‘In the future, most sentient minds will be digital—and they should be treated well’

For decades, Nick Bostrom, philosopher, AI theorist and director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, has been warning the world that superintelligence could be humanity’s final invention. Not because it is the end goal—but because it might be the end, period.

Bostrom now brings fretful optimism, as he calls it, and philosophical clarity to questions that are no longer theoretical in his latest book, Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World, which comes a decade after his pathbreaking Superintelligence (2014).

In Deep…