This post is basically a repackaging of Nick Bostrom&#x27;s book <i>SuperIntelligence</i>, a work suspended somewhere between the sci-fi and non-fiction aisles.<p>As a philosopher of the future, Bostrom has successfully combined the obscurantism of Continental philosophy, the license of futurism and the jargon of technology to build a tower from which he foresees events that may or may not occur for centuries to come. Nostradamus in a hoody.<p>Read this sentence:<p>&quot;It looks quite difficult to design a seed AI such that its preferences, if fully implemented, would be consistent with the survival of humans and the things we care about,&quot; Bostrom told Dylan Matthews, a reporter at Vox.<p>Notice the mixture of pseudo-technical terms like “seed AI” and “fully implemented”, alongisde logical contructs such as “consistent with” --  all leading up to the phobic beacons radiating at the finale: “the survival of humans and the things we care about.”<p>It&#x27;s interesting, the technical challenges that he feels optimism and pessimism for. For reasons best known to himself, Bostrom has chosen to be optimistic that we can solve AI (some of the best researchers are not, and they are <i>very</i> conservative about the present state of research). It may perhaps the hardest problem in computer science. But he&#x27;s pessimistic that we&#x27;ll make it friendly.<p>Bostrom’s tower is great for monologs. The parlor game of AI fearmongering has entertained, rattled and flattered a lot of people in Silicon Valley, because it is about us. It elevates one of our core, collective projects to apocalyptic status. But there is no dialog to enter, no opponent to grapple with, because no one can deny Bostrom&#x27;s pronouncements any more than he can prove them.<p><i>Superintelligence</i> is like one of those books on chess strategy that walk you through one gambit after the other. Bostrom, too, walks us through gambits; for example, what are the possible consequences of developing hardware that allows us to upload or emulate a brain? Hint: It would make AI much easier, or in Bostrom’s words, reduce “recalcitrance.”<p>But unlike the gambits of chess, which assume fixed rules and pieces, Bostrom’s gambits imagine new pieces and rules at each step, substituting dragons for knights and supersonic albatrosses for rooks, so that we are forced to consider the pros and cons of decreasingly likely scenarios painted brightly at the end of a line of mights and coulds. In science fiction, this can be intriguing; in a work of supposed non-fiction, it is tiresome.<p>How can you possibly respond to someone positing a supersonic albatross? Maybe Bostrom thinks it will have two eyes, while I say three, and that might make all the difference, a few more speculative steps into the gambit.<p>In the New Yorker article The Doomsday Invention, Bostrom noted that he was &quot;learning how to code.&quot;<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newyorker.com&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;2015&#x2F;11&#x2F;23&#x2F;doomsday-invention-artificial-intelligence-nick-bostrom" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newyorker.com&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;2015&#x2F;11&#x2F;23&#x2F;doomsday-invent...</a><p>We might have expected him to do that before he wrote a book about AI. In a way, it&#x27;s the ultimate admission of a charlatan. He is writing about a discipline that he does not practice.