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Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World
A greyhound catching the mechanical lure—what would he actually do with it? Has he given this any thought?
Bostrom’s previous book, 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.
Bostrom’s previous book, 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.
536 pages, Hardcover
Published March 27, 2024
About the author
Nick Bostrom
21 books1,521 followersNick Bostrom is Professor at Oxford University, where he is the founding Director of the Future of Humanity Institute. He also directs the Strategic Artificial Intelligence Research Center. He is the author of some 200 publications, including Anthropic Bias (Routledge, 2002), Global Catastrophic Risks (ed., OUP, 2008), Human Enhancement (ed., OUP, 2009), and Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (OUP, 2014), a New York Times bestseller.
Bostrom holds bachelor degrees in artificial intelligence, philosophy, mathematics and logic followed by master’s degrees in philosophy, physics and computational neuroscience. In 2000, he was awarded a PhD in Philosophy from the London School of Economics.
He is recipient of a Eugene R. Gannon Award (one person selected annually worldwide from the fields of philosophy, mathematics, the arts and other humanities, and the natural sciences). He has been listed on Foreign Policy's Top 100 Global Thinkers list twice; and he was included on Prospect magazine's World Thinkers list, the youngest person in the top 15 from all fields and the highest-ranked analytic philosopher. His writings have been translated into 24 languages. There have been more than 100 translations and reprints of his works. During his time in London, Bostrom also did some turns on London’s stand-up comedy circuit.
Nick is best known for his work on existential risk, the anthropic principle, human enhancement ethics, the simulation argument, artificial intelligence risks, the reversal test, and practical implications of consequentialism. The bestseller Superintelligence, and FHI’s work on AI, has changed the global conversation on the future of machine intelligence, helping to stimulate the emergence of a new field of technical research on scalable AI control.
More: https://nickbostrom.com
Bostrom holds bachelor degrees in artificial intelligence, philosophy, mathematics and logic followed by master’s degrees in philosophy, physics and computational neuroscience. In 2000, he was awarded a PhD in Philosophy from the London School of Economics.
He is recipient of a Eugene R. Gannon Award (one person selected annually worldwide from the fields of philosophy, mathematics, the arts and other humanities, and the natural sciences). He has been listed on Foreign Policy's Top 100 Global Thinkers list twice; and he was included on Prospect magazine's World Thinkers list, the youngest person in the top 15 from all fields and the highest-ranked analytic philosopher. His writings have been translated into 24 languages. There have been more than 100 translations and reprints of his works. During his time in London, Bostrom also did some turns on London’s stand-up comedy circuit.
Nick is best known for his work on existential risk, the anthropic principle, human enhancement ethics, the simulation argument, artificial intelligence risks, the reversal test, and practical implications of consequentialism. The bestseller Superintelligence, and FHI’s work on AI, has changed the global conversation on the future of machine intelligence, helping to stimulate the emergence of a new field of technical research on scalable AI control.
More: https://nickbostrom.com
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
May 12, 2024
I greatly respect Bostrom as a thinker - he's helped conceive some of the memes that have been most influential in my ethical and intellectual beliefs and, therefore, my life priorities. Given this, I had high expectations of this book, but I found it moderately disappointing. Below, I'll outline three things I liked and then mention the main reason why I found it disappointing.
Three things I liked:
1. Outlining the contours of our cosmic endowment:
By making two different BOTECs of the potential size of galaxy-expanding life by making two estimates: 10^43 human lives (assuming we stay in our biological form) and 10^58 (assuming that we optimize for emulations).
2. The notion of technological maturity:
"A condition in which a set of capabilities exist that afford a level of control over nature that is close to the maximum that could be achieved in the fullness of time."
3. Meaning as Encompassing Transcendental Purpose A purpose P is the meaning of person S’s life if and only if: (i) P is encompassing for S; (ii) S has strong reason to embrace P; and (iii) the reason is derived from a context of justification that is external to S’s mundane existence.
Why I found it disappointing
The main reason for my disappointment is the incredibly messy structure of the book.
It's divided into six parts (Monday, Tuesday, ... Saturday) with an excessive number of fairly non-descriptive sub-chapters.
Three things I liked:
1. Outlining the contours of our cosmic endowment:
By making two different BOTECs of the potential size of galaxy-expanding life by making two estimates: 10^43 human lives (assuming we stay in our biological form) and 10^58 (assuming that we optimize for emulations).
