Nick Bostrom Has a Plan for Humanity’s ‘Big Retirement’

A striking development has emerged in artificial intelligence. Steven LevyBusinessMay 8, 2026 11:00 AMNick Bostrom Has a Plan for Humanity’s ‘Big Retirement’The philosopher thinks humans should pursue advanced AI and the promise of a “solved world. ”Photo-Illustration: WIRED Staff; Stephen McCarthy/Getty Images Save this story Save this storyPhilosopher Nick Bostrom recently posted a paper, where he postulated that a small chance of AI annihilating all humans might be worth the risk, because advanced AI might relieve humanity of “its universal death sentence. ” That upbeat gamble is quite a leap from his previous dark musings on AI, which made him a doomer godfather.

His 2014 book Superintelligence was an early examination of AI’s existential risk. One memorable thought experiment: An AI tasked with making paper clips winds up destroying humanity because all those resource-needy people are an impediment to paper clip production. His more recent book, Deep Utopia, reflects a shift in his focus.

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Bostrom, who leads Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, dwells on the “solved world” that comes if we get AI right. STEVEN LEVY: Deep Utopia is more optimistic than your previous book. What changed for you?

NICK BOSTROM: I call myself a fretful optimist. I am very excited about the potential for radically improving human life and unlocking possibilities for our civilization. That’s consistent with the real possibility of things going wrong.

You wrote a paper with a striking argument: Since we’re all going to die anyway, the worst that can happen with AI is that we die sooner. But if AI works out, it might extend our lives, maybe indefinitely. That paper explicitly looks at only one aspect of this.

Industry Implications

In any given academic paper, you can't address life, the universe, and the meaning of everything. So let's just look at this little issue and try to nail that down. That isn’t a little issue.

I guess I've been irked by some of the arguments made by doomers who say that if you build AI, you're going to kill me and my children and how dare you. Like the recent book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. Even more probable is that if nobody builds it, everyone dies!

That's been the experience for the last several 100,000 years. But in the doomer scenario everybody dies and there’s no more people being born. I have obviously been very concerned with that.

This advance offers important signals about the future of the sector, and the tech world is watching closely.