Anders Sandberg is a Swedish researcher, futurist, and transhumanist at the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, holding a PhD in computational neuroscience from Stockholm University. His research covers the ethics and societal implications of human enhancement, whole brain emulation, existential and global catastrophic risk, and the very long-range future of intelligent life. He is co-founder of the Swedish Transhumanist Association, a former chairman of that body, and has been described as a philosopher, neuroscientist, futurist, and computer graphics artist whose work ranges from formal academic papers to his famous 2018 viral piece calculating what would happen if the Earth were replaced with blueberries. He is signed up for cryonic preservation after death and is at work on a book titled Grand Futures exploring what intelligent life could ultimately achieve within the laws of physics.

Expect to learn how a bored Swedish child reading 1970s science fiction ended up at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, what transhumanism actually means and how it differs from the science-fiction caricature, why there is no fundamental philosophical distinction between taking a pill and getting a brain implant, how the concept of morphological freedom works and why it cuts both ways, what makes genetic enhancement of children ethically distinct from self-modification, how Anders thinks about the accessibility objection to human enhancement technologies, why he is personally signed up for cryonic preservation and how the process actually works in practice, what whole brain emulation is and why he calls mind uploading a term that makes him cringe, whether a digitally emulated brain could be genuinely conscious and how that question changes the ethics of running simulations, what neuro rights are and why Anders thinks they will become one of the defining legal battlegrounds of the coming decades, how being frozen makes civilizational collapse a deeply personal risk and what that means for his research priorities, and why he considers himself an optimist despite spending his career cataloguing ways the future could go wrong.

Anders Sandberg online:

Website: aleph.se

Twitter/X: @anderssandberg

Oxford profile: ox.ac.uk/news-and-events/find-an-expert/dr-anders-sandberg

Grand Futures (forthcoming): search Anders Sandberg Grand Futures