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In this week’s newsletter

✅ Introduction to episode #19 with Anders Sandberg.  ✅ Brain emulation - does it preserve ”you”? ✅ Detailed show notes.  ✅ Biological risks and superintelligence. ✅ The optimistic outlook on humanity's future.

🤙🏼 Want to connect? Add me on LinkedIn. 🙏🏼 Not subscribed to the LEVITY podcast on Youtube yet? Do it here. 🎧 More of a listener? The LEVITY podcast is also available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and other places.

Some housekeeping:

In just a couple of weeks, I’ll be publishing the next feature in my Longevity Builders series. I can’t wait to share this one with you - calling this company ambitious would be an understatement.

Longevity Builders is a PREMIUM feature, meaning those of you who have upgraded will get exclusive early access. After that, I’ll open the article up for everyone to read for a few days (and I’ll be sure to let you know when).

The first company I covered in this series was the incredible Fauna Bio - and there’s plenty more to come.

If you’d like to support LEVITY, the best way is to upgrade to PREMIUM. I’ll do my absolute best to make sure you feel it’s worth it - and of course, you can cancel anytime.

Humming Forever Young in the face of existential risk

When the war in Ukraine started, Anders Sandberg was walking along the corridors at Oxford humming 80's pop songs about nuclear armageddon (including one you might otherwise associate with longevity: Forever Young by Alphaville).

That's the thing about Anders - he can have deep conversations about existential risks while maintaining a joyous perspective. In this episode of LEVITY, Patrick and I engage with our fellow Swede, a philosopher and researcher from the Institute for Future Studies in Stockholm, as he shares his optimistic outlook on humanity's future.

Despite discussing nuclear threats, biological risks, and superintelligent AI, Anders brings a wonderful and, I would argue, unique mix of philosophical depth and playful curiosity to these weighty topics. Our conversation spans from personal identity and brain emulation to the nature of death and the potential ”telescoping of the future” where technological advancement might accelerate beyond our imagination.

In this episode you’ll learn about:

✅ Existential risks and Anders' optimistic view that we have a 90% chance of surviving this century.

✅ Why our current era might be humanity's ”crunch time” with unprecedented technological risks.

✅ The philosophical debate about whether death is bad for you personally.

✅ The nature of personal identity and whether brain emulation preserves ”you”.

✅ AI development and the potential ”telescoping of the future” where advancements happen rapidly.

✅ Nuclear war as an ongoing existential threat that shouldn't be forgotten.

✅ Biological risks from advancing biotechnology and decentralized threats.

✅ Anders' vision of humans potentially becoming like ”mitochondria” in a future AI civilization.

You can watch the episode below or listen to it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or other places, like PocketCasts. Please follow, like and subscribe! 🙏🏼 This will boost our chances of reaching a bigger audience.

A detailed overview of the episode

Introduction

• Peter Ottsjö and Patrick Linden introduce Anders Sandberg, a Swedish philosopher and researcher at the Institute for Future Studies in Stockholm.

• Anders was previously a senior research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford.

• Anders' focus is on the very long-term future and technologies that can change the human condition.

Exercise and longevity

• Brief discussion about David Sinclair's recent statement that ”exercise may not be as important for longevity as we think”.

• Anders: ”Exercise is still good for a lot of other stuff. It keeps you healthy and it keeps you happy. That's already a good reason to do it.”

The Doomsday Clock and existential risk

• Patrick mentions the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists' Doomsday Clock (currently at 90 seconds to midnight at time of recording) [Note: it’s now at 89 seconds.]

• Discussion about humanity's chances of survival through the next century, millennium, and beyond.

• Anders expresses optimism: ”I typically hand wave a bit and say, maybe something around 10% chance [of extinction this century]. So many people hear that and say, 'Oh no, that's enormous, this is so gloomy'. And I cheer and say, yeah, but it's 90% chance that we muddled through”.

• Anders references Toby Ord's book The Precipice, which estimates a one in six chance of extinction.

• Anders believes our current era might be ”crunch time” for humanity, with powerful technologies creating unprecedented risks.

• ”If we survive the next thousand years, I think the next million years are going to be a breeze.”

Current existential risks

Nuclear War

• Anders: ”So there is that kind of oldie but a goodie nuclear war. In some sense it was the original anthropogenic existential risk.”

• Anders grew up in the 1980s: ”For me [the prospect of] nuclear war is kind of a normal state. I remember going to bed thinking that the missiles might be in the air tonight.”

• Discussion of satellite warning systems, close calls, and increased risk due to the Ukraine war.

• Anders: ”When it [the Ukraine war] broke out, I was kind of humming various pop hits from the 80s while I was walking around in our offices [...] I was whistling Forever Young in the hallways and the young researchers didn't really like it.”

• Reference to Anders' office at FHI being named the ”Petrov room” after Stanislav Petrov who prevented nuclear war in 1983.

• Discussion of uncertainties around nuclear winter and its effects.

ALLFED and Food resilience

• Anders mentions his involvement with ALLFED (Alliance to Feed Earth in Disasters).

• Focus on resilient food sources in case of global catastrophes like nuclear winter.

• Examples include: using fungi or insects to process cellulose (from trees), natural gas digesting bacteria for protein, and building plastic greenhouses in the tropics.

Biological risks

• Discussion of how biological weapons are becoming more accessible due to advancing biotechnology.

• Anders: ”The resources you needed to make a pandemic virus are very modest compared to the resources needed to make even a single nuclear warhead.”

• Importance of decentralized solutions for biotechnology risks: disease surveillance, rapid antibody development, and monitoring DNA synthesis.

• ”Biology is complicated and by its nature insecure... exchanging DNA, that's a really good survival trait across the biosphere.”

