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?