Latest / Art of the Question / Should We Have the Right to Modify Our Bodies? - Dr. Anders Sandberg - #16
Transcript
- Julius Moorman: When did you first get interested in transhumanism and why? So I usually say that my origin story is that I grew up in the very boring 1970s in Sweden and I read all the science fiction books I could find at the local library to get something less boring. And then at some point I realized maybe I could make this real. How do I do that? I probably need some science. And then I started reading all the science books and I never stopped. a common theme here was of course that In many of these stories, there was this idea that you could improve on humans. could do cyborg implants to get new abilities. You could adapt to new environments. Maybe there were ways of using brains in different ways. And that could work better than what we currently do. And I realized that would be very practical. And I'm interested in so much that I need a very long lifespan to learn even half of the things I want to learn. So this seems to be a reasonable thing to aim at. So as I grew up, I got interested in collecting information about what can we actually do to fix ourselves, fix the human condition. And gradually, especially in the 90s when I got onto the internet and could more easily connect to other people, I realized I wasn't alone. There's a bunch of people out here and some of them are calling themselves transhumanists. ⁓ that's what it's called. That's awesome. And what is some of the science fiction that inspired this genuine interest? So I read extremely widely. it ranged from of course, Gilles Verne and H.G. Wells, very old classics, ⁓ over to, well, you have Herbert's Dune, of course, which contains quite a lot of interesting examples of people. who got kind of superhuman abilities because of training. But perhaps the most powerful of these books was Olaf Stapeldon's Last of First Men and its sequel, Star Maker. So these are towering, titanic science fiction stories. They're also very weird because they're more like history books or lectures. They're from the 1920s and 1930s. And the main story there is about not so much a person, but... What about the history of humanity through all its iterations literally go in billions of years later? Or in Star Maker, what about the intelligent life in the universe? How can intelligent life survive, change itself and remake the universe? That is an absolutely astonishing book. Many science fiction authors have said that you were totally stealing everything from Stapeldon. Some years later, I realized Stapeldon was stealing too. When from JBS, Haldane, a British biologist and interesting quirky character who wrote this fantastic essay in the 1920s about the future of biology. And he was arguing that right now, physics in the 20s seems to be on a roll. That Einstein guy and this quantum whatever it is, this seems to be going places. This century is probably going to be the century of physics. Next century is going to be the century of biology. And the rest of this essay is all about how people are going to totally hate genetically modified organism because that's weird and perverse, but also mentioning that of course we're going to apply it to ourselves for both good and bad reasons. Later, Haldane also wrote another essay about the end of the world and how we might cause it. So this was the start of research into existential risk done in the 1920s. And he got so many things really right. He was discussing what do we do when the fossil fuels run out? What about if we mess up climate? What about adapting to other planets? And then that was taken up by a bunch of British scholars and academics. Irish crystallographer named Bernal wrote a fantastic book about this, The World, The Flesh, The Devil, where he started proposing space stations and discussed cyborgs. Still 1920s style. And then all of his influence stayed put on who was the real author and did the real science fiction of it. So that's kind of where it all really started for me. Yeah, isn't that incredible that all these... ⁓ I also really like to read science fiction books. I haven't read anything from the 1920s, but ⁓ I have read books like A Space Odyssey, of course. And to me, what's so fascinating is how... these science fiction writers are so far ahead of their time and how creative they are when it comes to these technologies. And basically they have this vision of the future that in many cases are actually coming true right now. And this is like, well, in your case over a hundred years ago, it's incredible to me. Yeah. And often it's a kind of dance between the science and the fiction. So for example, Bernal was proposing that maybe we can survive on sunlight from the star instead of living with agriculture on a planet. And then Stapledon in Star-Mech, it start talking about how future civilization build spheres around the star to collect all the starlight. And then in the 1960s, Freeman Dyson writes this famous paper about what is now called Dyson Spheres. where he looks at the energy use for humanity and points out that the logical end point is that we're going to englobe the sun in solar collectors. And maybe this is a way of looking for alien intelligence, looking for these Dyson spheres. He of course always insisted on calling them Staple Dawn spheres. And the funny thing is of course, science fiction authors loved that. So Dyson spheres show up in a fair bit of science fiction. And then that inspired scientists to think more about how would a Dyson sphere actually work? I am actually right now writing a paper about some of the practical issues in constructing Dyson spheres, how to do it properly. And this dance has been going on for a long while because science is good at figuring out what is and what is possible. Science fiction is good at playing out, well, what are those possibilities in terms of meaning? What would it mean to me and you? What could it mean for humanity? Is this a good thing or bad thing? What could possibly go wrong? And that engagement inspires people