Exploring Personal Identity and Technology

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The chapter delves into philosophical thought experiments involving duplications, teleportation, and uploading of consciousness to question the preservation of personal identity. Discussions cover the concepts of self in relation to memory, point of view, and the complexities of defining oneself in potentially replicating memories. The conversation also touches on the challenges of defining personal identity in a post-human reality and the ethical considerations of creating replicas indistinguishable from originals.

Nick Bostrom’s previous book, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, changed the global conversation on AI and became a New York Times bestseller. It focused on what might happen if AI development goes wrong.

But what if things go right?

Bostrom and Shermer discuss: An AI Utopia and Protopia • Trekonomics, post-scarcity economics • the hedonic treadmill and positional wealth values • colonizing the galaxy • The Fermi paradox: Where is everyone? • mind uploading and immortality • Google’s Gemini AI debacle • LLMs, ChatGPT, and beyond • How would we know if an AI system was sentient?

Nick Bostrom is a Professor at Oxford University, where he is the founding director of the Future of Humanity Institute. Bostrom is the world’s most cited philosopher aged 50 or under.