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Deep Utopia - Nick Bostrom ***

This is one of the strangest sort-of popular science (or philosophy, or something or other) books I've ever read. If you can picture the impact of a cross between Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel Escher Bach and Gaileo's Two New Sciences (at least, its conversational structure), then thrown in a touch of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, and you can get a feel for what the experience of reading it is like - bewildering with the feeling that there is something deep that you can never quite extract from it.

Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom is probably best known in popular science for his book Superintelligence in which he looked at the implications of having artificial intelligence (AI) that goes beyond human capabilities. In a sense, Deep Utopia is a sequel, picking out one aspect of this speculation: what life would be like for us if technology had solved all our existential problems, while (in the form of superintelligence) it had also taken away much of our apparent purpose in life. To get a feel for this, and for Bostrom's writing style, he summarises it thus:

The telos of technology, we might say, is to allow us to accomplish more with less effort. If we extrapolate this internal directionality to its logical terminus, we arrive at a condition in which we can accomplish everything with no effort. Over the millennia, our species has meandered a fair distance toward this destination already. Soon the bullet train of machine super intelligence (have we not already heard the conductor's whistle?) could whisk us the rest of the way.

If the style is reminiscent of some half-remembered, rather pompous university lecture, this is not accidental. The starting point of the book's convoluted structure is a transcript of a lecture series given by a version of Bostrom that feels like the self-portrayals of actors in the TV series Extras, where all their self-importance is exaggerated for humorous effect.

If we only got the lectures, the approach wouldn't be particularly radical. But there is far more. Firstly, fictional students ask questions during the lecture (some subject to heavy-handed putdowns by pseudo-Bostrom). And there are three extra students who exist outside the lectures, Tessius, Kelvin and Firafix who provide a commentary on the whole process. We also get Bostrom's handouts and his reading material for the next lecture, much of which is based on the 'Feodor the Fox correspondence'. This takes the form of a (to be honest, deeply tedious) pseudo-ancient series of letters from Feodor to his uncle in a world populated by animals. I had to skip much of this to avoid falling asleep.

One way of looking at the book is that it is clever, original and verging on the mind-blowing. Another is that it's clever-clever, pretentious and often distinctly hard going. In practice, I suspect it's both. Certainly the lecture content is sometimes an opaque mix of philosophy and economics - yet despite finding reading it like walking through mud, I wanted to continue, arguably more for the satisfaction of completion than any benefit I got from reading it.

Sometimes you have to congratulate a magnificent failure, where someone has taken a huge chance, pushing the boundaries, but ultimately it doesn't work. I can't say I enjoyed reading this book - but I think I am glad that I did. However, because of its ambiguous nature, I can’t go beyond three stars.

Note - this book was published in March 2024, but only Kindle appears to be available until May.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
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