This month we take a look at another of our favourite coaching books that can inspire you to success.
Nick Bostrom is Professor at Oxford University, where he is the founding Director of the Future of Humanity Institute, a multidisciplinary research centre which enables a set of exceptional mathematicians, philosophers, and scientists to think about global priorities and big questions for humanity. He also directs the Strategic Artificial Intelligence Research Center.
Bostrom has a background in physics, computational neuroscience, and mathematical logic as well as philosophy. He is the author of some 200 publications, including Anthropic Bias), Global Catastrophic Risks, Human Enhancement, and the academic book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, which became a New York Times bestseller. He is best known for his work in five areas existential risk, the simulation argument, anthropics (developing the first mathematically explicit theory of observation selection effects and impacts of future technology, especially machine intelligence.
Superintelligence asks the questions: what happens when machines surpass humans in general intelligence? Will artificial agents save or destroy us? Coaching expert Nick Bostrom lays the foundation for understanding the future of humanity and intelligent life. The human brain has some capabilities that the brains of other animals lack. It is to these distinctive capabilities that our species owes its dominant position. If machine brains surpassed human brains in general intelligence, then this new superintelligence could become extremely powerful—possibly beyond our control. As the fate of the gorillas now depends more on humans than on the species itself, so would the fate of humankind depend on the actions of the machine superintelligence.
But we have one advantage: we get to make the first move. Will it be possible to construct a seed Artificial Intelligence, to engineer initial conditions so as to make an intelligence explosion survivable? How could one achieve a controlled detonation?
This profoundly ambitious and original coaching book breaks down a vast track of difficult intellectual terrain. After an utterly engrossing journey that takes us to the frontiers of thinking about the human condition and the future of intelligent life, we find in Nick Bostrom’s work nothing less than a reconceptualization of the essential task of our time.
