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The cognitive functioning of a human brain depends on a delicate orchestration of many factors, especially during the critical stages of embryo development—and it is much more likely that this self-organizing structure, to be enhanced, needs to be carefully balanced, tuned, and cultivated rather than simply flooded with some extraneous potion.

— Nick Bostrom Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014)

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Had Mother Nature been a real parent, she would have been in jail for child abuse and murder.

Unrestricted altruism is not so common that we can afford to fritter it away on a plethora of feel-good projects of suboptimal efficacy.

Perhaps it is a sign of civilizational progress that the very idea of threatening a nuclear first strike today seems borderline silly or morally obscene.

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014)

Knowledge about limitations of your data collection process affects what inferences you can draw from the data.

The gap between a dumb and a clever person may appear large from an anthropocentric perspective, yet in a less parochial view the two have nearly indistinguishable minds.

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Nick Bostrom (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.