What are the basic notions one needs to grasp in the complex debate on transhumanism and the advancement of technology? Nick Bostrom, the Founding Director of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, helps us navigate the concepts, biases and circumstances we need to take into account before making judgements on what we should do to stay alive, and stay safe, as superintelligent systems overtake us.

In the transhumanist debate there are quite a lot of terms that are difficult to understand for the lay reader, and I was wondering whether we could start by unpacking some of these terms. The most basic concept would be superintelligence – what is it?

Superintelligence – I don’t even know whether it counts as a neologism – but having a way to refer to the possibility of intelligent systems that are smarter than human brains is important because I think systems smarter than the human brain could be very powerful constituents of the future of humanity. Superintelligence is an abstract term which covers all systems that are a lot smarter than the general reasoning and planning ability that the contemporary human minds have. A lot of our work here focuses on machine learning.

Those more intelligent systems than us raise a great public fear for our human future. Just like the existence of gorillas depends on humans more than on themselves, now we are scared that superintelligence will decide the fate of humanity… Are you an optimist or a pessimist about this perspective?

You could put me down as a frightened optimist. I resist this binary choice between being biased and naive in an optimistic direction or being biased, naive and despondent in a pessimistic direction. We are trying to grasp complex issues, so we need to have a more nuanced understanding of the possibilities than this binary set of notions.

Are the concepts you create and engage with a way of nuancing this debate?

We need concepts because they help us see possibilities, they are ways of organising information. When you have an obscure, ill-defined domain, such as the future of capabilities and technological advancements and how they might impact the human condition, it matters what criteria we use when choosing between different courses of action. Concepts that highlight salient possibilities can be very valuable. 

Concepts are sometimes enablers of research and other times they are products of research, that is, in order to find the right concept, you first need to spend time thinking hard about a set of questions; but then new concepts can also help communicate the result of your own thinking more accessibly. 

One such example might be the ‘status quo bias,’ that you explored in a recent paper. How far does it explain our resistance to technology?

The concept of status quo bias is borrowed from cognitive psychology, so researchers like Daniel Kahneman and many others analysed how people in many situations developed a preference for an option if the option was presented or framed as being the status quo. So you would need to present extra-benefits in order to get them to switch their preference. People were randomly given a chocolate bar, a mug or a pen after having filled in a questionnaire and then they were given the opportunity to change the gift that they had been given for something else. Researchers have found that most people preferred to keep the gift they had been given initially. It became part of your endowment and it was psychologically hard to give it up. 

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