The Path to Utopia, with Nick Bostrom – from Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg

**SPEAKER_2** (0:02)
Hey, everyone. I'm excited to share Turpentine's newest show, This Won't Last. The show includes Logan Bartlett of Redpoint, Keith Rabois at COSLA, Kevin Ryan at AlleyCorp, and Zach Weinberg, a biotech founder and investor. They're not here to promote a portfolio company or share marketing blurs. If you were curious about what VCs talk about in group chats, when the cameras are normally gone, they're releasing footage for a short time. A link is in the description. Listen wherever you get your podcast.

**Nathan Labenz** (0:32)
Hello and welcome to The Cognitive Revolution, where we interview visionary researchers, entrepreneurs, and builders working on the frontier of artificial intelligence. Each week, we'll explore their revolutionary ideas, and together we'll build a picture of how AI technology will transform work, life, and society in the coming years. I'm Nathan Labenz, joined by my co-host, Erik Torenberg. Hello and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today, I'm pleased to share a special cross-post episode from the excellent podcast, Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg. Spencer is a mathematician, entrepreneur, and researcher who explores ideas that matter through in-depth conversations with leading thinkers. And in this episode, Spencer speaks with philosopher Nick Bostrom. Bostrom is perhaps best known for his book Superintelligence, which took on the challenge of analyzing the potential dangers associated with smarter-than-human AIs while the very possibility still seemed remote. But this conversation is actually mostly about his latest book, Deep Utopia, Life and Meaning in a Solved World. So why is it so difficult for us to envision a truly desirable future? Bostrom argues that our current lives are structured by what he calls an exoskeleton of instrumental necessities. That is, the things that we need to do to survive and thrive are the things that we've evolved to value.
In a world where advanced AI could handle all these tasks, things like purpose, achievement, and the satisfaction of overcoming challenges could all potentially disappear, leaving us with a profound new challenge. How do we find purpose and meaning in our lives when there's nothing that we truly have to do? As you'll hear, Bostrom faces this challenge head-on, attempting to sketch the outlines of a truly desirable technology utopia, touching on concepts including quiet or subtle values, including things like aesthetic beauty, acts of creativity, and commitments to honoring ancestors or upholding traditions. These are currently overshadowed by more pressing concerns, but perhaps could come to the foreground in a technology-enabled future. They also discuss artificial purpose or the creation of arbitrary goals and constraints that could give our lives structure, not unlike the sense of purpose that some find in video games today. They also assess the possible need for global coordination to achieve such a future, as well as the associated risks of pervasive surveillance. I've often said that the scarcest resource is a positive vision for the future. And this book is a great prompt for all of us to begin to think more deeply about how we might find continued meaning in our lives in a world where today's most pressing problems are solved. As always, if you're finding value in the show, we'd appreciate it if you'd take a moment to share it with friends or post a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And we always value your feedback and your topic or guest suggestions. You can submit those either via our website, cognitiverevolution.ai, or by DMing me on your favorite social network. Now, I hope you enjoyed this thought-provoking conversation about the potential evolution of the very meaning of human flourishing between Spencer Greenberg and Nick Bostrom, from Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg.

**Josh Castle** (3:40)
Hello, and welcome to Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg, the podcast about ideas that matter. I'm Josh Castle, the producer of the podcast, and I'm so glad you joined us today. In this episode, Spencer speaks with Nick Bostrom about the potential of AI-driven utopia and the search for meaning in a post-instrumental world.

**Spencer Greenberg** (4:05)
Nick, welcome.

**Nick Bostrom** (4:07)
Hey, Spencer.

**Spencer Greenberg** (4:09)
I don't know about you, but I found that there's a lot more interesting, vivid descriptions of dystopias out there than of utopias. Do you agree with that?

**Nick Bostrom** (4:18)
Yes, I think that's true. I wonder what that says about us humans, but it does seem to be a pattern. Like most people could probably rattle off a bunch of different dystopias, you know, Brave New World, 1984, Handmaid's Tale, but the average person would have trouble, I think, naming even a single utopia.

**Spencer Greenberg** (4:39)
Yeah, it's interesting because it seems important to figure out where we want society to go, not simply what we want to avoid.

**Nick Bostrom** (4:45)
Yeah, and it gets worse, like once you actually look at the utopias that have been attempted, by and large, you wouldn't actually want to live in any of them. They often seem too packed or too sort of, they become a little bit sort of like a plastic toy or something, like cloying often.