THE FUTURE IS HERE

Superintelligence: paths, dangers, strategies

Professor Nick Bostrom, Director, Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technologies

Join Professor Nick Bostrom for a talk on his new book, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, and for a journey that takes us to the frontiers of thinking about the human condition and the future of 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. Other animals have stronger muscles or sharper claws, but we have cleverer brains.

If machine brains one day come to surpass human brains in general intelligence, then this new superintelligence could become very powerful. As the fate of the gorillas now depends more on us humans than on the gorillas themselves, so the fate of our species then would come to 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 AI or otherwise to engineer initial conditions so as to make an intelligence explosion survivable? How could one achieve a controlled detonation?

http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/event/1913

Oxford Martin School,
University of Oxford
www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk