Nick Bostrom is a professor at the Oxford University, where he heads the Future of Humanity Institute, a research group of mathematicians, philosophers and scientists tasked with investigating the big picture for the human condition and its future. He has been referred to as one of the most important thinkers of our age.

As a philosopher, Bostrom envisioned a future full of human enhancement, nanotechnology and machine intelligence long before they became mainstream concerns. From his famous simulation argument -- which identified some striking implications of rejecting the Matrix-like idea that humans are living in a computer simulation -- to his work on existential risk, he approaches both the inevitable and the speculative using the tools of philosophy, probability theory and scientific analysis.

Bostrom was honored as one of Foreign Policy's 2015 Global Thinkers. His book Superintelligence advances the ominous idea that "the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make."