More than 20 years ago, futurist intellectual Nick Bostrom upended the psyches of tech bros the world around when he proposed in a 2003 Philosophical Quarterly paper that we all may be living in a computer simulation.

Beloved by such strange bedfellows as Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Sam Altman, Bostrom has released two other influential missives — 2014's "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies," which detailed the ways AI could become smarter than humans, and 2024's "Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World," which ponders on what will happen if AI fixes everything — in the interim.

He also was embroiled in a minor controversy after a very racist email he sent in the 1990s was uncovered in 2023, and the following year, his Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford was shut down

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