Anders Sandberg

University of Oxford | OX · Faculty of Philosophy

Sigmoids (AKA s-curves or logistic curves) are commonly used in a diverse spectrum of disciplines as models for time-varying phenomena showing initial acceleration followed by slowing: technology diffusion, cumulative cases of an epidemic, population growth towards a carrying capacity, etc. Existing work demonstrates that retrospective fit of data...

It is unknown how abundant extraterrestrial life is, or whether such life might be complex or intelligent. On Earth, the emergence of complex intelligent life required a preceding series of evolutionary transitions such as abiogenesis, eukaryogenesis, and the evolution of sexual reproduction, multicellularity, and intelligence itself. Some of these...

Empirical investigations into ordinary people’s bioethical intuitions have steadily grown throughout the last decades. A new study provides a paradigm example of what has been recently dubbed experimental philosophical bioethics or “bioxphi." A descendant of both experimental philosophy (“x-phi”) and empirical bioethics, bioxphi goes beyond merely...

Purpose This paper aims to formalize long-term trajectories of human civilization as a scientific and ethical field of study. The long-term trajectory of human civilization can be defined as the path that human civilization takes during the entire future time period in which human civilization could continue to exist. Design/methodology/approach...

In an increasingly complex information society, demands for cognitive functioning are growing steadily. In recent years, numerous strategies to augment brain function have been proposed. Evidence for their efficacy (or lack thereof) and side effects has prompted discussions about ethical, societal and medical implications. In the public debate, cog...

With the advance of biotechnology, biological information, rather than biological materials, is increasingly the object of principal security concern. We argue that both in theory and in practice, existing security approaches in biology are poorly suited to manage hazardous biological information, and use the cases of Mousepox, H5N1 gain of functio...

Purpose The speed of computing and other automated processes plays an important role in how the world functions by causing “time compression”. This paper aims to review reasons to believe computation will continue to become faster in the future, the economic consequences of speedups and how these affect risk, ethics and governance. Design/methodo...

'Brainjacking’ refers to the exercise of unauthorized control of another’s electronic brain implant. Whilst the possibility of hacking a Brain–Computer Interface (BCI) has already been proven in both experimental and real-life settings, there is reason to believe that it will soon be possible to interfere with the software settings of the Implanted...

This paper explores the physics of the what-if question "what if the entire Earth was instantaneously replaced with an equal volume of closely packed, but uncompressed blueberries?" While the assumption may be absurd, the consequences can be explored rigorously using elementary physics. The result is not entirely dissimilar to a small ocean-world e...

The Fermi paradox is the conflict between an expectation of a high {\em ex ante} probability of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe and the apparently lifeless universe we in fact observe. The expectation that the universe should be teeming with intelligent life is linked to models like the Drake equation, which suggest that even if the prob...

Using a collection of data on some of the catastrophe policies written since 2006 by a major reinsurance organisation, this paper explores how tightly underwriters follow the models and under what conditions they deviate from them. The data included underwriter premium and LE (loss estimate), and sometimes included LE from up to four different mode...

In September 2015 a well-publicised Campaign Against Sex Robots (CASR) was launched. Modelled on the longer-standing Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, the CASR opposes the development of sex robots on the grounds that the technology is being developed with a particular model of female-male relations (the prostitute-john model) in mind, and that this...

In this article we discuss the moral and legal aspects of causing the death of a terminal patient in the hope of extending their life in the future. We call this theoretical procedure cryothanasia. We argue that administering cryothanasia is ethically different from administering euthanasia. Consequently, objections to euthanasia should not apply t...

How individuals tend to evaluate the combination of their own and other’s payoffs—social value orientations—is likely to be a potential target of future moral enhancers. However, the stability of cooperation in human societies has been buttressed by evolved mildly prosocial orientations. If they could be changed, would this destabilize the cooperat...