2. The notion of technological maturity:
"A condition in which a set of capabilities exist that afford a level of control over nature that is close to the maximum that could be achieved in the fullness of time."
3. Meaning as Encompassing Transcendental Purpose A purpose P is the meaning of person S’s life if and only if: (i) P is encompassing for S; (ii) S has strong reason to embrace P; and (iii) the reason is derived from a context of justification that is external to S’s mundane existence.
Why I found it disappointing
The main reason for my disappointment is the incredibly messy structure of the book.
It's divided into six parts (Monday, Tuesday, ... Saturday) with an excessive number of fairly non-descriptive sub-chapters.
April 10, 2024
A "Post-Utopian" book. Breezy read with interesting points scattered throughout, but at the same time unnecessarily long. It employs Socratic method, presenting dialogues between a teacher and his students across six chapters (from Monday to Saturday).
These discussions explore various utopian concepts, such as emotional utopia, governance utopia, cultural utopia, post-scarcity utopia, post-work utopia, technological maturity etc.
The book also explores the challenges of deep redundancy—how to attain interestingness, fulfillment, richness, purpose, and meaning in a post-utopian society.
These discussions explore various utopian concepts, such as emotional utopia, governance utopia, cultural utopia, post-scarcity utopia, post-work utopia, technological maturity etc.
The book also explores the challenges of deep redundancy—how to attain interestingness, fulfillment, richness, purpose, and meaning in a post-utopian society.
April 20, 2024
Some interesting ideas scattered around. But awful execution. This books proves that being smart and having good taste are two very different things.
April 24, 2024
Bostrom's previous book, Superintelligence, triggered expressions of concern. In his latest work, he describes his hopes for the distant future, presumably to limit the risk that fear of AI will lead to a The Butlerian Jihad-like scenario.
While Bostrom is relatively cautious about endorsing specific features of a utopia, he clearly expresses his dissatisfaction with the current state of the world. For instance, in a footnoted rant about preserving nature, he writes:
The book begins as if addressing a broad audience, then drifts into philosophy that seems obscure, leading me to wonder if it's intended as a parody of aimless academic philosophy.
Future Technology
Bostrom focuses on technological rather than political forces that might enable utopia. He cites the example of people with congenital analgesia, who live without pain but often face health issues. This dilemma could be mitigated by designing a safer environment.
Bostrom emphasizes more ambitious options:
Mass Unemployment
As technology surpasses human abilities at most tasks, we may eventually face a post-work society. Hiring humans would become less appealing when robots can better understand tasks, work faster, and cost less than feeding a human worker.
That conclusion shouldn't be controversial given Bostrom's assumptions about technology. Unfortunately, those assumptions about technology are highly controversial, at least among people who haven't paid close attention to trends in AI capabilities.
The stereotype of unemployment is that it's a sign of failure. But Bostrom points to neglected counterexamples, such as retirement and the absence of child labor. Reframing technological unemployment in this light makes it appear less disturbing. Just as someone in 1800 might have struggled to imagine the leisure enjoyed by children and retirees today, we may have difficulty envisioning a future of mass leisure.
If things go well, income from capital and land could provide luxury for all.
Bostrom notes that it's unclear whether automating most, but not all, human labor will increase or decrease wages. The dramatic changes from mass unemployment might occur much later than the automation of most current job tasks.
Post-Instrumentality Purpose
Many challenges that motivate human action can, in principle, be automated. Given enough time, machines could outperform humans in these tasks.
What will be left for humans to care about accomplishing? To a first approximation, that eliminates what currently gives our lives purpose. Bostrom calls this the age of post-instrumentality.
Much of the book describes how social interactions could provide adequate sources of purpose.
He briefly mentions that some Eastern cultures discourage attachment to purpose, which seems like a stronger argument than his main points. It's unclear why he treats this as a minor detail.
As Robin Hanson puts it:
If I live millions of years, I expect that I'll experience large changes in how I feel about having a purpose to guide my life.
Bostrom appears too focused on satisfying the values reflecting the current culture of those debating utopia and AI. These values mostly represent adaptations to recent conditions. The patterns of cultural and value changes suggest we're far from achieving a stable form of culture that will satisfy most people.
