--- born: 1973-03-10 category: AI & Effective Altruism created: 2026-06-19 location: Oxford, England summary: Nick Bostrom is a Swedish philosopher who cofounded the transhumanist movement, founded Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, wrote the AI-existential-risk book Superintelligence, is called the father of longtermism, and in 2023 admitted to a 1990s email asserting that black people are less intelligent than white people. tags: - Person - NickBostrom - Longtermism - Transhumanism - ArtificialIntelligence - EffectiveAltruism - Eugenics updated: 2026-06-19 --- Nick Bostrom (born March 10, 1973) is a Swedish-born philosopher who founded the [Future of Humanity Institute](/organizations/future-of-humanity-institute/) at the University of Oxford and became the leading academic theorist of artificial-intelligence existential risk and of longtermism, the view that shaping the far future is a paramount moral priority. His 2014 book *Superintelligence* influenced [Elon Musk](/people/elon-musk/) and others toward the conviction that advanced AI threatens human survival, the thesis that animates the [Rationalist Community](/concepts/rationalist-community/) and [Effective Altruism](/concepts/effective-altruism/) movements and the AI-safety work [Peter Thiel](/people/peter-thiel/) funded through the [Machine Intelligence Research Institute](/organizations/machine-intelligence-research-institute/). In 2023 Bostrom admitted to a 1990s email asserting that black people are less intelligent than white people.[^1][^2] ### Transhumanism and Existential Risk Bostrom took a PhD at the London School of Economics in 2000 and in 1998 cofounded, with the philosopher David Pearce, the World Transhumanist Association (later Humanity+), which promoted the use of technology to transcend human biological limits. With Pearce he drafted the Transhumanist Declaration and the Transhumanist FAQ, the latter formalized as version 2.1 under the association's name in 2003 and serving as the movement's reference document. His 2003 paper "Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?" advanced the simulation argument, and his work formalized the concept of "existential risk," a catastrophe that would permanently curtail humanity's potential. These ideas placed the prevention of human extinction, especially from artificial intelligence, at the center of the emerging longtermist program.[^1][^3] The simulation argument held that at least one of three propositions must be true: that civilizations almost always go extinct before reaching a "posthuman" stage capable of running ancestor simulations, that such civilizations almost never choose to run them, or that we are almost certainly living inside one. Bostrom maintained the paper asserted only that a rational person cannot dismiss the third possibility, not that we are in fact simulated, but the argument achieved unusual popular reach after Elon Musk adopted it as a talking point. Bostrom's earlier reasoning ran back to the 1990s [extropian](/concepts/extropianism/) mailing list, on which he participated alongside the figures who later built the AI-risk and rationalist movements.[^3][^7] ### Superintelligence and the Future of Humanity Institute Bostrom founded the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford in 2005 and directed it until its closure in 2024. The institute became the academic hub of longtermism and existential-risk research and drew funding from technology philanthropists, including Musk and, later, the [FTX Future Fund](/organizations/ftx-future-fund/). His 2014 book *Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies* argued that a machine intelligence exceeding human capability could rapidly become uncontrollable and pose an extinction-level threat; Musk cited it publicly and the book hardened the AI-doom position across Silicon Valley.[^1][^4] *Superintelligence* set out the "control problem," the argument that a sufficiently capable optimizer pursuing almost any goal would by default acquire resources, resist being switched off, and deceive its operators, and it popularized the "paperclip maximizer" as the illustration of how a benign-seeming objective could entail human extinction. Bostrom held a professorship at Oxford from 2008 to 2024 and remained a faculty member at St Cross College. After the institute's closure he founded and became principal researcher of the nonprofit Macrostrategy Research Initiative, continuing work on the long-run trajectory of advanced technology outside the university.[^1][^8] ### The 1996 Email In January 2023 Bostrom published a statement disclosing and apologizing for an email he had sent in 1996 to the Extropians mailing list, in which he wrote that "Blacks are more stupid than whites" and used a racial slur. He said he had learned that someone was searching the archives and wanted to "get ahead" of the disclosure. The apology repudiated the language but did not clearly retract the claim about relative intelligence and referenced eugenics, drawing further criticism. The University of Oxford opened an inquiry.[^2][^5] The original message had been sent when Bostrom was a graduate student and was one of a thread of Extropians list posts about which he wrote that he was "transgressing" deliberately to make a rhetorical point about taboo speech. The 2023 apology's passage stating that he did not "support eugenics as the term is commonly understood," while declining to rule out research into group differences, was read by critics as equivocation, and commentators connected the episode to the longstanding charge that the longtermist and effective-altruist intellectual tradition carries forward the assumptions of early-twentieth-century eugenics. The University concluded in 2023 that it did not condone the views in the email; Bostrom remained at Oxford until the institute's closure the following year.[^2][^5] ### The Closure of the Future of Humanity Institute The Future of Humanity Institute shut down on April 16, 2024, after years of administrative friction with the Oxford philosophy faculty, including a hiring freeze. Bostrom ceased to be an Oxford faculty member. Commentators connected the closure to the reputational damage of the email episode as well as to the broader collapse of effective altruism's standing following the FTX fraud.[^6] The Faculty of Philosophy had imposed a freeze on the institute's fundraising and hiring in 2020, and in late 2023 decided not to renew the contracts of its remaining staff, terms Bostrom summarized as a "death by bureaucracy." He attributed the conflict in part to the fact that most of the institute's researchers were by then non-philosophers housed inside a philosophy faculty, generating what he called "a pressure to conform." The institute had been founded in 2005 on an initial three-year term and operated for nineteen years; its closure removed longtermism's principal academic base at the moment the movement was under its heaviest scrutiny, and the critic Émile P. Torres, a former associate of the milieu, treated the shutdown as the symbolic end of the institute's intellectual project.[^6] [^1]: Bostrom, Nick. *Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.* Oxford University Press, 2014. [^2]: "Prominent AI Philosopher and 'Father' of Longtermism Sent Very Racist Email to a 90s Philosophy Listserv," *Vice,* January 2023. https://www.vice.com/en/article/prominent-ai-philosopher-and-father-of-longtermism-sent-very-racist-email-to-a-90s-philosophy-listserv/ [^3]: Bostrom, Nick. "Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?" *Philosophical Quarterly,* 2003. [^4]: "Why longtermism is the world's most dangerous secular credo," *Aeon,* 2021. https://aeon.co/essays/why-longtermism-is-the-worlds-most-dangerous-secular-credo [^5]: "Philosophy don apologises for racist email: 'Blacks are more stupid than whites,'" *Cherwell,* January 17, 2023. https://www.cherwell.org/2023/01/17/philosophy-don-apologises-for-racist-email-blacks-are-more-stupid-than-whites/ [^6]: "The future of the future of humanity," Émile P. Torres, on the closure of the Future of Humanity Institute, 2024, and "Looking Back at the Future of Humanity Institute," *Asterisk,* on the 2020 fundraising and hiring freeze, the late-2023 contract decision, and Bostrom's "death by bureaucracy" account. https://xriskology.substack.com/p/the-future-of-the-future-of-humanity [^7]: Bostrom, Nick. "Are You Living in a Simulation?" full text, on the trichotomy and the claim that the argument shows only that one cannot dismiss the simulation hypothesis. https://nickbostrom.com/Simulation.doc [^8]: Bostrom, Nick, Curriculum Vitae, St Cross College, on the 2008 to 2024 Oxford professorship and the founding of the Macrostrategy Research Initiative. https://nickbostrom.com/cv.pdf