Anders Sandberg (born 11 July 1972) is a Swedish researcher,

futurist Futurists (also known as futurologists, prospectivists, foresight practitioners and horizon scanners) are people whose specialty or interest is futures studies or futurology or the attempt to systematically explore predictions and possibilities ...

and

transhumanist Transhumanism is a philosophical and intellectual movement that advocates the human enhancement, enhancement of the human condition by developing and making widely available new and future technologies that can greatly enhance longevity, cogni ...

. He holds a PhD in

computational neuroscience Computational neuroscience (also known as theoretical neuroscience or mathematical neuroscience) is a branch of neuroscience which employs mathematics, computer science, theoretical analysis and abstractions of the brain to understand th ...

from

Stockholm University Stockholm University (SU) () is a public university, public research university in Stockholm, Sweden, founded as a college in 1878, with university status since 1960. With over 33,000 students at four different faculties: law, humanities, social ...

, and is a former senior research fellow at the

Future of Humanity Institute The Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) was an interdisciplinary research centre at the University of Oxford investigating big-picture questions about humanity and its prospects. It was founded in 2005 as part of the Faculty of Philosophy and t ...

at the

University of Oxford The University of Oxford is a collegiate university, collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the List of oldest un ...

Work

Sandberg's research centres on societal and ethical issues surrounding

human enhancement Human enhancement is the natural, artificial, or technological alteration of the human body in order to enhance physical or mental capabilities. Technologies Existing technologies Three forms of human enhancement currently exist: reproductive ...

and new technology, as well as on assessing the capabilities and underlying science of future technologies. His research includes work on cognitive enhancement (methods, impacts, and policy analysis) and technical roadmaps on

whole brain emulation Mind uploading is a speculative process of whole brain emulation in which a brain scan is used to completely emulate the mental state of the individual in a digital computer. The computer would then run a simulation of the brain's information ...

neuroethics In philosophy and neuroscience, neuroethics is the study of both the ethics of neuroscience and the neuroscience of ethics. The ethics of neuroscience concerns the ethical, legal, and social impact of neuroscience, including the ways in which ne ...

, and

existential risk A global catastrophic risk or a doomsday scenario is a hypothetical event that could damage human well-being on a global scale, endangering or even destroying Modernity, modern civilization. Existential risk is a related term limited to even ...

s. He analysed how to take into account the subjective uncertainty in risk estimates of low-likelihood, high-consequence risk. Sandberg is known as a researcher, participant and commentator in the public debate on human enhancement, neuroscience, ethics, and future studies. He is co-founder of and writer for the think tank Eudoxa, and is a co-founder of the

Orion's Arm Orion's Arm (also called the Orion's Arm Universe Project, OAUP, or simply OA) is a multi-authored online hard science fiction world-building project, first established in 2000 by M. Alan Kazlev, Donna Malcolm Hirsekorn, Bernd Helfert and And ...

collaborative

worldbuilding Worldbuilding is the process of constructing an imaginary world or setting (narrative), setting, sometimes associated with a fictional universe. Developing the world with coherent qualities such as a history, geography, culture and ecology is a k ...

project. Between 1996 and 2000 he was Chairman of the Swedish Transhumanist Association. He was also the scientific producer for the neuroscience exhibition "Se Hjärnan!" ("Behold the Brain!"), organized by Swedish Travelling Exhibitions, the Swedish Research Council and the Knowledge Foundation, that toured Sweden in 2005–2006. In 2007 he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the

Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics The Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford was founded in 2001. It is part of Oxford's Humanities Division, University of Oxford, Humanities Division. The faculty is located next to Somerville College, Oxford, Somerville College on Woodstock ...

, working on the EU-funded ENHANCE project on the ethics of human enhancement. Sandberg is also an electronic artist, whose renderings have been adapted for book covers by futurist

Damien Broderick Damien Francis Broderick (22 April 1944 – 19 April 2025) was an Australian science fiction and popular science writer and editor of some 74 books. ''The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction'' credits him with the first usage of the term ''virtual ...

: ''The Dreaming'', ''Earth is But a Star'', ''The Judas Mandala'', ''Skiffy and Mimesis'', ''Uncle Bones'', ''Warriors of the Tao'', and ''xyzt''. Anders Sandberg in TEDxTallinn

Sandberg has also supported and advocated

cryonics Cryonics (from ''kryos'', meaning "cold") is the low-temperature freezing (usually at ) and storage of human remains in the hope that resurrection may be possible in the future. Cryonics is regarded with skepticism by the mainstream scien ...

, for example by signing an open letter to support research into cryonics and by being an advisor to the UK Cryonics and Cryopreservation Research Network, a UK

advocacy group Advocacy groups, also known as lobby groups, interest groups, special interest groups, pressure groups, or public associations, use various forms of advocacy or lobbying to influence public opinion and ultimately public policy. They play an impor ...

. He has personally arranged to be cryonically preserved after his legal death. One of his 2014 papers, entitled "Ethics of Brain Emulations", became one of the most downloaded papers in the

Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence The ''Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence'' is a quarterly peer-reviewed scientific journal published by Taylor and Francis. It covers all aspects of artificial intelligence and was established in 1989. The editor-in-chi ...

, from a special volume edited by Vincent C. Müller. With nanotechnologist

Eric Drexler Kim Eric Drexler (born April 25, 1955) is an American engineer best known for introducing molecular nanotechnology (MNT), and his studies of its potential from the 1970s and 1980s. His 1991 doctoral thesis at Massachusetts Institute of Technology ...

and philosopher

Toby Ord Toby David Godfrey Ord (born July 1979) is an Australian philosopher. In 2009 he founded Giving What We Can, an international society whose members pledge to donate at least 10% of their income to effective charities, and is a key figure in th ...

in 2018 he published a paper entitled "Dissolving the

Fermi Paradox The Fermi paradox is the discrepancy between the lack of conclusive evidence of advanced extraterrestrial life and the apparently high likelihood of its existence. Those affirming the paradox generally conclude that if the conditions required ...

". The paper was the first to estimate and rigorously take into account the uncertainties in each term in the

Drake equation The Drake equation is a probability theory, probabilistic argument used to estimate the number of active, communicative extraterrestrial life, extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy.Physics Today 14 (4), 40–46 (1961). The e ...

. These uncertainties, which often span multiple orders of magnitude, can be represented as probability distributions with long tails. Instead of getting a single estimate of the probability of life in our galaxy, they therefore obtained a distribution. They found that there is a high likelihood that we are alone in our galaxy or even alone in the entire observable universe, thus proposing a solution to the famous Fermi paradox, which asks why we do not see signs of intelligent life in the night sky. In 2018, in response to a question on Physics

Stack Exchange Stack Exchange is a network of question-and-answer (Q&A) websites on topics in diverse fields, each site covering a specific topic, where questions, answers, and users are subject to a reputation award process. The reputation system allows t ...

, Sandberg published a paper on

arXiv arXiv (pronounced as "archive"—the X represents the Chi (letter), Greek letter chi ⟨χ⟩) is an open-access repository of electronic preprints and postprints (known as e-prints) approved for posting after moderation, but not Scholarly pee ...

entitled "Blueberry Earth", which answered the question, "What if the entire Earth was instantaneously replaced with an equal volume of closely packed, but uncompressed blueberries?" The paper got a large amount of news coverage on ''Slate'', ''The Atlantic'', ''Popular Mechanics'', ''Atlas Obscura'', and in other outlets.

Work

See also

References

External links