Bostrom seems to target critics whose arguments often amount to proof by failure of imagination. Their true objections might be:
* Arrogant beliefs that their culture has found the One True Moral System, so any culture adapting to drastically different conditions will be unethical.
* Fear of change: critics belonging to an elite that knows how to succeed under current conditions may be unable to predict whether they'll retain their elite status in a utopia.
The book also dedicates many pages to interestingness, asking whether long lifespans and astronomical population sizes will exhaust opportunities to be interesting. This convinced me of my confusion regarding what interestingness I value.
Malthus
A large cloud on the distant horizon is the pressure to increase population to the point where per capita wealth is driven back down to non-utopian levels.
We can solve this by ... um, waiting for his next book to explain how? Or by cooperating? Why did he bring up Malthus and then leave us with too little analysis to guess whether there's a good answer?
To be clear, I don't consider Malthus to provide a strong argument against utopia. My main complaint is that Bostrom leaves readers confused as to how uncomfortable the relevant trade-offs will be.
Style
The book's style sometimes seems more novel than the substance. Bostrom is the wrong person to pioneer innovation in writing styles.
The substance is valuable enough to deserve a wider audience. Parts of the book attempt to appeal to a broad readership, but the core content is mostly written in a style aimed at professional philosophers.
Nearly all readers will find the book too long. The sections (chapters?) titled Tuesday and Wednesday contain the most valuable ideas, so maybe read just those.
Concluding Thoughts
Bostrom offers little reassurance that we can safely navigate to such a utopia. However, it's challenging to steer in that direction if we only focus on dystopias to avoid. A compelling vision of a heavenly distant future could help us balance risks and rewards. While Bostrom provides an intellectual vision that should encourage us, it falls short emotionally.
Bostrom's utopia is technically feasible. Are we wise enough to create it? Bostrom has no answer.
Many readers will reject the book because it relies on technology too far from what we're familiar with. I don't expect those readers to say much beyond "I can't imagine ...". I have little respect for such reactions.
A variety of other readers will object to Bostrom's intuitions about what humans will want. These are the important objections to consider.
P.S. While writing this review, I learned that Bostrom's Future of Humanity Institute has shut down for unclear reasons, seemingly related to friction with Oxford's philosophy department. This deserves further discussion, but I'm unsure what to say. The book's strangely confusing ending, where a fictional dean unexpectedly halts Bostrom's talk, appears to reference this situation, but the message is too cryptic for me to decipher.
While Bostrom is relatively cautious about endorsing specific features of a utopia, he clearly expresses his dissatisfaction with the current state of the world. For instance, in a footnoted rant about preserving nature, he writes:
Imagine that some technologically advanced civilization arrived on Earth ... Imagine they said: "The most important thing is to preserve the ecosystem in its natural splendor. In particular, the predator populations must be preserved: the psychopath killers, the fascist goons, the despotic death squads ... What a tragedy if this rich natural diversity were replaced with a monoculture of healthy, happy, well-fed people living in peace and harmony." ... this would be appallingly callous.
The book begins as if addressing a broad audience, then drifts into philosophy that seems obscure, leading me to wonder if it's intended as a parody of aimless academic philosophy.
Future Technology
Bostrom focuses on technological rather than political forces that might enable utopia. He cites the example of people with congenital analgesia, who live without pain but often face health issues. This dilemma could be mitigated by designing a safer environment.
Bostrom emphasizes more ambitious options:
But another approach would be to create a mechanism that serves the same function as pain without being painful. Imagine an "exoskin": a layer of nanotech sensors so thin that we can't feel it or see it, but which monitors our skin surface for noxious stimuli. If we put our hand on a hot plate, ... the mechanism contracts our muscle fibers so as to make our hand withdraw
Mass Unemployment
As technology surpasses human abilities at most tasks, we may eventually face a post-work society. Hiring humans would become less appealing when robots can better understand tasks, work faster, and cost less than feeding a human worker.
That conclusion shouldn't be controversial given Bostrom's assumptions about technology. Unfortunately, those assumptions about technology are highly controversial, at least among people who haven't paid close attention to trends in AI capabilities.
The stereotype of unemployment is that it's a sign of failure. But Bostrom points to neglected counterexamples, such as retirement and the absence of child labor. Reframing technological unemployment in this light makes it appear less disturbing. Just as someone in 1800 might have struggled to imagine the leisure enjoyed by children and retirees today, we may have difficulty envisioning a future of mass leisure.
