Nick Bostrom - Managing Existential Risks related to Machine Intelligence - FHI

See article: Existential risks are those that threaten the entire future of humanity. Many theories of value imply that even relatively small reductions in net existential risk have enormous expected value. Despite their importance, issues surrounding human-extinction risks and related hazards remain poorly understood. In this paper, I clarify the concept of existential risk and develop an improved classification scheme. I discuss the relation between existential risks and basic issues in axiology, and show how existential risk reduction (via the maxipok rule) can serve as a strongly action-guiding principle for utilitarian concerns. I also show how the notion of existential risk suggests a new way of thinking about the ideal of sustainability.

Professor Nick Bostrom
Director & James Martin Research Fellow
Nick Bostrom is Professor in the Faculty of Philosophy at Oxford University and founding Director of the Future of Humanity Institute and of the Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology within the Oxford Martin School. He is the author of some 200 publications, including Anthropic Bias (Routledge, 2002), Global Catastrophic Risks (ed., OUP, 2008), and Human Enhancement (ed., OUP, 2009), and a forthcoming book on Superintelligence. He previously taught at Yale, and he was a Postdoctoral Fellow of the British Academy. Bostrom has a background in physics, computational neuroscience, and mathematical logic as well as philosophy.
He is best known for his work in five areas: (i) the concept of existential risk; (ii) the simulation argument; (iii) anthropics (developing the first mathematically explicit theory of observation selection effects); (iv) transhumanism, including related issues in bioethics and on consequences of future technologies; and (v) foundations and practical implications of consequentialism. He is currently working on a book on the possibility of an intelligence explosion and on the existential risks and strategic issues related to the prospect of machine superintelligence.
In 2009, he was awarded the 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 in the FP 100 Global Thinkers list, the Foreign Policy Magazine's list of the world's top 100 minds. His writings have been translated into more than 21 languages, and there have been some 80 translations or reprints of his works. He has done more than 500 interviews for TV, film, radio, and print media, and he has addressed academic and popular audiences around the world.