Number one possibility is, amongst all the civilizations at our current stage of technological development,

almost none attained technological maturity.

The second possibility is there is this strong convergence among all civilizations that do become technologically

mature.

They all just lose interest in using those immense technological powers for the purpose of creating large numbers of detailed simulations with conscious digital

being syndrome. And then the third possibility is we are living in a computer

simulation. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Open the pod bay doors now.

Welcome everybody to a very exciting, super intelligent conversation with none other than possibly the most requested

guests that I have not yet had on in any form and that's a professor Nick

Bostrom joining us from Oxford. How are you today, Nick? A pleasure. It's really great to meet you virtually and we'd be together if there weren't, you know, existential risks threatening the world, but I want to begin by doing what you're never supposed to do,

which you're always told not to do, which is to judge a book by its cover.

And this is a segment that's very popular on this

podcast because you know really what else do you have to go on if you see a book you

only can look at its cover maybe you know the author maybe you know somebody that

endorsed it so I want to talk about your

New York Times number one best-selling book called Super Intelligence and I want to ask you how did you come up

with the title the subtitle the very, very evocative and interesting cover design,

at least here in the US, which is a very wise and observant bird known as the owl. So Nick, how did you come up with the title and the cover design for this wonderful book?

Well I mean the title is pretty obvious, the whole book is about super intelligence, and so I keep it simple.

There is a subtitle, Paths, Dangerous, Strategies, since it's an but with academic pretensions I feel it

needed the double-barreled approach we did also flesh it out little. The cover was a bit of a struggle actually with a publisher to get it the way I wanted.

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