Nick Bostrom

Nick Bostrom (born Niklas Boström on 10 March 1973) is a Swedish philosopher at the University of Oxford known for his work on existential risk and the anthropic principle. He holds a PhD from the London School of Economics (2000). He is currently the director of both The Future of Humanity Institute and the Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology as part of the Oxford Martin School at Oxford University.He is the author of over 200 publications, including Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies and Anthropic Bias. He has been awarded the Eugene R. Gannon Award and has been listed in Foreign Policy's Top 100 Global Thinkers list.In addition to his writing for academic and popular press, Bostrom makes frequent media appearances in which he talks about transhumanism-related topics such as artificial intelligence, superintelligence, mind uploading, cryonics, nanotechnology, human enhancement, and the simulation argument.Bostrom was born in 1973 in Helsingborg, Sweden.Bostrom is favourable towards "human enhancement", or "self-improvement and human perfectibility through the ethical application of science", as well as a critic of bio-conservative views. He has proposed the reversal test for reducing status quo bias in bioethical discussions of human enhancement.In 1998, Bostrom co-founded (with David Pearce) the World Transhumanist Association (which has since changed its name to Humanity+). In 2004, he co-founded (with James Hughes) the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. In 2005 he was appointed Director of the newly created Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford. Bostrom is the 2009 recipient of the Eugene R. Gannon Award for the Continued Pursuit of Human Advancement and was named in Foreign Policy's 2009 list of top global thinkers "for accepting no limits on human potential."Bostrom has addressed the philosophical question of humanity's long-term survival. He defines an existential risk as one in which an "adverse outcome would either annihilate Earth-originating intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential." In the 2008 volume "Global Catastrophic Risks", editors Bostrom and Cirkovic offer a detailed taxonomy of existential risk, and various papers link existential risk to observer selection effects and the Fermi paradox.Bostrom has published numerous articles on anthropic reasoning, as well as the book Anthropic Bias: Observation Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy. In the book, he criticizes previous formulations of the anthropic principle, including those of Brandon Carter, John Leslie, John Barrow, and Frank Tipler.Bostrom appeared a 2003 episode of Horizon. More recently, he's appeared in two episodes of Closer to Truth hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn, once to discuss the universe and once to discuss his agnosticism.More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Bos...