Philosopher and former Oxford University professor Nick Bostrom has built an impressive career posing questions that tend to be hair-raising for both experts and the general public. His 2014 New York Times bestseller Superintelligence sparked numerous conversations about existential risk and civilization’s overall vulnerabilities to rampant AI development. But with his latest book, Deep Utopia, Bostrom has taken a decidedly more upbeat approach. “Maybe these immense technological powers end in disaster,” Bostrom says. “But if we assume things go well, what do we want?”

For the last six years, while working on Deep Utopia, Bostrom has been reflecting on the current uneasy discourse around future technologies, including what he finds to be frustrating oversimplifications. “I’ve thought that discussion was stuck at a very superficial level,” Bostrom says. He started to feel that people were only superficially grasping the complex subjects he has spent decades working on—particularly issues of unemployment and retraining workers—and using those in an attempt to extrapolate a simple answer of “AI, bad” or “technology, good.”

As much as Bostrom still believes there are numerous serious causes for concern, he finds that most debates only scratch the surface of the issues that could stem from a future aided by machine intelligence. “It’s almost like a genie has popped out of a bottle,” Bostrom says about future technological advancement. “You have to be careful what you wish for. What would actually be a good future for humanity, collectively or individually?”

Bostrom did not initially intend for Deep Utopia to turn into a full book, but the more he dug into that fascinating question of humanity’s future, the more he found himself with a springboard to investigate the fundamentals of human values. “It kind of forced itself to be written,” Bostrom says. “It was like hopping on a wild beast as it runs away. You have no precise control over where it’s going, but you just have to hang on.”

Bostrom ended up with a book that Kirkus Reviews has selected for their Indie Best List 2024 and describes in its review as, “a complex and stimulatingly provocative look at just how possible a fulfilling life might be.”

Deep Utopia features an unusual Russian doll structure that embeds thought experiments within philosophical lectures, in the fictional story of three students (Kelvin, Tessisus, and Fairfax) who attend daily lectures given by none other than infamous AI doom-monger, Nick Bostrom. (“I turned out to be a somewhat ridiculous character,” Bostrom quips about the older, more curmudgeonly version of himself that popped up in his writing.)

After each lecture, the characters complete their assigned readings and discuss the fictive Bostrom’s propositions. This unusual structure allowed (the real) Bostrom to put some distance between himself and his ideas about a utopic future, while also attacking them from different perspectives. In the opening chapter, during the first lecture, Bostrom’s older self lays the groundwork for the myriad layers of ideas to follow by asking what happens if technology becomes so advanced that humanity can accomplish everything with no effort:

And what would become of us then? What would give our lives meaning and purpose in a “solved world”? What would we do all day? These questions have timeless intellectual interest. The concept of deep utopia can serve as a kind of philosophical particle accelerator, in which extreme conditions are created that allow us to study the elementary constituents of our values…In any case, the problem of utopia is in the water. Can we not sense it—a certain half-embarrassed latent unease? A doubt lurking in the depths beneath us? A faint shadow sweeping across our conception of what’s it all for?

As the lectures and discussions continue, the characters engage with an imagined world in which everything from parenting to pastimes is potentially redundant. The result is that Bostrom sets himself up to try to address the meaning of life itself, a huge endeavor that follows quite logically from his own life’s work.

Bostrom was born and raised in Sweden, where he began his studies in both philosophy and physics before continuing on in computational neuroscience at King’s College London, then completing his PhD in philosophy of science at the London School of Economics. “I’ve never really made a very sharp distinction between philosophy and science,” Bostrom says of the blend between humanities and sciences that has always captured his attention. “To me, they are all sort of overlapping parts of a continuum.”

Working within that continuum, Bostrom served as director of the now-dissolved Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford from 2005 until this year. Through the institute, he strove to probe the big-picture questions that have always intrigued him—questions that might have previously been found more readily in stargazing science fiction or among people pontificating at a pub: What is this planet we find ourselves on? Why are we here? What’s going to happen?

“To actually seriously and systematically think about these big-picture questions with the same kind of rigor and attention to detail that you would apply to any other academic topic, to some extent, we pioneered that,” Bostrom says of the institute’s work. Over the years, he found that there was a tremendous appetite in the public and academic spheres for this line of reasoning, especially concerning AI. His numerous publications have been translated into over 30 languages, he has been a repeat mainstage TED Talk speaker, and after more than a thousand interviews with media outlets, Bostrom has become one of the most cited philosophers in the world.

Certainly helping to drive interest in his work is Bostrom’s approachable demeanor and more light-hearted touch, which can readily be seen in Deep Utopia with the main characters’ comic non sequiturs and the book’s satiric edge. Consistent mismanagement of the fictional lectures—which themselves are hilariously sponsored by Philip Morris and Exxon—and preposterously long introductions by various university deans will have anyone familiar with the struggles of academic bureaucracy laughing out loud. (“Or they may be depressingly familiar,” Bostrom admits.)

For Bostrom, humor can help lower walls when it comes to dense subjects. He has always found it to be an interesting mode of thought and communication; he even dabbled in stand-up comedy when he was a student in London. With Deep Utopia, he hopes that humor will help to make the challenging material accessible. “I didn’t dumb anything down,” he clarifies. But for readers who already enjoy challenging material, he wanted to convey a specific spirit of how we can approach these questions, “with a sort of open-minded curiosity, an expansive generosity, and also a playfulness.”

Bostrom is currently splitting his time between the English countryside and Montreal, continuing his research and considering some fascinating subjects to work on next. In addition to getting readers to engage with such big ideas, he hopes that Deep Utopia will also be seen as a love letter to academia, despite the jokes at its expense.

When he imagines the three friends he created for the book spending their days going to lectures and discussing big ideas at a hot spring or a party, he sees it as a version of what he might want life to look like in a world without work. “You could almost see it as a fragment of utopia,” Bostrom says. “It’s a little grain of what’s possible.”

Rhett Morgan is a writer and translator based in Paris, France.