If things go well, income from capital and land could provide luxury for all.
Bostrom notes that it's unclear whether automating most, but not all, human labor will increase or decrease wages. The dramatic changes from mass unemployment might occur much later than the automation of most current job tasks.
Post-Instrumentality Purpose
Many challenges that motivate human action can, in principle, be automated. Given enough time, machines could outperform humans in these tasks.
What will be left for humans to care about accomplishing? To a first approximation, that eliminates what currently gives our lives purpose. Bostrom calls this the age of post-instrumentality.
Much of the book describes how social interactions could provide adequate sources of purpose.
He briefly mentions that some Eastern cultures discourage attachment to purpose, which seems like a stronger argument than his main points. It's unclear why he treats this as a minor detail.
As Robin Hanson puts it:
Bostrom asks his question about people pretty close to him, leftist academics in rich Western societies.
If I live millions of years, I expect that I'll experience large changes in how I feel about having a purpose to guide my life.
Bostrom appears too focused on satisfying the values reflecting the current culture of those debating utopia and AI. These values mostly represent adaptations to recent conditions. The patterns of cultural and value changes suggest we're far from achieving a stable form of culture that will satisfy most people.
Bostrom seems to target critics whose arguments often amount to proof by failure of imagination. Their true objections might be:
* Arrogant beliefs that their culture has found the One True Moral System, so any culture adapting to drastically different conditions will be unethical.
* Fear of change: critics belonging to an elite that knows how to succeed under current conditions may be unable to predict whether they'll retain their elite status in a utopia.
The book also dedicates many pages to interestingness, asking whether long lifespans and astronomical population sizes will exhaust opportunities to be interesting. This convinced me of my confusion regarding what interestingness I value.
Malthus
A large cloud on the distant horizon is the pressure to increase population to the point where per capita wealth is driven back down to non-utopian levels.
We can solve this by ... um, waiting for his next book to explain how? Or by cooperating? Why did he bring up Malthus and then leave us with too little analysis to guess whether there's a good answer?
To be clear, I don't consider Malthus to provide a strong argument against utopia. My main complaint is that Bostrom leaves readers confused as to how uncomfortable the relevant trade-offs will be.
Style
The book's style sometimes seems more novel than the substance. Bostrom is the wrong person to pioneer innovation in writing styles.
The substance is valuable enough to deserve a wider audience. Parts of the book attempt to appeal to a broad readership, but the core content is mostly written in a style aimed at professional philosophers.
Nearly all readers will find the book too long. The sections (chapters?) titled Tuesday and Wednesday contain the most valuable ideas, so maybe read just those.
Concluding Thoughts
Bostrom offers little reassurance that we can safely navigate to such a utopia. However, it's challenging to steer in that direction if we only focus on dystopias to avoid. A compelling vision of a heavenly distant future could help us balance risks and rewards. While Bostrom provides an intellectual vision that should encourage us, it falls short emotionally.
Bostrom's utopia is technically feasible. Are we wise enough to create it? Bostrom has no answer.
Many readers will reject the book because it relies on technology too far from what we're familiar with. I don't expect those readers to say much beyond "I can't imagine ...". I have little respect for such reactions.
A variety of other readers will object to Bostrom's intuitions about what humans will want. These are the important objections to consider.
P.S. While writing this review, I learned that Bostrom's Future of Humanity Institute has shut down for unclear reasons, seemingly related to friction with Oxford's philosophy department. This deserves further discussion, but I'm unsure what to say. The book's strangely confusing ending, where a fictional dean unexpectedly halts Bostrom's talk, appears to reference this situation, but the message is too cryptic for me to decipher.
May 21, 2024
I was intrigued by the subtitle of this book: ‘Life and Meaning in a Solved World.’ With the pace of change and technological maturation, we might, at some point, reach a state where there is little to no work for human beings. How would we still find meaning in life, since we derive a large part of our meaning from work and solving problems? An interesting research question, poorly executed. Too complex, too many pages, and still in the dark about why Nick embedded a fairytale in his book. I would not recommend this book to anyone.
Back to the book…
A quote from Keynes continues to echo in many books – he predicted that our workweek would decrease to just 15 hours a week. Mind you, he made this prediction back in 1930. We are still far off, and this is mainly because we are using our wealth for consumerism; however, with the pace of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, it could happen quickly. If this becomes cheap enough, it will push humans out of the labor market.
