Anders Sandberg on Singularity 1 on 1: Embrace Strangeness

by Socrates

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Dr. Anders Sandberg is a well known transhumanist, futurist, computational neuroscientist and currently a research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford University. I enjoyed talking to him last time he was on Singularity 1 on 1 and was happy to have him back for another one.

During our second conversation with Anders we cover a wide variety of topics such as: transhumanism and the ethics thereof; the limits of being human; the Epic of Gilgamesh and our quest for immortality; overcoming death and enhancing life; life expectancy and our willingness to take risks; the potential for enhancement arms-races; the likelihood of armed conflict between transhumanists and neo-luddites; the most likely path to human enhancement; personal versus collective enhancement; hive-minds, distributed intelligence, the Borg and individulaity; post-humanism and mind uploading.

My favorite quote that I will take away from this interview with Dr. Sandberg is: “That which does not kill us only makes us stranger.”

(As always you can listen to or download the audio file above or scroll down and watch the video interview in full.)

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Who is Anders Sandberg?

Anders Sandberg’s research at the Future of Humanity Institute centres on societal and ethical issues surrounding human enhancement and new technology, as well as estimating the capabilities and underlying science of future technologies. Topics of particular interest include enhancement of cognition, cognitive biases, technology-enabled collective intelligence, neuroethics and public policy. He has worked on this within the EU project ENHANCE, where he also was responsible for public outreach and online presence. Besides scientific publications in neuroscience, ethics and future studies he has also participated in the public debate about human enhancement internationally. Anders also holds an AXA Research Fellowship.

He has a background in computer science, neuroscience and medical engineering. He obtained his Ph.D. in computational neuroscience from Stockholm University, Sweden, for work on neural network modeling of human memory. He has also been the scientific producer for the major neuroscience exhibition “Se Hjärnan!” (“Behold the Brain!”), organized by Swedish Travelling Exhibitions, the Swedish Research Council and the Knowledge Foundation that toured Sweden 2005-2007. He is co-founder and writer for the think tank Eudoxa.

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Tagged as: Anders Sandberg, transhumanism

  • http://twitter.com/theogonia31 M87

    Socrates, your interviews are always so deep and intellectually stimulating. How I wish all content on the Internet or News was not superficial. Keep up the good work.

  • http://www.singularityweblog.com/ Socrates

    Thank you very much friend, you just made my day! ;-)

    And, of course, this is the best motivation to continue doing more interviews ;-)

  • Martin Andersen

    I think the discussion about enhancing one-selves, will not be a hot topic in the future. As mentioned in the video, we do embrace technology very much today. The smartphone is getting more features at a fast rate, and nobody is questioning people with a smartphone, it’s quite natural to have one. So it might be that Kurzweil is right, humans and technology will merge.

  • http://www.singularityweblog.com/ Socrates

    Welcome friend, hope you enjoy your time here in such a way that you will always say that spending your attention currency was worth your while ;-)

  • http://khanneasunztu.wordpress.com/ KhanneaSuntzu

    Anders is *such* a Joker :)

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