Nick Bostrom Quotes

“Traits acquired during one's lifetime - muscles built up in the gym, for example - cannot be passed on to the next generation. Now with technology, as it happens, we might indeed be able to transfer some of our acquired traits on to our selected offspring by genetic engineering.”

“A full-throttled deployment of the practices of strategic communication would kill candor and leave truth bereft to fend for herself in the backstabbing night of political bogeys.”

“Any death prior to the heat death of the universe is premature if your life is good.”

“Eternity. Isn't that word terrifying?”

“I counted the living and gathered them within me and the light that broke through embraced all the life that I had within me...”

“Far from being the smartest possible biological species, we are probably better thought of as the stupidest possible biological species capable of starting a technological civilization - a niche we filled because we got there first, not because we are in any sense optimally adapted to it.”

“Nature might be a great experimentalist, but one who would never pass muster with an ethics review board – contravening the Helsinki Declaration and every norm of moral decency, left, right, and center.”

“[D]umb evolutionary processes have dramatically amplified the intelligence in the human lineage even compared with our close relatives the great apes and our own humanoid ancestors”

“Nick stands up and offers his hand to me. I have no idea what he wants, but what the hell, I take his hand anyway, and he pulls me up on my feet then presses against me for a slow dance and it's like we're in a dream where he's Christopher Plummer and I'm Julie Andrews and we're dancing on the marble floor of an Austrian terrace garden. Somehow my head presses Nick's t-shirt and in this moment I am forgetting about time and Tal because maybe my life isn't over. Maybe it's only beginning.”

“How does that put me in danger?” Nick asks. It’s the first question he’s asked the entire time. Devyn, however, has been Mr. Nonstop Wondering Question Guy.“Because . . .” I don’t know how to say it, struggle for the words. “Because you and I are a thing and you’re a threat.”“You better believe I’m a threat,” Nick growls. The entire car seems to shake with his energy. Little hairs on my arm lift and vibrate.“He’s going macho again,” Dev says, totally nonchalantly, while he unlocks the door.“He’s always going macho,” Is adds. “It must be the wolf thing.”“I am not going macho. I am always macho,” Nick says, and for a moment the tension ratchets down, but then his face muscles become rigid again.”