Professor Nick Bostrom

Director, Oxford Future of Humanity Institute; Director, Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology; Professor of Applied Ethics

About

Professor Bostrom has a background in physics, computational neuroscience, and mathematical logic as well as philosophy.  He is best known for his work in five areas:  (i) existential risk; (ii) the simulation argument; (iii) anthropics (developing the first mathematically explicit theory of observation selection effects); (iv) impacts of future technology; and (v) implications of consequentialism for global strategy. 

In 2014 he was included on Prospect magazine’s World Thinkers list, the youngest person in the top 15 from all fields and the highest-ranked analytic philosopher. He is also the recipient of a Eugene R Gannon Award (one person selected annually worldwide from the fields of philosophy, mathematics, the arts and other humanities, and the natural sciences). He is the author of some 200 publications, and his writings have been translated into 22 languages.

Expertise

  • Human enhancement (cognitive enhancement, life extension, genetic enhancement etc), including techniques, ethics, future prospects, and social and policy implications
  • Global catastrophic risks (including from particle physics experiments, global warming, nuclear war, terrorism, pandemics, nanotechnology, etc)
  • Future technologies (including nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, cloning, virtual reality, genetic engineering, space colonisation, biotechnology, computing, uploading)
  • Transhumanism, posthumanism, the future of human evolution
  • The search for extraterrestrial life; multiverse cosmology; anthropic principle

Media experience

Professor Bostrom has extensive and wide-ranging national and international media experience, including more than 500 interviews for TV, film, radio, and print media. 

Languages

English, Swedish