In his extensive writing, Nick posits that if we want to sustainably improve the living standards of all humans, we need to control populations – also known as the ‘Malthusian State.’ Simply put: the mouths to feed will outnumber what we can produce. Technology can only help us so far; it still comes down to the scarcity of land. I wonder how big of a problem this is, assuming that affluent people will have fewer children (there is some scientific evidence for this).
In his book, he also outlines some of the limitations of ‘technological maturity’ – which is described as ‘a condition in which a set of capabilities exists that afford a level of control over nature that is close to the maximum achievable in the fullness of time.’ Some of the limitations are cosmological in nature (what is within our reach is finite), prudential barriers (perhaps some technologies are too dangerous), and/or axiological (simply not aligned with our values).
Idle hands are the devil’s workshop’, so in a solved world, how will we respond to an abundance of leisure and wealth? We don’t really know. We could extrapolate how kids behave, aristocrats, or retirees, for instance. However, they are all part of a wider system where human beings work. Like Nick stated, maybe freedom is a void depleted of purpose. But this could be solved with artificial purpose – we could engineer any experience (power over nature). To me, this would mean the end of being human.
Back to the book…
A quote from Keynes continues to echo in many books – he predicted that our workweek would decrease to just 15 hours a week. Mind you, he made this prediction back in 1930. We are still far off, and this is mainly because we are using our wealth for consumerism; however, with the pace of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, it could happen quickly. If this becomes cheap enough, it will push humans out of the labor market.
In his extensive writing, Nick posits that if we want to sustainably improve the living standards of all humans, we need to control populations – also known as the ‘Malthusian State.’ Simply put: the mouths to feed will outnumber what we can produce. Technology can only help us so far; it still comes down to the scarcity of land. I wonder how big of a problem this is, assuming that affluent people will have fewer children (there is some scientific evidence for this).
In his book, he also outlines some of the limitations of ‘technological maturity’ – which is described as ‘a condition in which a set of capabilities exists that afford a level of control over nature that is close to the maximum achievable in the fullness of time.’ Some of the limitations are cosmological in nature (what is within our reach is finite), prudential barriers (perhaps some technologies are too dangerous), and/or axiological (simply not aligned with our values).
Idle hands are the devil’s workshop’, so in a solved world, how will we respond to an abundance of leisure and wealth? We don’t really know. We could extrapolate how kids behave, aristocrats, or retirees, for instance. However, they are all part of a wider system where human beings work. Like Nick stated, maybe freedom is a void depleted of purpose. But this could be solved with artificial purpose – we could engineer any experience (power over nature). To me, this would mean the end of being human.
April 18, 2024
This is one of the strangest sort-of popular science (or philosophy, or something or other) books I've ever read. If you can picture the impact of a cross between Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel Escher Bach and Gaileo's Two New Sciences (at least, its conversational structure), then thrown in a touch of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, and you can get a feel for what the experience of reading it is like - bewildering with the feeling that there is something deep that you can never quite extract from it.
Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom is probably best known in popular science for his book Superintelligence in which he looked at the implications of having artificial intelligence (AI) that goes beyond human capabilities. In a sense, Deep Utopia is a sequel, picking out one aspect of this speculation: what life would be like for us if technology had solved all our existential problems, while (in the form of superintelligence) it had also taken away much of our apparent purpose in life. To get a feel for this, and for Bostrom's writing style, he summarises it thus:
The telos of technology, we might say, is to allow us to accomplish more with less effort. If we extrapolate this internal directionality to its logical terminus, we arrive at a condition in which we can accomplish everything with no effort. Over the millennia, our species has meandered a fair distance toward this destination already. Soon the bullet train of machine super intelligence (have we not already heard the conductor's whistle?) could whisk us the rest of the way.
If the style is reminiscent of some half-remembered, rather pompous university lecture, this is not accidental. The starting point of the book's convoluted structure is a transcript of a lecture series given by a version of Bostrom that feels like the self-portrayals of actors in the TV series Extras, where all their self-importance is exaggerated for humorous effect.