If a civilization wants to maximize computation it appears rational to aestivate until the far future in order to exploit the low temperature environment: this can produce a $10^{30}$ multiplier of achievable computation. We hence suggest the "aestivation hypothesis": the reason we are not observing manifestations of alien civilizations is that the...

In recent years, a number of prominent computer scientists, along with academics in fields such as philosophy and physics, have lent credence to the notion that machines may one day become as large as humans. Many have further argued that machines could even come to exceed human size by a significant margin. However, there are at least seven distin...

Human beings are a marvel of evolved complexity. Such systems can be difficult to enhance. When we manipulate complex evolved systems, which are poorly understood, our interventions often fail or backfire. It can appear as if there is a “wisdom of nature” which we ignore at our peril. Sometimes the belief in nature’s wisdom—and corresponding doubts...

In 2015, we published an article entitled “The Medicalization of Love,” in which we argued that both good and bad consequences could be expected to follow from love’s medicalization, depending upon how the process unfolded. A flurry of commentaries followed; here we offer some preliminary thoughts in reply to the more substantial of the criticisms...

Does the energy requirements for the human brain give energy constraints that give reason to doubt the feasibility of artificial intelligence? This report will review some relevant estimates of brain bioenergetics and analyze some of the methods of estimating brain emulation energy requirements. Turning to AI, there are reasons to believe the energ...

In some situations a number of agents each have the ability to undertake an initiative that would have significant effects on the others. Suppose that each of these agents is purely motivated by an altruistic concern for the common good. We show that if each agent acts on her own personal judgment as to whether the initiative should be undertaken,...

One day we will create virtual minds. Could this simulation suffer, asks Anders Sandberg, and does it matter?

In the depths of space, how will groups and individuals interact? What will the dynamics be when law enforcement is in pursuit of criminals, or when powerful groups try to constrain the activities of lesser ones? Using some very general assumptions, it is possible to paint a picture of how these dynamics could play out. The most likely options for...

Pharmaceuticals or other emerging technologies could be used to enhance (or diminish) feelings of lust, attraction, and attachment in adult romantic partnerships. While such interventions could conceivably be used to promote individual (and couple) well-being, their widespread development and/or adoption might lead to “medicalization” of human love...

Autonomous Cars and their Moral Implications This paper argues that autonomous cars are social robots which must act as moral proxies for their human owners. To avoid the unacceptable removal of moral choices from human users of these technologies, we could program the vehicles to act in accordance with different moral theories and allow their owne...

miembro del Future of Humanity Institute de la Universidad de Oxford y experto en mejoramiento humano y transhumanismo, sobre cuestiones centrales de su labor investigadora.PALABRAS CLAVETRANSHUMANISMO, MEJORAMIENTO HUMANO, ANDERS SANDBERG, BIOTECNOLOGÍAABSTRACTInterview with Anders Sandberg, member of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford Uni...

Pharmaceuticals or other emerging technologies could be used to enhance (or diminish) feelings of lust, attraction, and attachment in adult romantic partnerships. While such interventions could conceivably be used to promote individual (and couple) well-being, their widespread development and/or adoption might lead to "medicalization" of human love...

A brain emulation would be a one-to-one simulation where every causal process in the brain is represented, behaving in the same way as the original. Opponents of animal testing often argue that much of it is unnecessary and could be replaced with simulations. Personal identity is going to be a major issue with brain emulations, both because of the...

Whole brain emulation attempts to achieve software intelligence by copying the function of biological nervous systems into software. This paper aims at giving an overview of the ethical issues of the brain emulation approach, and analysing how they should affect responsible policy for developing the field. Animal emulations have uncertain moral sta...

As cognitive neuroscience has advanced, the list of prospective internal, biological enhancements has steadily expanded. Education and training, as well as the use of external information-processing devices, may be labeled as “conventional” means of cognition enhancement (CE). They are often well established and culturally accepted. By contrast, me...