Technology as both risk and solution

• Nuclear and biotech are beneficial (energy, medicine) but also dangerous

• Anders: ”Most technologies that are powerful can be used for powerful destruction.”

• Comparison to how we've managed fire over time through building materials, fire brigades, and fire insurance.

Anders' background and philosophy

• Grew up in Sweden in the 1970s-80s reading science fiction.

• Mentions influences including Isaac Asimov, Jules Verne, Arthur C. Clarke, and Sam J. Lundwall.

• ”I regard myself more of a hard science fiction fan than a follower of new wave science fiction”.

• First connected to the internet in 1991 at university.

• Met Nick Bostrom (whose name is pronounced ”Boström” in Swedish) at transhumanist conferences in America.

• Initially disagreed with Bostrom's paper on existential risk before coming to agree with it.

• Joined the Future of Humanity Institute in 2006, combining his knowledge of human enhancement philosophy with computational neuroscience background.

• Anders humorously notes that his web design skills were ”this unheard of super skill back in 2006 at the philosophy department”.

Personal identity and self-continuity

• Discussion of continuity of self and the nature of personal identity

• Anders describes himself as ”the equivalence class of all sufficient Anders-like processes”.

• Deep philosophical discussion about brain emulation and whether it preserves personal identity.

• Anders: ”I think personal identity, it doesn't exist. Or rather, people have different views on personal identity and they're all kind of right about them being their view.”

• Discussion of how we accept gradual changes to ourselves over time (childhood to adulthood) but question sudden transitions.

• Peter asks about Anders' cryonics contract with Alcor and how it relates to his views on personal identity.

Epistemology and knowledge

• Discussion of how to know what's true in an age of specialized knowledge

• Anders on epistemic humility: ”Being absolutely certain of anything is kind of stupid. At the same time, we need to act on our beliefs, but we can recognize that I could be wrong about this, but I'm still gonna do it.”

• Reference to Cratylus (Greek cynic) who would only raise his finger to indicate something happened because he wasn't certain what it was.

• Anders: ”The problem is knowing everything just means that the frontier of ignorance just gets bigger.”

Optimism and pessimism

• Patrick notes a cultural bias: ”If you express optimism you're regarded as naive and if you express pessimism you're regarded as wise.” [Note: for more about Patrick’s views, watch our very first episode.]

• Anders: ”As an optimist that, yeah, pessimist might be right more often than optimist, but we're still happy when we're wrong. The pessimist is right and not happy about it.”

• Discussion of the value of optimism in motivating action versus accurate prediction.

Transhumanism and enhancement

• Anders discusses his involvement in the transhumanist movement.

• ”I think that we should totally upgrade our bodies and minds. I think we should remove involuntary aging.”

• Discussion of whole brain emulation (uploading minds to computers).

• Philosophical debate about whether an uploaded mind would still be ”you”.

Ethics and altruism

• Discussion about whether we should prioritize ourselves or others.

• Anders mentions a simulation he ran showing a natural convergence to pro-social behavior with some variation in selfishness/altruism.

• Discussion of rights-based versus consequentialist ethics.

• Anders: ”I'm very much on the consequentialist side of things. So that also makes me a somewhat unusual libertarian.”

Artificial Intelligence

• Discussion of how AI development is accelerating faster than expected.

• Anders: ”It's kind of an odd feeling that the stuff we were talking about on the Extropians mailing list in the 90s... is kind of getting very mainstream and not just mainstream, it's serious business.”

• Reference to the shift after ImageNet/AlexNet in 2012 demonstrated unexpectedly good results.

• Anders uses language models to analyze his research notes and generates new ideas.

• Discussion of how AI is being integrated into programming.

• Peter mentions Nick Bostrom's concept of the ”telescoping of the future” - rapid acceleration of technological advancement.

AI safety concerns

• Peter expresses concern that ”AI safety is not going to work because we don't have enough time to fix it. The capabilities are evolving too fast.”

• Anders discusses not catastrophic AI takeover but emergent collective effects: ”I don't think the likely disaster scenario is so much that a server somewhere decides, I think therefore I am, and then goes off and takes over the world... I think a more likely thing is we're getting pretty aligned AI and you can't live without it.”

• Anders describes a scenario where individually well-aligned AI systems collectively create emergent effects humans can't control.

• Discussion of humanity potentially becoming like ”mitochondria” in relation to future AI systems: ”We're giving some goals and pizazz to the AI civilization and they can't live without us, but we're a small part of something much bigger.”

Differential technology development

• Anders advocates for changing the order in which technologies arrive.

• ”You want certain technologies that make the future safer to arrive much earlier. It would have been a great thing if we had figured out how to go to space and settle other planets before we discovered nuclear weapons.”

• Examples of beneficial technologies to accelerate: automated medicine, AI safety systems.

• Technologies to delay or avoid: methods causing false vacuum decay or creating black holes.

Book recommendations

• Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker and Last and First Men - epic science fiction about the future of humanity and intelligence in the universe.

• The Anthropic Cosmological Principle by Barrow and Tipler - about humanity's role in the universe.

• Hannu Rajaniemi's The Quantum Thief - a post-human science fiction heist story (by an author who now runs a biotech startup).

Current projects

• Working on an updated roadmap for brain emulation (a sequel to his 2008 work with Nick Bostrom).

• Running a workshop on the ethics of brain emulation.

• Planning to restart work on a book about ”grand futures”.

Closing reflections

• Anders on life's limitations: ”The most horrible thing about life, I think, is that we have to specialize and limit ourselves. There's so much for us to experience and learn and so many conversations to have”.

• Discussion of aging as an arbitrary limitation we should fight against.

• Anders mentions wearing his cryonics medallion as a conversation starter: ”It immediately gets people to start talking about the big things.”