How long does it take to read Superintelligence?
Paths, Dangers, Strategies
Nick Bostrom
Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom takes about 6 hours 27 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 6 hours 27 minutes
A weekend read
First published 2014. 352 pages, about 96,800 words.
13 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 10 hours 45 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 6 hours 27 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 4 hours 2 minutes |
The page count is the median across 11 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
The human brain has some capabilities that the brains of other animals lack. It is to these distinctive capabilities that our species owes its dominant position. Other animals have stronger muscles or sharper claws, but we have cleverer brains. If machine brains one day come to surpass human brains in general intelligence, then this new superintelligence could become very powerful. As the fate of the gorillas now depends more on us humans than on the gorillas themselves, so the fate of our species then would come to depend on the actions of the machine superintelligence. But we have one advantage: we get to make the first move. Will it be possible to construct a seed AI or otherwise to engineer initial conditions so as to make an intelligence explosion survivable? How could one achieve a controlled detonation? To get closer to an answer to this question, we must make our way through a fascinating landscape of topics and considerations. Read the book and learn about oracles, genies, singletons; about boxing methods, tripwires, and mind crime; about humanity's cosmic endowment and differential technological development; indirect normativity, instrumental convergence, whole brain emulation and technology couplings; Malthusian economics and dystopian evolution; artificial intelligence, and biological cognitive enhancement, and collective intelligence.
Subjects: Moral and ethical aspects, Cognitive science, Artificial intelligence, Social aspects, Philosophy, Computers and civilization