Current and future possibilities for enhancing human physical ability, cognition, mood, and lifespan raise the ethical question of whether we should enhance normal human capacities in these ways. This chapter offers such an account of enhancement. It begins by reviewing a number of suggested accounts of enhancement, and points to their shortcomings...

The possibility of enhancing human abilities often raises public concern about equality and social impact. This chapter aims at one particular group of technologies, cognitive enhancement, and one particular fear, that enhancement will create social divisions and possibly expanding inequalities. The chapter argues that cognitive enhancements could...

The enhancement debate in neuroscience and biomedical ethics tends to focus on the augmentation of certain capacities or functions: memory, learning, attention, and the like. Typically, the point of contention is whether these augmentative enhancements are permissible for individuals with no particular ‘medical’ disadvantage along any of the dimens...

We extend the existing enumeration of neck tie-knots to include tie-knots with a textured front, tied with the narrow end of a tie. These tie-knots have gained popularity in recent years, based on reconstructions of a costume detail from The Matrix Reloaded, and are explicitly ruled out in the enumeration by Fink and Mao (2000). We show that the re...

Our understanding of the neurochemical bases of human love and attachment, as well as of the genetic, epigenetic, hormonal, and experiential factors that conspire to shape an individual’s sexual orientation, is increasing exponentially. This research raises the vexing possibility that we may one day be equipped to modify such variables directly, al...

"Love hurts"-as the saying goes-and a certain amount of pain and difficulty in intimate relationships is unavoidable. Sometimes it may even be beneficial, since adversity can lead to personal growth, self-discovery, and a range of other components of a life well-lived. But other times, love can be downright dangerous. It may bind a spouse to her do...

The Fermi paradox is the discrepancy between the strong likelihood of alien intelligent life emerging (under a wide variety of assumptions) and the absence of any visible evidence for such emergence. In this paper, we extend the Fermi paradox to not only life in this galaxy, but to other galaxies as well. We do this by demonstrating that travelling...

Brain emulation is a hypothetical but extremely transformative technology which has a non-zero chance of appearing during the next century. This paper investigates whether such a technology would also have any predictable characteristics that give it a chance of being catastrophically dangerous, and whether there are any policy levers which might b...

This chapter presents comments by David Brin, Damien Broderick, Nick Bostrom, Alexander "Sasha" Chislenko, Robin Hanson, Max More, Michael Nielsen, and Anders Sandberg on Vernor Vinge's Singularity concept. Vinge's "Singularity" is a worthy contribution to the long tradition of contemplations about human transcendence. Around 2050, or maybe as earl...

This chapter demonstrates why the freedom to modify one's body is essential not just to transhumanism, but also to any future democratic society. It sketches a core framework of rights leading up the morphological freedom, showing how it derives from and is necessary for other important rights. Given current social and technological trends issues r...

INTERVIEW of Brian D. Earp, Anders Sandberg, and Julian Savulescu (University of Oxford) by Ross Andersen (The Atlantic): George Bernard Shaw once satirized marriage as "two people under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, who are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, ab...

Whole brain emulation (WBE) is the possible future one-to-one modeling of the function of the entire (human) brain. The basic idea is to take a particular brain, scan its structure in detail, and construct a software model of it that is so faithful to the original that, when run on appropriate hardware, it will behave in essentially the same way as...

We argue that the fragility of contemporary marriages-and the corresponding high rates of divorce-can be explained (in large part) by a three-part mismatch: between our relationship values, our evolved psychobiological natures, and our modern social, physical, and technological environment. "Love drugs" could help address this mismatch by boosting...

There is no strong reason to believe that human-level intelligence represents an upper limit of the capacity of artificial intelligence, should it be realized. This poses serious safety issues, since a superintelligent system would have great power to direct the future according to its possibly flawed motivation system. Solving this issue in genera...

