Anders Sandberg
Dr. Anders Sandberg is senior research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) at the University of Oxford, and fellow for Ethics and Values at Reuben College, Oxford. Beside FHI and Mimir he is also research associate of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and the Center for the Study of Bioethics (Belgrade). He is on the board of the non-profits ALLFED and AI Objectives Institute.
His research centres on management of low-probability high-impact risks, societal and ethical issues surrounding human enhancement, estimating the capabilities of future technologies, and very long-range futures. Topics of particular interest include global catastrophic risk, existential risk, cognitive enhancement, methods of forecasting, whole brain emulation, and the search for extraterrestrial inteligence (SETI).
At Mimir he is working on issues of space ethics, systemic risk and whole brain emulation. What are the physical limits of what advanced civilizations can achieve in this universe, and what implications does this have for our near-term strategy on reducing risk, SETI and setting space policy? How much does the grandness (by any normative measure) of the future determine near-term macrostrategy compared to uncertainty and the expected length of the future? What is the moral value or risk of spreading life in the universe? What are the pathways to systemic disasters in societies and civilizations, and how can they be avoided? What are the methodological innovations needed to make tightly coupled systemic risks amenable to analysis and amelioration? How feasible is whole brain emulations, and what does the possibility of human- and animal-based digital minds imply ethically?
Selection of publications
Sandberg, A. (forthcoming). Grand Futures: visions and limits of what can be achieved.
Sandberg, A. (2023). “The Lifespan of Civilizations: Do Societies ‘Age,’ or Is Collapse Just Bad Luck?”, in How Worlds Collapse (pp. 375-396). Routledge.
Jebari, K. & A. Sandberg (2022). “Ecocentrism and Biosphere Life Extension”, Science and Engineering Ethics, 28(6), 46.
Fisher, L. & A. Sandberg (2022). “A safe governance space for humanity: necessary conditions for the governance of global catastrophic risks”, Global Policy, 13(5), 792-807.
Yang, V. C. & A. Sandberg (2022). “Collective Intelligence as Infrastructure for Reducing Broad Global Catastrophic Risks”, arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.03300.