About this item
Highlights
- Gold Medal Winner, Living Now Book Awards 2024Best Books 2024, Kirkus ReviewsWinner, Independent Press Awards 2024Bostrom's previous book, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (OUP, 2014) sparked a global conversation on AI that continues to this day.
- Author(s): Nick Bostrom
- 536 Pages
- Computers + Internet, Intelligence (AI) & Semantics
Description
About the Book
"If the AI transition goes well, human labor becomes obsolete. Furthermore, at technological maturity, human nature becomes entirely malleable. We will thus enter a condition of 'post-instrumentality', in which our efforts are not needed for any practical purpose. 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 a new light on these old questions, giving us glimpses of a different kind of existence, which might be ours in the future." -- Dust jacket.Book Synopsis
Gold Medal Winner, Living Now Book Awards 2024Best Books 2024, Kirkus ReviewsWinner, Independent Press Awards 2024Bostrom's previous book, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (OUP, 2014) sparked a global conversation on AI that continues to this day. That book, which became a surprise New York Times bestseller, focused on what might happen if AI development goes wrong.
But what if things go right? Suppose we develop superintelligence safely and ethically, and that we make good use of the almost magical powers this technology would unlock. We would transition into an era in which human labor becomes obsolete--a "post-instrumental" condition in which human efforts are not needed for any practical purpose. Furthermore, human nature itself becomes fully malleable.
The challenge we confront here 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 would we do and experience?
Deep Utopia--a work that is again decades ahead of its time--takes the reader who is able to follow on a journey into the heart of some of the profoundest questions before us, questions we didn't even know to ask. It shows us a glimpse of a different kind of existence, which might be ours in the future.
Review Quotes
"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, President of Shalem College
"Fascinating" --The New York Times
"Yeah." --Elon Musk
"A major contribution to human thought and ways of thinking." --Robert Lawrence Kuhn
"Brilliant! Hilarious, poignant, insightful, clever, important." --Prof. Thaddeus Metz
"When technology has solved humanity's deepest problems, what is left to do? ... 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
"Reminiscent of Plato's dialogues--with a 21st-century twist." --Stuff (NZ)
"Bostrom is a marvelously energetic prose stylist ... 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
"One of the strangest ... books I've ever read." --Popular Science Books
"A really fun, and important, book... the writing is brilliant... incredibly rich... a constant parade of fascinating ideas." --Prof. Guy Kahane, Oxford University
"Wow." --Prof. Erik Brynjolfsson, Stanford University; Co-author of 'The Second Machine Age'