Just read this (though not too carefully). The book is structured with about half being transcripts of fictional lectures given by Bostrom at Oxford, about a quarter being stories about various woodland creatures striving to build a utopia, and another quarter being various other vignettes and framing stories.
Overall, I was a bit disappointed. The lecture transcripts touch on some interesting ideas, but Bostrom’s style is generally one which tries to classify and taxonimize, rather than characterize (e.g. he has a long section trying to analyze the nature of boredom). I think this doesn’t work very well when describing possible utopias, because they’ll be so different from today that it’s hard to extrapolate many of our concepts to that point, and also because the hard part is making it viscerally compelling.
The stories and vignettes are somewhat esoteric; it’s hard to extract straightforward lessons from them. My favorite was a story called The Exaltation of ThermoRex, about an industrialist who left his fortune to the benefit of his portable room heater, leading to a group of trustees spending many millions of dollars trying to figure out (and implement) what it means to “benefit” a room heater.
Just read this (though not too carefully). The book is structured with about half being transcripts of fictional lectures given by Bostrom at Oxford, about a quarter being stories about various woodland creatures striving to build a utopia, and another quarter being various other vignettes and framing stories.
Overall, I was a bit disappointed. The lecture transcripts touch on some interesting ideas, but Bostrom’s style is generally one which tries to classify and taxonimize, rather than characterize (e.g. he has a long section trying to analyze the nature of boredom). I think this doesn’t work very well when describing possible utopias, because they’ll be so different from today that it’s hard to extrapolate many of our concepts to that point, and also because the hard part is making it viscerally compelling.
The stories and vignettes are somewhat esoteric; it’s hard to extract straightforward lessons from them. My favorite was a story called The Exaltation of ThermoRex, about an industrialist who left his fortune to the benefit of his portable room heater, leading to a group of trustees spending many millions of dollars trying to figure out (and implement) what it means to “benefit” a room heater.