Deep Utopia Quotes

“For example: peace. Consider an ideological development that favored more peaceful relations between groups and individuals: a doctrine of love thy neighbor; or improved norms for conflict resolution that allowed more disagreements to be settled through reasoned debate and compromise rather than by fist or sword. What could be more benign? And yet… such improvements may actually have had a negative effect on average well-being, by making the equilibrium one in which the deaths necessary to maintain the human population at a given size are produced by grinding poverty, chronic malnutrition, and physiological exhaustion, rather than by the occasional axe-through-the-skull among people who at other times live in ease and comfort.”
― Nick Bostrom, Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World

“humanity is riding on the back of some chaotic beast of tremendous strength, which is bucking, twisting, charging, kicking, rearing. This beast does not represent nature; it represents the dynamics of the emergent behavior of our own civilization, the technology-mediated culture-inflected game-theoretic interactions between billions of individuals, groups, and institutions. No one is in control.”
― Nick Bostrom, Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World

“Think of a deer skipping gracefully across a complex woodland terrain. Then think of a mathematician in an analogous situation, attempting to traverse a field of abstract algebra—stiff and achy; unnatural; almost entirely blind, able to see scarcely two yards ahead; slow and unsteady; frowning with concentration; clutching the rollator of formal proof… Maybe that happens to be the only way we can currently do it, rather than the way it really should be done.

In all of this, there is room for improvement.”
― Nick Bostrom, Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World

“It is also possible to have a desire for improvement per se: to desire that tomorrow we have more than we have today.”
― Nick Bostrom, Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World

“telos of technology, we might say, is to allow us to accomplish more with less effort. If we extrapolate this internal directionality to its logical terminus, we arrive at a condition in which we can accomplish everything with no effort.”
― Nick Bostrom, Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World