If we only got the lectures, the approach wouldn't be particularly radical. But there is far more. Firstly, fictional students ask questions during the lecture (some subject to heavy-handed putdowns by pseudo-Bostrom). And there are three extra students who exist outside the lectures, Tessius, Kelvin and Firafix who provide a commentary on the whole process. We also get Bostrom's handouts and his reading material for the next lecture, much of which is based on the 'Feodor the Fox correspondence'. This takes the form of a (to be honest, deeply tedious) pseudo-ancient series of letters from Feodor to his uncle in a world populated by animals. I had to skip much of this to avoid falling asleep.
One way of looking at the book is that it is clever, original and verging on the mind-blowing. Another is that it's clever-clever, pretentious and often distinctly hard going. In practice, I suspect it's both. Certainly the lecture content is sometimes an opaque mix of philosophy and economics - yet despite finding reading it like walking through mud, I wanted to continue, arguably more for the satisfaction of completion than any benefit I got from reading it.
Sometimes you have to congratulate a magnificent failure, where someone has taken a huge chance, pushing the boundaries, but ultimately it doesn't work. I can't say I enjoyed reading this book - but I think I am glad that I did. However, because of its ambiguous nature, I can’t go beyond three stars.
Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom is probably best known in popular science for his book Superintelligence in which he looked at the implications of having artificial intelligence (AI) that goes beyond human capabilities. In a sense, Deep Utopia is a sequel, picking out one aspect of this speculation: what life would be like for us if technology had solved all our existential problems, while (in the form of superintelligence) it had also taken away much of our apparent purpose in life. To get a feel for this, and for Bostrom's writing style, he summarises it thus:
The telos of technology, we might say, is to allow us to accomplish more with less effort. If we extrapolate this internal directionality to its logical terminus, we arrive at a condition in which we can accomplish everything with no effort. Over the millennia, our species has meandered a fair distance toward this destination already. Soon the bullet train of machine super intelligence (have we not already heard the conductor's whistle?) could whisk us the rest of the way.
If the style is reminiscent of some half-remembered, rather pompous university lecture, this is not accidental. The starting point of the book's convoluted structure is a transcript of a lecture series given by a version of Bostrom that feels like the self-portrayals of actors in the TV series Extras, where all their self-importance is exaggerated for humorous effect.
If we only got the lectures, the approach wouldn't be particularly radical. But there is far more. Firstly, fictional students ask questions during the lecture (some subject to heavy-handed putdowns by pseudo-Bostrom). And there are three extra students who exist outside the lectures, Tessius, Kelvin and Firafix who provide a commentary on the whole process. We also get Bostrom's handouts and his reading material for the next lecture, much of which is based on the 'Feodor the Fox correspondence'. This takes the form of a (to be honest, deeply tedious) pseudo-ancient series of letters from Feodor to his uncle in a world populated by animals. I had to skip much of this to avoid falling asleep.
One way of looking at the book is that it is clever, original and verging on the mind-blowing. Another is that it's clever-clever, pretentious and often distinctly hard going. In practice, I suspect it's both. Certainly the lecture content is sometimes an opaque mix of philosophy and economics - yet despite finding reading it like walking through mud, I wanted to continue, arguably more for the satisfaction of completion than any benefit I got from reading it.
Sometimes you have to congratulate a magnificent failure, where someone has taken a huge chance, pushing the boundaries, but ultimately it doesn't work. I can't say I enjoyed reading this book - but I think I am glad that I did. However, because of its ambiguous nature, I can’t go beyond three stars.
June 18, 2024
Bostrom, the patron saint of technological maturity (or maybe AI dystopia) has written a new book, about, this time, what will happen when AI takes over everyones jobs (and I mean really takes them over) and everyone has no work. How will people live, derive meaning, and make sense of their lives. That is what this book is about.
When Super-intelligence came out (his other book) that forms the basis of most of the zeitgeist of AI alignment problems that people discuss these days, I read it maybe 10 years after it was published. What struck me by it was just how far Bostrom seems able to see into the future. When You read Deep Utopia, it seems so fantastical and ridiculous, and yet, so too did Super-inteligence when it came out.
Whereas Super-intelligence had this kind of sci-fi quality to it, Deep Utopia has a more philosophical tone. Much of the book is about meaning in a very meta sense, and the book, kind of like Godel Escher Bach, has this fiction / non-fiction swap in the chapters, where the points Bostrom makes are also articulated through humour and fiction. While the philosophical quality of the book can at times be a bit too meta to really enjoy, the really incredible parts of the book wash over you in waves, making the book well worth its complexity.
