class="post-434 post hentry category-speakers"

Humanity+ UK2010 speaker Nick Bostrom gave a TED talk in 2005 on the subject “Humanity’s 3 biggest problems”:

There are lots of interesting connections between points in this presentation and points already covered in this blog. See if you can spot them!

On his own home page, Nick makes the following comment about the presentation:

This short talk (prepared on short notice and delivered in a somewhat sleep-deprived state) was delivered to a popular audience at the TED conference in Oxford, July 2005. I’m not sure they knew what to make of it.

Even though the subject matters of TED talks are generally thought-provoking, the subject matter of this particular talk is, in a way, significantly more fundamental and important.  However, as Nick says in the presentation, sometimes we fail to notice a problem, because we’ve become so accustomed to it, or because it’s so large.

On April 24th, Nick will be re-visiting the topic “Reducing Existential Risks”.  If you’d like to do some reading on this topic in advance of the conference, a good place to start is the webpage of a 2008 gathering to review “Global Catastropic Risks”.  This webpage contains a PDF of the Introductory Chapter to a book with that name, co-edited by Nick Bostrom and and Milan Cirkovic.

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