Ideapress Publishing Hardback English
Deep Utopia
Life and Meaning in a Solved World
By Nick Bostrom
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Gold Medal Winner, Living Now Book Awards 2024 Best Books of 2024, Kirkus Reviews Winner, Independent Press Awards 2024 Honorable Mention, Royal Dragonfly Book Awards 2024 (Religion/Spirituality) Winner, PenCraft Book Awards 2024 (Fiction: Intrigue) Best AI Books of 2024, The Information Winner, American Book Fest (Nonfiction: Cross-Genre) Winner, 2025 American Legacy Book Award (Nonfiction: Cross-Genre) Bostrom’s last book, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (OUP, 2014), sparked a global conversation on AI that continues and widens to this day. That book, which despite its academic style became a New York Times bestseller, focused on what would happen if AI goes wrong. But what if AI goes right? Suppose we succeed in developing superintelligence safely and that we make good use of the almost magical powers this unlocks. We would then achieve full unemployment. More than that, we would transition into a “post-instrumental condition," in which human effort is not needed for any practical purpose. This would be a condition of material abundance. Human nature itself would become fully malleable. In such a solved world, what would be the point of human existence? What could give meaning to our lives? Which old values will we have to sacrifice, and which new values will we be able to realize to wonderful degrees? Deep Utopia—a work that is again years ahead of its time—takes the readers on a journey into some of the most profound questions that arise as we dissolve the limits of our current mode of being. It is a lush, playful, difficult, and human text that interleaves fiction stories and philosophical lectures that show us a glimpse of a different kind of existence–one that might be ours in the not-so-distant future.
Gold Medal Winner, Living Now Book Awards 2024
Best Books of 2024, Kirkus Reviews
Winner, Independent Press Awards 2024
Honorable Mention, Royal Dragonfly Book Awards 2024 (Religion/Spirituality)
Winner, PenCraft Book Awards 2024 (Fiction: Intrigue)
Best AI Books of 2024, The Information
Winner, American Book Fest (Nonfiction: Cross-Genre)
Winner, 2025 American Legacy Book Award (Nonfiction: Cross-Genre)
Bostrom’s last book, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (OUP, 2014), sparked a global conversation on AI that continues and widens to this day. That book, which despite its academic style became a New York Times bestseller, focused on what would happen if AI goes wrong.
But what if AI goes right? Suppose we succeed in developing superintelligence safely and that we make good use of the almost magical powers this unlocks. We would then achieve full unemployment. More than that, we would transition into a “post-instrumental condition," in which human effort is not needed for any practical purpose. This would be a condition of material abundance. Human nature itself would become fully malleable.
In such a solved world, what would be the point of human existence? What could give meaning to our lives? Which old values will we have to sacrifice, and which new values will we be able to realize to wonderful degrees?
Deep Utopia—a work that is again years ahead of its time—takes the readers on a journey into some of the most profound questions that arise as we dissolve the limits of our current mode of being. It is a lush, playful, difficult, and human text that interleaves fiction stories and philosophical lectures that show us a glimpse of a different kind of existence–one that might be ours in the not-so-distant future.