Anders Sandberg (born 11 July 1972) is a Swedish researcher,

futurist Futurists (also known as futurologists, prospectivists, foresight practitioners and horizon scanners) are people whose specialty or interest is futurology or the attempt to systematically explore predictions and possibilities abou ...

and

transhumanist Transhumanism is a philosophical and intellectual movement which advocates the enhancement of the human condition by developing and making widely available sophisticated technologies that can greatly enhance longevity and cognition. Transhuma ...

. He holds a PhD in

computational neuroscience Computational neuroscience (also known as theoretical neuroscience or mathematical neuroscience) is a branch of neuroscience which employs mathematical models, computer simulations, theoretical analysis and abstractions of the brain to u ...

from

Stockholm University Stockholm University ( sv, Stockholms universitet) is a public research university in Stockholm, Sweden, founded as a college in 1878, with university status since 1960. With over 33,000 students at four different faculties: law, humanities, so ...

, and is currently a senior research fellow at the

Future of Humanity Institute The Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) is an interdisciplinary research centre at the University of Oxford investigating big-picture questions about humanity and its prospects. It was founded in 2005 as part of the Faculty of Philosophy and t ...

at the

University of Oxford , mottoeng = The Lord is my light , established = , endowment = £6.1 billion (including colleges) (2019) , budget = £2.145 billion (2019–20) , chancellor ...

, and a Fellow at Reuben College.

Work

Sandberg's research centres on societal and ethical issues surrounding

human enhancement Human enhancement (HE) can be described as the natural, artificial, or technological alteration of the human body in order to enhance physical or mental capabilities. Technologies Existing technologies Three forms of human enhancement curre ...

and new technology, as well as on assessing the capabilities and underlying science of future technologies. His research includes work on cognitive enhancement (methods, impacts, and policy analysis); a technical roadmap on

whole brain emulation Mind uploading is a speculative process of whole brain emulation in which a brain scan is used to completely emulate the mental state of the individual in a digital computer. The computer would then run a simulation of the brain's information ...

; on neuroethics; and on

global catastrophic risk A global catastrophic risk or a doomsday scenario is a hypothetical future event that could damage human well-being on a global scale, even endangering or destroying modern civilization. An event that could cause human extinction or permanen ...

s, particularly on the question of how to take into account the subjective uncertainty in risk estimates of low-likelihood, high-consequence risk. Sandberg is a commentator and participant in the public debate about human enhancement, as well as for his academic publications in neuroscience, ethics, and future studies. He is co-founder of and writer for the think tank

Eudoxa Eudoxa is a Swedish think tank, formed in 2000. Eudoxa has a transhumanist, and liberal political profile, with a focus on promoting dynamism, emerging technologies, harm reduction policy and discussing the challenges of the environment and the ...

, and is a co-founder of the

Orion's Arm Orion's Arm (also called the Orion's Arm Universe Project, OAUP, or simply OA and formerly known as the Orion's Arm Worldbuilding Group) is a multi-authored online science fiction world-building project, first established in 2000 by M. Alan Kaz ...

collaborative

worldbuilding Worldbuilding is the process of constructing a world, originally an imaginary one, sometimes associated with a fictional universe. Developing an imaginary setting with coherent qualities such as a history, geography, and ecology is a key task fo ...

project. Between 1996 and 2000 he was Chairman of the Swedish Transhumanist Association. He was also the scientific producer for the neuroscience exhibition "Se Hjärnan!" ("Behold the Brain!"), organized by Swedish Travelling Exhibitions, the Swedish Research Council and the Knowledge Foundation, that toured Sweden in 2005–2006. In 2007 he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the

Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics The Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford was founded in 2001. It is part of Oxford's Humanities Division. The faculty is located next to Somerville College on Woodstock Road. As of 2020, it is ranked 1st in the UK and 2nd in the English-s ...

, working on the EU-funded ENHANCE project on the ethics of human enhancement. Sandberg is also an electronic artist, whose renderings have been adapted for book covers by futurist

Damien Broderick Damien Francis Broderick (born 22 April 1944) is an Australian science fiction and popular science writer and editor of some 74 books. His science fiction novel ''The Dreaming Dragons'' (1980) introduced the trope of the generation time machine ...

: ''The Dreaming'', ''Earth is But a Star'', ''The Judas Mandala'', ''Skiffy and Mimesis'', ''Uncle Bones'', ''Warriors of the Tao'', and ''xyzt''. Anders Sandberg in TEDxTallinn

Sandberg has also supported and advocated

cryonics Cryonics (from el, κρύος ''kryos'' meaning 'cold') is the low-temperature freezing (usually at ) and storage of human remains, with the speculative hope that resurrection may be possible in the future. Cryonics is regarded with skepticis ...

, for example by signing an open letter to support research into cryonics and by being an advisor to the UK Cryonics and Cryopreservation Research Network, a UK

advocacy group Advocacy groups, also known as interest groups, special interest groups, lobbying groups or pressure groups use various forms of advocacy in order to influence public opinion and ultimately policy. They play an important role in the developm ...

. He has personally arranged to be cryonically preserved after his legal death. One of his 2014 papers, entitled "Ethics of Brain Emulations", became one of the most downloaded papers in the

Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence The ''Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence'' is a quarterly peer-reviewed scientific journal published by Taylor and Francis. It covers all aspects of artificial intelligence and was established in 1989. The editor-in-chi ...

. With nanotechnologist

Eric Drexler Kim Eric Drexler (born April 25, 1955) is an American engineer best known for studies of the potential of molecular nanotechnology (MNT), from the 1970s and 1980s. His 1991 doctoral thesis at Massachusetts Institute of Technology was revised and ...

and philosopher

Toby Ord Toby David Godfrey Ord (born July 1979) is an Australian philosopher. He founded Giving What We Can in 2009, an international society whose members pledge to donate at least 10% of their income to effective charities, and is a key figure in the ...

in 2018 he published a paper entitled "Dissolving the

Fermi Paradox The Fermi paradox is the discrepancy between the lack of conclusive evidence of advanced extraterrestrial life and the apparently high a priori likelihood of its existence, and by extension of obtaining such evidence. As a 2015 article put it, ...

". The paper was the first to estimate and rigorously take into account the uncertainties in each term in the

Drake equation The Drake equation is a probabilistic argument used to estimate the number of active, communicative extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy. The equation was formulated in 1961 by Frank Drake, not for purposes of quantifying ...

. These uncertainties, which often span multiple orders of magnitude, can be represented as probability distributions with long tails. Instead of getting a single estimate of the probability of life in our galaxy, they therefore obtained a distribution. They found that there is a high likelihood that we are alone in our galaxy or even alone in the entire observable universe, thus proposing a solution to the famous Fermi paradox, which asks why we do not see signs of intelligent life in the night sky. In 2018, in response to a question on Physics

Stack Exchange Stack Exchange is a network of question-and-answer (Q&A) websites on topics in diverse fields, each site covering a specific topic, where questions, answers, and users are subject to a reputation award process. The reputation system allows th ...

, Sandberg published a paper on

arxiv.org arXiv (pronounced "archive"—the X represents the Greek letter chi ⟨χ⟩) is an open-access repository of electronic preprints and postprints (known as e-prints) approved for posting after moderation, but not peer review. It consists of s ...

entitled "Blueberry Earth", which answered the question, "What if the entire Earth was instantaneously replaced with an equal volume of closely packed, but uncompressed blueberries?" The paper got a large amount of news coverage on Slate, The Atlantic, Popular Mechanics, Atlas Obscura, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Forbes, Live Science, Physics World, New Scientist, and many blogs and podcasts.

Work

See also

References

External links