If the meaning of sport is increasingly to do with what it is to be human, then Oscar Pistorius is the thin end of a fat wedge, says Anders Sandberg

Anthropogenic climate change is arguably one of the biggest problems that confront us today. There is ample evidence that climate change is likely to affect adversely many aspects of life for all people around the world, and that existing solutions such as geoengineering might be too risky and ordinary behavioural and market solutions might not be...

High divorce and break-up rates make it look like, we're outliving our inborn capacity to love. But there may be a way to make love last…

The dynamics and storage capacity of a Bayesian Confidence Propagation Neural Network (BCPNN) with hypercolumns is studied. Hypercolumns is a concept derived from the local connectivity seen between neurons in cortex. The BCPNN has recurrent connections and it is used as an autoassociative memory. A parallel implementation of the BCPNN is used to r...

Human cognitive performance has crucial significance for legal process, often creating the difference between fair and unfair imprisonment. Lawyers, judges, and jurors need to follow long and complex arguments. They need to understand technical language. Jurors need to remember what happens during a long trial. The demands imposed on jurors in part...

Recent elegant research has raised the salient issue of altering traumatic memories and its treatment implications. Kindt et al [1][1] suggest that ‘if emotional memory could be weakened or even erased, then we might be able to eliminate the root of many psychiatric disorders, such as post-

We describe a significant practical consequence of taking anthropic biases into account in deriving predictions for rare stochastic catastrophic events. The risks associated with catastrophes such as asteroidal/cometary impacts, supervolcanic episodes, and explosions of supernovae/gamma-ray bursts are based on their observed frequencies. As a resul...

This paper reviews dierent denitions and models of technological singularity. The models range from con- ceptual sketches to detailled endogenous growth mod- els, as well as attempts to t empirical data to quan- titative models. Such models are useful for examining the dynamics of the world-system and possible types of future crisis points where fu...

Cognitive enhancement takes many and diverse forms. Various methods of cognitive enhancement have implications for the near future. At the same time, these technologies raise a range of ethical issues. For example, they interact with notions of authenticity, the good life, and the role of medicine in our lives. Present and anticipated methods for c...

This paper deals with new pharmacological and technological developments in the manipulation and curtailment of our sleep needs. While humans have used various methods throughout history to lengthen diurnal wakefulness, recent advances have been achieved in manipulating the architecture of the brain states involved in sleep. The progress suggests t...

Some risks have extremely high stakes. For example, a worldwide pandemic or asteroid impact could potentially kill more than a billion people. Comfortingly, scientific calculations often put very low probabilities on the occurrence of such catastrophes. In this paper, we argue that there are important new methodological problems which arise when as...

The prospect of using memory modifying technologies raises interesting and important normative concerns. We first point out that those developing desirable memory modifying technologies should keep in mind certain technical and user-limitation issues. We next discuss certain normative issues that the use of these technologies can raise such as trut...

This paper reviews the evolutionary history and biology of love and marriage. It examines the current and imminent possibilities of biological manipulation of lust, attraction and attachment, so called neuroenhancement of love. We examine the arguments for and against these biological interventions to influence love. We argue that biological interv...

Large-scale, coherent, but highly transient networks of neurons, 'neuronal assemblies', operate over a sub-second time frame. Such assemblies of brain cells need not necessarily respect well-defined anatomical compartmentalisation, but represent an intermediate level of brain organisation between identified brain regions and individual neurons depe...

Cognitive enhancement, the amplification or extension of core capacities of the mind, has become a major topic in bioethics. But cognitive enhancement is a prime example of a converging technology where individual disciplines merge and issues transcend particular local discourses. This article reviews currently available methods of cognitive enhanc...

Differences in cognitive aging rates among mammals suggest that the pace of brain aging is genetically determined. In this work, we investigate the possibility that brain aging is an extension of brain development. It is possible that a subset of developmental mechanisms are extreme cases of antagonistic pleiotropy in that they are necessary for re...

Data of spike timing-dependent plasticity (STDP) show a sharp temporal transition between potentiation and depression despite a relatively slow time course of calcium concentration. We show how autocatalytic amplification of initial concentration differences can enable a high degree of temporal selectivity and produce the sharp STDP weight change c...

