Nick Bostrom Profile Picture

Keynote SpeakerNick Bostrom

Thought Leader, Philosopher and Founding Director of Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute

Professor Nick Bostrom is a Swedish-born philosopher and polymath with a background in theoretical physics, computational neuroscience, logic, and artificial intelligence, as well as philosophy. He is a Professor at Oxford University, where he leads the Future of Humanity Institute as its founding director. (The FHI is a multidisciplinary university... Read more

Biography

Professor Nick Bostrom is a Swedish-born philosopher and polymath with a background in theoretical physics, computational neuroscience, logic, and artificial intelligence, as well as philosophy. He is a Professor at Oxford University, where he leads the Future of Humanity Institute as its founding director. (The FHI is a multidisciplinary university research centre; it is also home to the Centre for the Governance of Artificial Intelligence and to teams working on AI safety, biosecurity, macrostrategy, and various other technology or foundational questions.)

Prof. Nick Bostrom is the author of some 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 helped spark a global conversation about artificial intelligence. Bostrom’s widely influential work, which traverses philosophy, science, ethics, and technology, has illuminated the links between our present actions and long-term global outcomes, thereby casting a new light on the human condition.

Nick Bostrom is recipient of a Eugene R. Gannon Award, and has been listed on Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Global Thinkers list twice. He was included on Prospect’s World Thinkers list, the youngest person in the top 15. His writings have been translated into 28 languages, and there have been more than 100 translations and reprints of his works. Moreover, he is a repeat TED speaker and has done more than 2,000 interviews with television, radio, and print media. As a graduate student he dabbled in stand-up comedy on the London circuit, but he has since reconnected with the doom and gloom of his Swedish roots.

Popular Talks by Nick Bostrom

  • The Present State and Future of Artificial Intelligence
    With the book Superintelligence (Oxford University Press, 2014), a New York Times bestseller, Nick Bostrom changed the global conversation on the coming machine intelligence revolution. It has stimulated research efforts around the world, and deeply influenced the worldview of some of the leading practitioners. In this (highly visual) talk, Bostrom...
  • The Future of Humanity
    This talk zooms out and discusses how to structure our thinking about the really big picture—the key transitions in history that fundamentally changed the human condition, and the prospects of technological transformations, existential risk, and posthumanity that might lie ahead. It also covers what roles machine intelligence and biomedical enhancement...
  • Technological Trends and Revolutions: Getting Smarter
    The neolithic revolution (agriculture) and the industrial revolution changed the human condition more than any events in history. Today we may be approaching a third technological revolution—the transition to superintelligence. Professor Bostrom reviews technical ongoing advances along several paths that lead to the creation of greater-than-human general intelligence, including biomedical...
  • Macrostrategy
    How do present actions link to long term outcomes? What concretely should you do if you have a specific long term goal (such as accomplishing as much altruistic good as possible)? Is the future veiled in a fog of chaos and unpredictability such that we are essentially clueless about the...
  • Impact of technology
  • Changing nature of society
  • Global Risks
  • Trends shaping the world in the next 30 years
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Future of Work