CNN’s piece on the upcoming conference on global catastrophic risks at Oxford, organized by IEET Chair Nick Bostrom and Milan Cirkovic, was extraordinarily warm.
Speakers at the four-day event at Oxford University in Britain will talk about topics including nuclear terrorism and what to do if a large asteroid were to be on a collision course with our planet.
On the final day of the Global Catastrophic Risk Conference experts will focus on what could be the unintended consequences of new technologies, such as superintelligent machines that, if ill-conceived, might cause the demise of Homo sapiens.
“Any entity which is radically smarter than human beings would also be very powerful,” said Dr. Nick Bostrom, director of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, host of the symposium. “If we get something wrong, you could imagine the consequences would involve the extinction of the human species.”
Bostrom is a philosopher and a leading thinker of transhumanism—a movement that advocates not only the study of the potential threats and promises that future technologies could pose to human life but also the ways in which emergent technologies could be used to make the very act of living better.
“We want to preserve the best of what it is to be human and maybe even amplify that,” Bostrom told CNN.
Transhumanists, according to Bostrom, anticipate a coming era where biotechnology, molecular nanotechnologies, artificial intelligence and other new types of cognitive tools to amplify our intellectual capacity, improve our physical capabilities and even enhance our emotional well-being.
The end result would be a new form of “posthuman” life with beings that possess qualities and skills so exceedingly advanced they no longer can be classified simply as humans.
“We will begin to use science and technology not just to manage the world around us but to manage our own human biology as well,” Bostrom told CNN. “The changes will be faster and more profound than the very, very slow changes that would occur over tens of thousands of years as a result of natural selection and biological evolution.”
Bostrom declined to try to predict an exact time frame when this revolutionary biotechnological metamorphosis might occur. “Maybe it will take eight years or 200 years,” he said. “It is very hard to predict.”
IEET Blog