Recent models of the oculomotor delayed response task have been based on the assumption that working memory is stored as a persistent activity state (a 'bump' state). The delay activity is maintained by a finely tuned synaptic weight matrix producing a line attractor. Here we present an alternative hypothesis, that fast Hebbian synaptic plasticity...

During the last few decades we have seen a convergence among ideas and hypotheses regarding functional principles underlying human memory. Hebb’s now more than fifty years old conjecture concerning synaptic plasticity and cell assemblies, formalized mathematically as attractor neural networks, has remained among the most viable and productive theor...

The central question of development is: how does structure emerge from a structureless state without an external organizing force? The answer seems to be that self-organizing processes are able to produce complex structures from simple initial states. In biological systems a major factor appears to be diffusion of chemical factors guiding growth or...

Recent models of the oculomotor delayed response task have been based on the assumption that working memory is stored as a persistent activity state (a ‘bump’ state). The delay activity is maintained by a finely tuned synaptic weight matrix producing a line attractor. Here we present an alternative hypothesis, that fast Hebbian synaptic plasticity...

We investigate attractor neural networks with a modular structure, where a local winner-takes-all rule acts within the modules (called hypercolumns). We make a signal-to-noise analysis of storage capacity and noise tolerance, and compare the results with those from simulations. Introducing local winner-takes-all dynamics improves storage capacity a...

A realtime online learning system with capacity limits needs to gradually forget old information in order to avoid catastrophic forgetting. This can be achieved by allowing new information to overwrite old, as in a so-called palimpsest memory. This paper describes an incremental learning rule based on the Bayesian confidence propagation neural netw...

Long-term memory consolidation is commonly assumed to occur through the reinstatement of previous activation states in the cortex by the action of the medial temporal lobe (MTL) memory system. In order to produce a sequence of reinstated patterns the MTL system either needs to be externally cued, or have an intrinsic dynamics enabling it to present...

The strength of a memory trace is modulated by a variety of factors such as arousal, attention, context, type of processing during encoding, salience and novelty of the experience. Some of these factors can be modeled as a variable plasticity level in the memory system, controlled by arousal or relevance-estimating systems. We demonstrate that a Ba...

We derive upper bounds for the density of dancing angels on the point of a pin. It is found to be dependent on the assumed mass of the angels, with a maximum number 8.6766 · 10 49 of angels at the critical angel mass 3.8807 · 10 −34 kg.

Capacity limited memory systems need to gradually forget old information in order to avoid catastrophic forgetting where all stored information is lost. This can be achieved by allowing new information to overwrite old, as in the so-called palimpsest memory. This paper describes a new such learning rule employed in an attractor neural network. The...

A recurrently connected attractor neural network with a Hebbian learning rule is currently our best ANN analogy for a piece cortex. Functionally biological memory operates on a spectrum of time scales with regard to induction and retention, and it is modulated in complex ways by sub-cortical neuro-modulatory systems. Moreover, biological memory net...

“See” is a software framework for simulation of biologically detailed and artificial neural networks and systems. It includes an general purpose scripting language, based on Scheme, which also can be used interactively, while the basic framework is written in C++. Models can be built on the Scheme level from “simulation objects”, each representing...

Attempts to model interstellar colonization may seem hopelessly compromised by uncertain-ties regarding the technologies and preferences of advanced civilizations. If light speed limits travel speeds, however, then a selection effect may eventually determine frontier behavior. Mak-ing weak assumptions about colonization technology, we use this sele...

Gesture interaction is a versatile, intuitive way of interacting with computers, especially suited for virtual environments and applications where many degrees of freedom are important. Human gestures have many meanings and uses, and are often different from person to person, while gesture input devices often introduce artifacts; this makes recogni...

Thesis (doctoral)--Stockholm University, 2003.