Nick Bostrom

Nick Bostrom

A Swedish philosopher who founded the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford and whose 2014 book Superintelligence brought long-term AI risk into mainstream discussion. He argued that a system substantially exceeding human capability could be difficult to control after the fact, and introduced the vocabulary the debate still uses: instrumental convergence, the orthogonality of intelligence and goals, and the paperclip maximiser as an illustration of how a harmless objective pursued single-mindedly could go badly. He is also known for the simulation argument. (See also: AI alignment, AGI, Stuart Russell, Eliezer Yudkowsky)