to become scientists, to build things. Yeah. But I think that's also very telling for your work, right? Because some of the topics you've written papers about may seem fantastic and may seem crazy to some people, but you always take a very scientific, very practical approach. What are the certain steps that we need to achieve in order to reach this? crazy technology, right? And I think that is an interesting thing I learned from science fiction. Some of the best hard science fiction I ever read is taking some crazy assumption and then working through the implications in logical detail. You're not allowed to change any law of physics just to make it fit the story. Instead, you make some change and see what happens from it. And that's of course how you do good modeling in science. You start with some assumptions, then you try to apply the rules as we know them and see where do they lead. And quite often, of course, they lead to crazy places. So Arthur C. Clarke wrote about future studies in one of his books, Profiles of the Future. And he pointed out that quite often scientists are bad at this because often they have a failure of imagination or a failure of nerve. One is that they cannot imagine that something could be possible because It's not around here and now. It's a technology that doesn't exist yet. So then they say, ⁓ it cannot possibly be done. So a lot of early in the rocketry was criticized by scientists, literal professors of astronomy and physics who said rockets cannot work. And they gave various reasons, which were fairly good physics, except that they didn't understand how an engineer would say, okay, if that doesn't work, I'm not going to do it. I'm going to do it this way instead. The other problem is of course the failure of nerve. So once you have a technology that can go somewhere, you're not willing to think about the full implications. What if everybody had access to all the knowledge of humanity? What if everybody were carrying around a little device that allowed them to be tracked, never forget and never be alone? How does that change society? And this is a point where science quite often has very little to say, but this is where authors and futurists might say something sensible. also say a lot of entertaining nonsense, of course, so you need to sift through this. Yeah. And if we're talking about transhumanism specifically, ⁓ it's a very broad term, but how would you define it? So I would define it as this continuation of a humanistic idea that the human condition can be made better. We can, of course, get a better life by having a better education, by having a better social institution. But also, and this is where it gets transhumanistic, by changing ourselves. That we could change our biology in various ways. We could do something about our bad memories. We could do something about our aging. We might gain new senses and abilities that we didn't have before. We might actually remake ourselves into something new. Now, What that something new is, is very debated because many people have very different opinions about it. I think that's kind of a useful thing. We probably don't want to be all homogeneous, identical things, even if it's a very good thing. A future world where we're all like iPhones, all perfectly sleek and identical and the side. Yeah, that sounds very boring. You probably want the diversity. You want to go for different individual life products, but My life project might require me to live for an extremely long time, much longer than biology would allow. Nature didn't care about the interest of individuals. through evolution, us to be able to reproduce, survive well enough to have kids and grandkids. That's great from an evolutionary perspective, but it's not great from a human perspective. When just as you started to get the hang of how to do science, your brain is giving out and your body is getting sleepy. That's not good. No. And do you think there's a difference between ⁓ biological adjustments to the human body and mechanical adjustments? So what I mean by this is currently we're reading a lot about peptides. ⁓ medicine, anything that you ingest into the body and then your body will use that substance to become stronger or to improve your memory or to become older or something like that. And then there's also things like BCI, for example, a brain computer interface. recently had Nathan Copeland on the show. ⁓ who is one of the longest running BCIA patients on the planet. He's had one for over 10 years now and he's paralyzed from the neck down and it was incredible to hear from him what this device allowed him to do. But do you think there's an important distinction there to be made between the biological and the mechanical transhumanism? I don't think there is actually. Again, turning to science fiction, is of course Bruce Stirling's classic novel Schismatrix, where there's a fight in the future across the solar system between the mechanists and shapers who take these different sides of human house, but they are kind of the political superpowers and much of the plot is about their big struggle. But that makes for great fiction. practice, I don't think there is a fundamental difference. There many practical differences. Right now, I'm drinking my morning coffee. It's a drug. The caffeine is affecting the adenosine receptors in my brain and doing certain things, which I find useful for getting started in the day. That is temporary. Taking peptides is typically a temporary thing, ⁓ which is probably fortunate because so many peptides have very dodgy effects. It's very unclear what a smart thing how people are going on endlessly about. But then again, if I go to the gym and start working out, that's also biological change. It's also biological change. Most people would say is kind of a normal thing to do. That's not weird. Like taking a pill of a cognitive enhancer I might take because I want to be smart in a meeting. And people definitely think that it's kind of a weird thing to go and get a brain computer interface or trying to get gene therapy or a