Case in point, the story of ThermoRex, a room heater who becomes sentient, and where, dear reader, we are to learn about what kind of choices one makes on a sentient room heater's behalf.
Is it worth reading? Yes. Why? Because, I suspect, 10 years from now, much of the content of this book will matter a lot more than we think it does. Bostrom is, I would argue, maybe one of the greatest living minds alive today, offering points of view that really do question much of our held assumptions about the world. If nothing else, Deep Utopia is an insight into the inner thinking patterns of someone so well versed in things like logic, it is quite a marvel to be in this kind of company, even on the page.
When Super-intelligence came out (his other book) that forms the basis of most of the zeitgeist of AI alignment problems that people discuss these days, I read it maybe 10 years after it was published. What struck me by it was just how far Bostrom seems able to see into the future. When You read Deep Utopia, it seems so fantastical and ridiculous, and yet, so too did Super-inteligence when it came out.
Whereas Super-intelligence had this kind of sci-fi quality to it, Deep Utopia has a more philosophical tone. Much of the book is about meaning in a very meta sense, and the book, kind of like Godel Escher Bach, has this fiction / non-fiction swap in the chapters, where the points Bostrom makes are also articulated through humour and fiction. While the philosophical quality of the book can at times be a bit too meta to really enjoy, the really incredible parts of the book wash over you in waves, making the book well worth its complexity.
Case in point, the story of ThermoRex, a room heater who becomes sentient, and where, dear reader, we are to learn about what kind of choices one makes on a sentient room heater's behalf.
Is it worth reading? Yes. Why? Because, I suspect, 10 years from now, much of the content of this book will matter a lot more than we think it does. Bostrom is, I would argue, maybe one of the greatest living minds alive today, offering points of view that really do question much of our held assumptions about the world. If nothing else, Deep Utopia is an insight into the inner thinking patterns of someone so well versed in things like logic, it is quite a marvel to be in this kind of company, even on the page.
April 25, 2024
An interesting topic but the book was disappointing. Too many things I simply cannot understand:
1) Horrible way to name chapters from Monday to Saturday. Maybe it's some kind of philosophical joke that I didn't understand, but I've never seen such meaningless chapters in a book before.
2) Lengthy, pointless and boring animal adventures at the end of the chapters.
3) The speculations are too pedantic and sprawling and take attention away from the main point.
4) "Just upload your mind"?? The author, who is otherwise pedantic to the point of exhaustion, repeats this very controversial claim as if it were self-evident! A few questions that quickly come to mind:
a. Science still cannot say practically anything about the birth and essence of consciousness.
b. If a person’s mind is uploaded like a computer program, is consciousness really transferred at the same time?
c. If not, the result is a zombie who behaves outwardly like him, in which case he does not benefit from uploading anything.
d. If the result is indeed a conscious being, but he still remains conscious only in his own body, that does him no good either.
e. If the consciousness were somehow magically transferred during uploading, what would happen to the consciousness that is in the biological body? Would consciousness be shared and how would such awareness be experienced etc. etc. Alas, not a single speculation on the subject in a book of thousands of speculations.
I give two stars, because the book has a few good ideas about purpose and, as far as I know, not much has been written about purpose in techno-utopia before.
1) Horrible way to name chapters from Monday to Saturday. Maybe it's some kind of philosophical joke that I didn't understand, but I've never seen such meaningless chapters in a book before.
2) Lengthy, pointless and boring animal adventures at the end of the chapters.
3) The speculations are too pedantic and sprawling and take attention away from the main point.
4) "Just upload your mind"?? The author, who is otherwise pedantic to the point of exhaustion, repeats this very controversial claim as if it were self-evident! A few questions that quickly come to mind:
a. Science still cannot say practically anything about the birth and essence of consciousness.
b. If a person’s mind is uploaded like a computer program, is consciousness really transferred at the same time?
c. If not, the result is a zombie who behaves outwardly like him, in which case he does not benefit from uploading anything.
d. If the result is indeed a conscious being, but he still remains conscious only in his own body, that does him no good either.
e. If the consciousness were somehow magically transferred during uploading, what would happen to the consciousness that is in the biological body? Would consciousness be shared and how would such awareness be experienced etc. etc. Alas, not a single speculation on the subject in a book of thousands of speculations.
