Nick Bostrom, Director of the Future of Humanity Institute

Nick Bostrom is Director of the Future of Humanity Institute, which is part of the James Martin 21st Century School.  He is also a member of the Faculty of Philosophy.  He previously taught at Yale University in the Department of Philosophy and in the Yale Institute for Social and Policy Studies.  He is the author of more than 130 publications including many in leading academic journals, and his writings have been translated into more than 16 different languages.  He has a background in physics, computational neuroscience, and mathematical logic as well as analytic philosophy.  There has also been considerable public interest in his work.  He is frequently asked to serve as an expert consultant for various governmental agencies in the UK, Europe, and the USA, and he has done several hundred interviews for television, radio, and print media.

Dr. Bostrom is a leading thinker on the consequences, ethical dimensions, and risks of anticipated future technologies and on “big picture questions” for humanity.  His research also covers the foundations of probability theory, scientific methodology, human enhancement, and moral philosophy.  Bostrom developed the first mathematically explicit theory of observation selection effects (Anthropic Bias, 2002).  He is also the originator of the Simulation argument and of the “reversal test”, and the author of the original paper that introduced the concept of existential risk.  He is currently doing research on several topics: (a) the challenge for aggregative ethical theories of the possibility of infinite goods; (b) judgment under fundamental ethical uncertainty; (c) the ethics of human enhancement; and (d) methodologies for probabilistic forecasting, especially in the context of global catastrophic risk and future technology.