This interview features philosopher Nick Bostrom in conversation with the head of TED

Chris Anderson, recorded live at TED 2019.

Nick Bostrom. So you have already given us so many crazy ideas out there. Like I think a couple

decades ago, you made the case that we

might all be living in a simulation, perhaps probably were. More recently, you've painted the most

vivid examples of how artificial general intelligence could go horribly wrong. And now this year,

you're about to publish a paper that presents something called the

vulnerable world hypothesis.

And our job this evening is to kind of give the illustrated guide to that.

So let's do that.

What is that hypothesis?

Well, it's trying to think about a sort of structural feature of the current human condition.

We can maybe, I mean, you like the urn metaphor, so I'm going to use that to explain it.

So picture a big urn, filled with balls, representing ideas, methods, possible technologies. You can think of the history of human

creativity as the process of reaching into this turn and pulling out one ball after another,

and the net effect so far has been hugely beneficial, right? We've extracted a great many,

white balls, some various shades of gray, mixed blessings.

We haven't so far pulled out the black ball, a technology that invariably destroys the

civilization that discovers it. So the paper tries to think about what could such a black

ball be? So you define that ball as one that would inevitably bring about civilization or destruction?

We exit what I call the semi-unarchic default condition, but sort of by default.

So you make the case compelling by showing some sort of counter-examples

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