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Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris.

Today I am speaking with Nick Bostrom. Nick is someone I've been hoping to get on the podcast

for quite some time. He is a Swedish-born philosopher with a background in theoretical physics

and computational neuroscience and logic and AI and many other interesting,

intersecting topics. But officially he's a professor of philosophy at Oxford University,

where he leads the Future of Humanity Institute. This organization is a research center

which is focused largely on the problem of existential risk. Today we get deep into his views

on existential risk by focusing on three of his papers, which I'll describe in our conversation.

We talk about what he calls the vulnerable world hypothesis, which gets us into many interesting

tangents with respect to the history of nuclear deterrence and the possible need for what he calls

turnkey totalitarianism. We talk about whether we're living in a computer simulation. He's the

father of the now famous simulation argument. We talk about the Doomsday argument, which is not his,

but it's one of these philosophical thought experiments that have convinced many people that we

might be living close to the end of human history. We talk about the implications of there being

extraterrestrial life out there in the galaxy and many other topics, but all of it is focused on

...