I give two stars, because the book has a few good ideas about purpose and, as far as I know, not much has been written about purpose in techno-utopia before.
June 16, 2024
There are some interesting points and arguments. But the book is more like the author's shower thoughts on technological maturity and human's meaning crisis than a systematic, structured thesis that sets the preconditions, identifies the questions, and answer them rigorously.
The uninformative chapter names and subchapter names reflect the book's messiness. The "funny" dialogues and mini-stories and boxed content neither make the book more entertaining nor add depth to the arguments, if there're any clear arguments the author's trying to make.
I also find discussions about technological maturity quite pointless because I picked up the book hoping to learn more about how humans should respond to AI advancements in the next hundred years, while "technological maturity" is at least a thousand years ahead. But this is just my own preference.
You'll find this book appealing if you're seeking thought-provoking ideas and imagination, but not if you're looking for philosophy.
The uninformative chapter names and subchapter names reflect the book's messiness. The "funny" dialogues and mini-stories and boxed content neither make the book more entertaining nor add depth to the arguments, if there're any clear arguments the author's trying to make.
I also find discussions about technological maturity quite pointless because I picked up the book hoping to learn more about how humans should respond to AI advancements in the next hundred years, while "technological maturity" is at least a thousand years ahead. But this is just my own preference.
You'll find this book appealing if you're seeking thought-provoking ideas and imagination, but not if you're looking for philosophy.
May 13, 2024
If I could rate it more accurately, I think Deep Utopia deserves a 3.5. At times, the book has some 5-star moments. I've not read anything which so deeply goes into some extremely profound topics pertaining to utopian life, and I really appreciate it for that. I also think that a few words have been added to my vocabulary by Bostrom's prose. I think my biggest critique of the book is that it was a bit of a rollercoaster. As well as there being 5-star peaks, there were 2-star troughs. I found the part about population growth especially tiring, because I accept Bostrom's argument that many problems would be easily remedied by superintelligence, but this logic didn't (at least not glaringly) seem to apply to population conundrums.
Overall, a good read, and one I will probably revisit if I need to find my meaning in utopia - but I won't hesitate to skip over a few sections! :)
Overall, a good read, and one I will probably revisit if I need to find my meaning in utopia - but I won't hesitate to skip over a few sections! :)
May 10, 2024
Bostrom has no idea what he is talking about when it comes to physical and computational limits of neuratech and uploads. Filled with misinformation about neuroscience and physics, and sometimes absurd reasoning about technological maturity.
It’s a bombastic, self-aggrandizing text, dismissive even of the perspectives of his own fictional students.
This topic could have lended itself for a great book, if Bostrom had had a bit more self-reflection and humility, while keeping his passion for big ideas
It’s a bombastic, self-aggrandizing text, dismissive even of the perspectives of his own fictional students.
This topic could have lended itself for a great book, if Bostrom had had a bit more self-reflection and humility, while keeping his passion for big ideas
July 7, 2024
Are these concepts prescient or half-baked speculation? I went back and forth until I recalled Bostrom's earlier "Superintelligence" might have seemed far-fetched but now looks to have been ahead of its time.
I will have to ponder these ideas and come back to this book later.
Note: I originally rated this three stars. I've amended that to four. How to spend one's days in a solved world is remarkably familiar if one has wondered what an afterlife would be.
I will have to ponder these ideas and come back to this book later.
Note: I originally rated this three stars. I've amended that to four. How to spend one's days in a solved world is remarkably familiar if one has wondered what an afterlife would be.
July 7, 2024
Some interesting ideas but painfully boring and very badly written. Contains lots of pointless filler. Bostrom's lack of engagement with the concept of utopia (and its history) frustrated me a lot given the explicitly utopian nature of the book.
April 22, 2024
Solipsistic
June 6, 2024
The book contains interesting ideas, but its bothersome structure and excessive filler material make it feel long and sparse.
July 2, 2024
Challenging. Fascinating. Inscrutable. Entertaining.
June 28, 2024
Somewhat of a letdown in the wake of Bostrom's prior work. I don't regret reading this, but I also don't know whether I would recommend it. Most of the philosophical action occurs in a relatively small percentage of the book; much of it is merely interesting and/or nice-to-know rather than need-to-know.
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