Oxford Martin School

Nick Bostrom examines what could happen if machine intelligence exceeded human intelligence across a broad range of tasks. He asks why superior cognitive capabilities could confer decisive power, and whether humans could shape the initial conditions of such a transition to make it survivable. The lecture develops the central questions of Superintelligence: how more capable artificial minds might arise, what risks their development could create, and what strategies might keep the resulting systems under meaningful control. Its comparison between humanity and other species motivates a philosophical and strategic analysis of a possible future intelligence transition, rather than a claim that such a transition has already occurred.