Imagine an upgrade to the fundamental model of Homo Sapiens: Homo Excelsior or Humanity 3.0, if you will. Human and machine merged to become something superior. Too preposterous? Anders Sandberg – acclaimed Swedish philosopher, neuroscientist and mathematician – doesn’t think so.
He is not alone. Google co-founder Larry Page, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, and Tesla’s Elon Musk are only a few other influential technologists who believe this is a very real prospect in a pretty near future. Stephen Hawking thought so too.
Enter the world of transhumanism: a philosophical and scientific movement that advocates the use of technology – gene editing, AI, cryonics – to augment human capability and create a new enhanced species: the posthuman. Beings who can eliminate aging. Adapt to deteriorating climate conditions. Create new traits. Store memory outside the brain. Perform superhuman feats.
Sandberg – who has arranged to freeze his body cryogenically in anticipation of a resurrection in the future – argues that human enhancement has been the story of mankind for its entire existence. “Wanting to change myself is at the core of what makes me human,” he says. “The human condition is not unchanging. It should be questioned and changed.” He calls it “intrinsic morphological freedom.” A natural corollary to being democratic: have rights over your own body.
There again he is not alone: futurist Ray Kurzweil, nanotechnology pioneer Eric Drexler, and PayPal founder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel have all pledged to preserve their bodies in liquid nitrogen until science resurrects them in augmented avatars.
A multi-faceted genius, Sandberg is a senior research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford, where the sharpest thinkers of our time wrestle with grand, big picture questions – AI, climate catastrophe, aging. Whether we are alone in the universe. Though a techno-optimist, Sandberg is deeply engaged with the ethics underpinning human enhancement and emerging technologies, and warns that AI-induced human extinction could be imminent unless regulated effectively and thoughtfully. He also examines existential and global catastrophic risk and the underlying science of future technologies.
Through all this, he remains a staunch transhumanist. He is the co-founder of Eudoxa, a think tank dedicated to transhumanism, and has been the president of the Swedish Transhumanist Association. In 1999, when Ray Kurzweil wrote The Age of Spiritual Machines, transhuman concepts and the notion that we can gain eternal life with the help of supercomputers was an outlier thought. With Sanders and other famous proponents, this idea is now strongly centrestage.
There’s a growing swarm of detractors though, who view transhumanism as sinister and have serious questions about it. Critics warn that transhumanists are deflecting human accountability for the world we create right now by talking of a future machinist utopia. And what would happen, ultimately, by fusing man and machine? Would it usher in a new era of haves and have-nots – rich augmented demigods, poor ordinary hold-out humans? And who gets to decide what this transformed humanity would look or behave like? Would it be white, urban, English-educated, able-bodied? Rewriting our social contract. Rerouting human evolution.
At SYNAPSE, Anders Sandberg will introduce us to this strange, brave, bold new world, and take on all of these questions and more. Join him as he enlightens us on the science and philosophy of body changing. On taking human engineering to the next life. On the dawn of the Cyborg, the Meta Human, the Übermensch – and how responsibly we wield our godly superpowers.