Showing papers by "Nick Bostrom published in 2009"

Cognitive Enhancement: Methods, Ethics, Regulatory Challenges

Abstract: Cognitive enhancement takes many and diverse forms. Various methods of cognitive enhancement have implications for the near future. At the same time, these technologies raise a range of ethical issues. For example, they interact with notions of authenticity, the good life, and the role of medicine in our lives. Present and anticipated methods for cognitive enhancement also create challenges for public policy and regulation.

The Future of Humanity

Abstract: In one sense, the future of humanity comprises everything that will ever happen to any human being, including what you will have for breakfast next Thursday and all the scientific discoveries that will be made next year. In that sense, it is hardly reasonable to think of the future of humanity as a topic: it is too big and too diverse to be addressed as a whole in a single essay, monograph, or even 100-volume book series. It is made into a topic by way of abstraction. We abstract from details and short-term fluctuations and developments that affect only some limited aspect of our lives. A discussion about the future of humanity is about how the important fundamental features of the human condition may change or remain constant in the long run.

Human Enhancement Ethics: The State of the Debate

Abstract: Are we good enough? If not, how may we improve ourselves? Must we restrict ourselves to traditional methods like study and training? Or should we also use science to enhance some of our mental and physical capacities more directly? Over the last decade, human enhancement has grown into a major topic of debate in applied ethics. Interest has been stimulated by advances in the biomedical sciences, advances which to many suggest that it will become increasingly feasible to use medicine and technology to reshape, manipulate, and enhance many aspects of human biology even in healthy individuals. To the extent that such interventions are on the horizon (or already available) there is an obvious practical dimension to these debates. This practical dimension is underscored by an outcrop of think tanks and activist organizations devoted to the biopolitics of enhancement. Already one can detect a biopolitical fault line developing between proenhancement and anti-enhancement groupings: transhumanists on one side, who believe that a wide range of enhancements should be developed and that people should be free to use them to transform themselves in quite radical ways; and bioconservatives on the other, who believe that we should not substantially alter human biology or the human condition.1 There are also miscellaneous groups who try to position themselves in

Smart policy: cognitive enhancement and the public interest

Abstract: Cognitive enhancement may be defined as the amplification or extension of core capacities of the mind through improvement or augmentation of internal or external information processing systems. Cognition refers to the processes an organism uses to organize information. These include acquiring information (perception), selecting (attention), representing (understanding) and retaining (memory) information, and using it to guide behavior (reasoning and coordination of motor outputs). Interventions to improve cognitive function may be directed at any of these core faculties. Many methods for enhancing cognition are of a quite mundane nature, and some have been practiced for thousands of years. The prime example is education and training, where the goal is often not only to impart specific skills or information but also to improve general mental faculties such as concentration, memory, and critical thinking. Other forms of mental training, such as yoga, martial arts, meditation, and creativity courses are also in common use. Caffeine is widely used to improve alertness. Herbal extracts reputed to improve memory are popular, with sales of Ginko biloba alone on the order of several hundred million dollars per year in the U.S. In an ordinary supermarket or health food store we can find a veritable cornucopia of energy drinks and similar preparations, vying for consumers hoping to turbo-charge their brains. As cognitive neuroscience has advanced, the list of prospective biomedical enhancements has steadily expanded. Yet to date, the most dramatic advances in our

Dignity and enhancement

Abstract: D human enhancement threaten our dignity, as some prominent commentators have asserted? Or could our dignity perhaps be technologically enhanced? After disentangling several different concepts of dignity, this essay focuses on the idea of dignity as a quality, a kind of excellence admitting of degrees and applicable to entities both within and without the human realm. I argue that dignity in this sense interacts with enhancement in complex ways which bring to light some fundamental issues in value theory, and that the effects of any given enhancement must be evaluated in its appropriate empirical context. Yet it is possible that through enhancement we could become better able to appreciate and secure many forms of dignity that are overlooked or missing under current conditions. I also suggest that, in a posthuman world, dignity as a quality could grow in importance as an organizing moral/aesthetic idea.

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Pascal's mugging

Abstract: In some dark alley. . . Mugger: Hey, give me your wallet. Pascal: Why on Earth would I want to do that? Mugger: Otherwise I’ll shoot you. Pascal: But you don’t have a gun. Mugger: Oops! I knew I had forgotten something. Pascal: No wallet for you then. Have a nice evening. Mugger: Wait! Pascal: Sigh. Mugger: I’ve got a business proposition for you. . . .How about you give me your wallet now? In return, I promise to come to your house tomorrow and give you double the value of what’s in the wallet. Not bad, eh? A 200% return on investment in 24 hours. Pascal: No way. Mugger: Ah, you don’t believe that I will be as good as my word? One can’t be too careful these days. . . .Tell you what: give me your wallet, and I come to your house tomorrow and pay you 10 times its value. Pascal: Sorry. Mugger: OK, let me ask you something. Many people are dishonest, but some people are honest. What probability do you give to the hypothesis that I will keep my promise? Pascal: 1 in a 1,000? Mugger: Great! OK, so give me your wallet, and tomorrow I give you 2,000 times the value of its contents. The expectation value is greatly to your advantage. Pascal: There are 10 livres in my wallet. If we made a deal for you to take the wallet and bring me 10 times the value of its contents tomorrow, then maybe there’s a 1-in-a-1,000 chance that I would see the 100 livres you owe. But I’d rate the chances that you will deliver on a deal to return me 20,000 livres much lower. I doubt you even have that much money. Mugger: Your scepticism is understandable, although in this particular case it happens to be misguided. For you are M. Pascal if I’m altogether not mistaken? And I’ve heard that you’re a committed expected-Utility maximizer, and that your Utility function is aggregative in terms of happy days of life. Is that not so?

The Simulation Argument: some explanations

Abstract: Anthony Brueckner, in a recent article, proffers 'a new way of thinking about Bostrom's Simulation Argument9 (2008). His comments, however, misconstrue the argument; and some words of explanation are in order. The Simulation Argument purports to show, given some plausible assumptions, that at least one of three propositions is true (Bostrom 2003; see also Bostrom 2005). Roughly stated, these propositions are: (1) almost all civilizations at our current level of development go extinct before reaching technological maturity; (2) there is a strong convergence among technologically mature civilizations such that almost all of them lose interest in creating ancestor-simulations; (3) almost all people with our sorts of experiences live in computer simulations. I also argue (#) that conditional on (3) you should assign a very high credence to the proposition that you live in a computer simulation. However, pace Brueckner, I do not argue that we should believe that we are in simulation.1 In fact, I believe that we are probably not simulated. The Simulation Argument purports to show only that, as well as (#), at least one of (l)-(3) is true; but it does not tell us which one. Brueckner also writes:

Dinosaurs, dodos, humans?

Abstract: An existential risk is defined as one that threatens to annihilate Earth-originating intelligent life or permanently and drastically to curtail its potential. Since we are still here, we know that no existential disaster has ever occurred. But lacking experience with such disasters, it is also likely that we have not have evolved mechanisms, biologically or culturally, for managing existential risks.