Quotes from Nick Bostrom

I personally don't think of myself as either an optimist or a pessimist.

Had Mother Nature been a real parent, she would have been in jail for child abuse and murder.

A full-throttled deployment of the practices of strategic communication would kill candor and leave truth bereft to fend for herself in the backstabbing night of political bogeys.

Machine intelligence is the last invention that humanity will ever need to make.

Knowledge about limitations of your data collection process affects what inferences you can draw from the data.

Once a discovery has been published, there is no way of un-publishing it.

For healthy adult people, the really big thing we can foresee are ways of intervening in the ageing process, either by slowing or reversing it.

Any death prior to the heat death of the universe is premature if your life is good.

Traits acquired during one's lifetime - muscles built up in the gym, for example - cannot be passed on to the next generation. Now with technology, as it happens, we might indeed be able to transfer some of our acquired traits on to our selected offspring by genetic engineering.

There are some problems that technology can't solve.

The first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.

Discovering traces of life on Mars would be of tremendous scientific significance: The first time that any signs of extraterrestrial life had ever been detected. Many people would also find it heartening to learn that we're not entirely alone in this vast, cold cosmos.

Are you living in a computer simulation?

Nanotechnology has been moving a little faster than I expected, virtual reality a little slower.