Bostrom’s Deep Utopia

Nick Bostrom’s new tome … has a great cover with a number of interesting questions and a subtitle that hints that it might address the meaning of life in a future where AI and robots can do everything. But alas, after much build up and anticipation, he leaves that question unanswered, with an abrupt oops, out of time on page 427. … He tries to address meaty topics like, what keeps life interesting?  What is our purpose and meaning when the struggle is gone?  Can fulfillment get full? But in each case, the pedagogy is more of a survey of all possible answers versus the much more difficult task of making specific predictions. (More)

What would life be like if artificial intelligence solved all your problems? You wouldn’t have to work anymore. You could get any luxury you wanted by raising an eyebrow. … for “Deep Utopia,” Bostrom smartly chose to imagine … that A.I. does exactly what we ask it to do. … Although he says we’re not cut out for perfection, Bostrom does explore ways that life in utopia could be made bearable after all. … Bostrom … sees the book as an exploration of the A.I. future, not a conclusion about it. … He likened the book to a particle accelerator that smashes atoms together to study their parts, such as quarks. In “Deep Utopia,” he said, he smashed values into one another to study their composition. (More)

In his new book Deep Utopia, Nick Bostrom asks how creatures very much like him might want to live for eons if they had total peace, vast wealth, and full eternal control of extremely competent AI that could do everything better than they. He mostly tries to list as many sensible possibilities as possible. 

Boston writes engagingly, though not concisely. He doesn’t overcome the usual impression that it is pretty hard to imagine compelling utopias, though I think he does help clarify some of his life goals. 

But I found it pretty hard to be motivated by his key question. In a future of creatures vastly more capable than us I’m far more interested in what those better creatures would do than in what a creature like me now might do there. And I find the idea of creatures like me long being rich, at peace, and in full control of such a world quite unlikely.  

Furthermore, in whatever actual future scenarios end up being the closest to his hypothetical, I just don’t believe that creatures at our level of ability there would have values much like Bostrom’s values today. Bostrom asks his question about people pretty close to him, leftist academics in rich Western societies. Others in our world today, or folks from past civs, would find much less in his book on how to fulfill their desires in his hypothetical scenario. After all, Bostrom says little about honor, of enjoying the lamentations of those you conquer, or of having “descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore.”

Apparently folks in the USSR once wanted to find aliens because they assumed that, as aliens must be very smart, they’d be communists. But it seems crazy to expect a stance less than a century old to feel central to aliens a billion years more advanced. Similarly, a great many futurists try to imagine crazy advanced technology and social institutions in the context of cultural values quite close to their own, even if little like those values around here existed even a few centuries ago.

The future will be strange. And as hard as it is to imagine changes to technology, institutions, and the universe, it can be even harder to imagine future cultures. But I can assure you, they will change, a lot.