosmic scale. These are resources that an advanced civilization could have used to create value-structures, such as sentient beings living worthwhile lives... Cosmology shows that we might well be living in an infinite universe that contains infinitely many happy and sad people. Given some assumptions, aggregative ethics implies that such a world contains an infinite amount of positive value and an infinite amount of negative value. But you can presumably do only a finite amount of good or bad. Since an infinite cardinal quantity is unchanged by the addition or subtraction of a finite quantity, it looks as though you can't change the value of the world. Aggregative consequentialism (and many other important ethical theories) ...Read More