Listening: Nicholas Bostrom on EconTalk
Enjoying this conversation with Nick Bostrom on his new book Deep Utopia.
Bostrom asks: in a world where AI can do anything and everything, and we can develop drugs to make us feel anything artificially (e.g. the feeling of being sated, the feeling and effects of a workout), what will humans end up doing?
The answer seems somewhat clear to me—we’ll value human-ness and intentionality more, in the same way that the value of actual human effort and sentiment has increased since computers made a lot of things easier. Like Baumol’s cost disease, but for human effort?
Bostrom seems to undervalue the innate enjoyment people get out of potentially “annoying” tasks like shopping—none of the women in my family would agree that it’s a chore they’d like to outsource to an AI agent.
His analysis is lacking a human element. But there’s something great in the interplay between Bostrom and Roberts that takes the conversation into a more metaphysical exploration. What is a life well-lived? Much of our meaning comes from experiences unconnected to technology, and those experiences will be more or less unchanged by AI—visiting the grave of an ancestor, going on a walk, painting, fishing. All these very human activities will endure.
Overall—a great conversation and a good example of how podcasts can be more than just a summary of an author’s new book. Not sure I’ll read the book but I’ll be chewing on the concepts for some time.
Enjoying this conversation with Nick Bostrom on his new book