Nick Bostrom

(b. 1973) — Swedish-born Oxford philosopher. Founder of the Future of Humanity Institute (2005–2024). Author of Superintelligence (2014) and Deep Utopia (2024).

Why he matters in this conversation

Jacob invokes Deep Utopia near the end, when articulating the answer to the question: what is all this for, once everything works?

"I think that's an answer to Nick Bostrom's question that he posed in the book Deep Utopia of the post-instrumentalist world. Post-instrumentalism is more than post-scarcity — when you're beyond the ability to do anything that's actually helpful to the world, because everything is handled so well. And I think cultivation practice is an answer to his question, as well as the liberal arts, as it were. That's one of the many, if not the greatest [answers]."

What "post-instrumentalism" means

Bostrom's framing in Deep Utopia: assume superintelligent AI handles all instrumental tasks better than any human. What do humans do then?

Not just post-scarcity (you have what you need). Post-instrumentalism: even your effort would not improve any outcome you care about, because the AI is better at everything that has an objective measurable outcome. Striving becomes structurally pointless.

This is a real philosophical problem. Bostrom canvasses a number of answers in the book; Jacob is offering his.

Jacob's two answers

1. Cultivation practice — the Super Conscious State direction. The depths of inner-ecosystem work are open-ended; no AI can do them for you because they constitutively involve your consciousness. This is the highest-leverage thing in the world per Jacob, and most of humanity doesn't even know it's an option.
2. The liberal arts — art, literature, taste-making, aesthetic depth. These are also constitutively about the experiencer, not about producing measurable instrumental outputs. AI can flood the zone with output but cannot be the experiencer / cultivator of taste.

Both share a structural feature: they are not zero-sum and not productivity-shaped. They're not making something to give to others; they're cultivating capacity in oneself.

The ultimate luxury claim

Earlier in the conversation Jacob anticipates this:

"The space to cultivate this is the ultimate luxury. And I want it to be on more people's radar — so much luxury, more than all these fancy external things, to be able to cultivate these inner states of like heart openness and mind openness."

This is the link from Bostrom's Deep Utopia problem to Jacob's Healing Arts Grant project: enable the cultivation luxury for those who can't access it, so that when the post-instrumentalist condition arrives en masse, more people are ready for the question Bostrom is asking.

Connection to existential risk

Bostrom is also famous for his work on existential risk (Superintelligence, the Vulnerable World Hypothesis). Jacob's "marginal cost of bioweapons keeps decreasing" argument is in a Bostromian register, even though Bostrom isn't named there.

So Bostrom shows up implicitly twice: once for the existential-risk framing, once explicitly for the post-instrumentalism question.

Related

• Super Conscious State — Jacob's answer to Deep Utopia
• Healing Arts Grant — population-scaling the cultivation luxury
• Existential Risk and Spa Diplomacy — Bostromian risk framing without the name