Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World

by Nick Bostrom

Overview

Gold Medal Winner, Living Now Book Awards 2024

Best Books 2024, Kirkus Reviews

Winner, Independent Press Awards 2024

Bostrom’s previous book, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (OUP, 2014) sparked a global conversation on AI that continues to this day. That book, which became a surprise New York Times bestseller, focused on what might happen if AI development goes wrong.

But what if things go right? Suppose we develop superintelligence safely and ethically, and that we make good use of the almost magical powers this technology would unlock. We would transition into an era in which human labor becomes obsolete—a “post-instrumental” condition in which human efforts are not needed for any practical purpose. Furthermore, human nature itself becomes fully malleable.

The challenge we confront here is not technological but philosophical and spiritual. In such a “solved world”, what is the point of human existence? What gives meaning to life? What would we do and experience?

Deep Utopia—a work that is again decades ahead of its time—takes the reader who is able to follow on a journey into the heart of some of the profoundest questions before us, questions we didn’t even know to ask. It shows us a glimpse of a different kind of existence, which might be ours in the future.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781646871643
Publisher:	Ideapress Publishing
Publication date:	03/27/2024
Pages:	536
Sales rank:	340,434
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

NICK BOSTROM is a Professor at Oxford University, where he is the founding director of the Future of Humanity Institute.  Bostrom is the world’s most cited philosopher aged 50 or under.  He is the author of more than 200 publications, including Anthropic Bias (2002), Global Catastrophic Risks (2008), Human Enhancement (2009), and Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014), a New York Times bestseller which sparked a global conversation about the future of AI.  His work has pioneered many of the ideas that frame current thinking about humanity’s future (such as the concept of an existential risk, the simulation argument, the vulnerable world hypothesis, the unilateralist’s curse, etc.), while some of his recent work concerns the moral status of digital minds.  His writings have been translated into more than 30 languages; he is a repeat main-stage TED speaker; and he has been interviewed more than 1,000 times by media outlets around the world.  He has been on Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Global Thinkers list twice and was included in Prospect’s World Thinkers list, the youngest person in the top 15.  He has an academic background in theoretical physics, AI, and computational neuroscience as well as philosophy.

Editorial Reviews

This is a wondrous book. It is mind-expanding. It is poetic. It is moving. It is funny. The writing is superb. Every page is full of ideas.” —Russ Roberts, President of Shalem College

“Fascinating” —The New York Times

“Yeah.” —Elon Musk

“A major contribution to human thought and ways of thinking.” —Robert Lawrence Kuhn

“Brilliant! Hilarious, poignant, insightful, clever, important.” —Prof. Thaddeus Metz

“When technology has solved humanity’s deepest problems, what is left to do? … argues that beyond the post-scarcity world lies a ‘post-instrumental’ one … With the arrival of AI Utopia, this would be put to the test. Quite a lot would ride on the result.” —The Economist

“Reminiscent of Plato’s dialogues—with a 21st-century twist.” —Stuff (NZ)

“Bostrom is a marvelously energetic prose stylist … Wry understated humor that’s often very quiet in its punchlines. … A complex and stimulatingly provocative look at just how possible a fulfilling life might be.” —Kirkus Reviews

“One of the strangest … books I’ve ever read.” —Popular Science Books

“A really fun, and important, book… the writing is brilliant… incredibly rich… a constant parade of fascinating ideas.” —Prof. Guy Kahane, Oxford University

“Wow.” —Prof. Erik Brynjolfsson, Stanford University; Co-author of ‘The Second Machine Age’

From the Publisher

★ 2024-05-17
Bostrom conducts a philosophical inquiry into what gives life meaning.

The author (Superintelligence, 2014) here examines what he calls “the problem of utopia: the problem we will face after we have solved all the other problems.” He refers to this post-problem “deep utopia” as a “kind of philosophical particle accelerator” that, though clearly hypothetical (as he puts it, “We appear in no imminent danger of running out of woe”), is useful in examining what gives life meaning. Bostrom breaks down a number of different kinds of meaning life might obtain if all obstacles to fulfillment were removed, ranging from pure hedonistic pleasure to “social entanglement”; generally, he’s talking about the mixture of the practical and the personal that’s typically defined as “purpose.” “If someone proclaimsXto be the meaning of their life,” he writes, “we may reasonably takeXto be some sort of declaration of what they’re about, what they stand for, and what they are ultimately up to.” The author examines various ideas of personal fulfillment against the backdrop of an “encompassing transcendental purpose,” often including references to various schools of philosophy. The “decabillionaire’s gigayacht” is discussed right alongside Nietzsche and Camus in a quest to understand what kinds of things might give life meaning in a world without problems—and, by extension, in a world currently full of problems. One might think that as those problems get smaller, the passion they generate would also decline, but Bostrom points out that this isn’t always so: As he observes, more people cheer a soccer goal than cheer the eradication of a disease.

Bostrom is a marvelously energetic prose stylist; it’s uncanny how often he turns subjects like utilitarianism and Malthusian superabundance into genuinely thrilling reading. He vigorously explores the ramifications of the “age of abundance” he envisions that might supplant the “shallow redundancy” of current occupational labor: “Since it would eliminate both the need and the opportunity for paid work,” he writes, “it would cause one source of purpose to dry up, namely the purpose that many people currently find in their jobs.” Some of his authorial devices might come off as a bit twee (the ongoing Socratic dialogue between voices called Kelvin, Tessius, and Firafix, for instance, which runs throughout the book and grows tiresome after three pages), and some of his contentions will strike readers as debatable, to say the least. When he posits that a “maximally technologically capable” society would also be “very good,” for instance, he might be taking optimism a bit far. But the bulk of the text is immensely accessible and thought-provoking. Through it all, Bostrom employs a wry understated humor that’s often very quiet in its punchlines. “While technically doable,” he writes in one of many such passages, “eliminating boredom feelings would incur an ethical cost by distancing us from the normative ideal that our attitudes should match reality.” Tech fans will have much to consider here.

A complex and stimulatingly provocative look at just how possible a fulfilling life might be.

Kirkus Reviews