Nick Bostrom, welcome to the show.

Oh, my pleasure.

Do you spend more time these days being optimistic or pessimistic

about the future of artificial intelligence?

I think I'm in a superposition. Yeah, so equal time on either would you say because I mean

everyone you're under the sun. I'm on both at the same time, I feel the prospects are quite ambivalent, and it's just this big unknown that we are approaching.

And I think, yeah, there's like realistic prospects of doom,

realistic prospects of fantastically good future, and also realistic prospects of outcomes

where it might not be clear immediately, even if we could see all the details how we would evaluate it.

In some sense maybe that's the most likely possibility

that the future might be really good in some sense,

although different from the current way that we are,

in such a way that we'd lose some and gain some

and how you sum that all up might be non-obvious.

Yeah sure I mean it seems like every person who interviews you likes to point out the interesting fact that unlike a lot of authors you've kind of

represented both positions here I mean you've you've written extensively an entire book

about the dangers of AI and what can happen if things go wrong and people have liked to point out that there's a certain

sort of unusual fairness in your approach

writing your most recent book, Deep Utopia, which is the name suggests, is a description of the opposite.

So I suppose that could imply that you remain sort of agnostic on the question.

I mean, I'm imagining like a lot of people get very fearful about artificial intelligence

and what it can do to our society and not to mention the potential implications of

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