prosthetic limb. But in practice, There are these practical differences. The prosthetic limb typically is a reversible change. Typically, nobody removes a healthy limb to get the prosthetic because we're not good enough yet. But if my arm were not working, I would totally go for a prosthetic limb before. The brain-computer interface right now, major surgery, nobody wants to mess with the brain just for fun. But once the implants get really good, you might want it, get it. But it's also fairly permanent. So if I find that, my phone is getting obsolete, I'm going to go to the store and buy a new one. That's going to be tricky if something is sitting inside my brain. Maybe one day it's still going to be as easy. I go to the store, they open my skull and remove it. But that's many decades ahead. So the really important issue of these practical things like is it easy to add or remove? Is it reversible? Because if I go to the gym a lot, I'm going to change my body and It is going to be changed irreversibly, usually for the better, but some athletes actually wear out their knees and bodies because of the sport. So that's actually a real problem. But people generally make a strong distinction. Quite often I notice that people get very worried about anything that seems unnatural. That's why transhumanism and these enhancements are often debated. ⁓ Taking a pill to be smarter, that sounds kind of creepy. A morning cup of coffee? No, no, no, this is totally normal and I'm over in Britain. A morning cup of tea? ⁓ no, no, that's just normal. Not having tea. That's weird. So from a philosophical standpoint, this is nonsense, of course. Then what we care about are the consequences. And maybe if the procedure we're using might have some ethical implications. If you want to do life extension by getting blood plasma from young people, there's going to be some issue about what the young people think about that. But for the most part, the means don't matter that much. Except of course that in practice how we construct it culturally, it's also going to matter for whether something is legal, whether we think this is good or this is so good that it should be mandatory. Like we're sending our kids to school, which is also a form of enhancement that changes them irrevocably. But we generally think that the parents that don't want to send the kids to school, they're doing something wrong because that irrevocable change is actually a fairly important improvement. Right. No, I see what you're saying for sure. And do you believe there is a limit as to what we should be able to change? Or do you think that it should be unlimited? Mechanically, biologically, whatever it is. So I think right now we have a lot of limits because we're not very good at biomedicine yet. We can do a lot of things, but many of them are not terribly good. And some of them are quite risky. But that's very different from your question because that's a kind of about the fundamental limit. What enhancement stop being good enhancement? And I think there are different directions where one can go with that question. One aspect is of course that I might change myself so I'm no longer myself. If I modify my brain so I got a new personality, Sometimes of course that might be good. We might want to tweak our personalities a bit, be a little bit more kind, maybe reduce narcissism a little bit, at least for the weekend or something. But obviously a radical change, that's like replacing yourself with a new person. And sometimes some people might argue that's actually a good idea. I'm a bad one. This other one should be replaced. Cool philosophical question there that one can debate. There are also changes that might be kind of ill-advised in various ways. There might be just too risky, but I usually argue for what I call morphological freedom. We have a right to as free people to do what we want with our lives. The others don't, shouldn't have a say over how we live our life. They might give us some well-deserved advice, but actually it's up to us to live our lives and others don't have a right to interfere with that. Similarly, we have a right to our bodies. Actually, without having a right to our own bodies, we can't really be free. And from that, I derive that we should have morphological freedom. We should have a right to reshape our bodies. But that also includes the right to say, no, thank you. I don't want that. My boss might want me to stop sleeping. If there is an enhancement that could remove that, ⁓ just imagine how productive we could be. But maybe I don't like that. Maybe I like sleeping. Maybe I think that, I might want to use those spare hours for my own things, not working for my boss. He can't demand that of me. So I have also a negative right to resist changes. Many people find it super creepy to be forced to modify the body. And I think one should totally respect that. Being forced to change for somebody else's sake is a bad thing. But this morphological freedom, that's a bit like any other freedom. Yeah, I have a freedom of action, but that doesn't mean I get to behave badly against others. They also have a freedom I need to respect. So you end up with all these liberties and freedoms kind of combining and colliding as we always do in society. We have freedom of expression. but we have a problem with hate speech. I tend to be more on the side that yeah, people should be allowed to even say nasty and hateful things. say, no, no, that causes too much damage. And in the end, we need to reach some political compromise. People might say, yeah, and there's in principle, you should be allowed to modify yourself, but some of these modifications are way too dangerous. They're actually not sane. If you want to do that, you're nuts. And we're gonna take you to the doctor about it. Yeah, I think, but I don't think let's take Nathan Copeland, for example, the BCI patient that I had on the show ⁓ two weeks ago. I don't think many people will argue that he shouldn't be allowed to have a BCI, right? I mean, he's been paralyzed for quite a long time now and the BCI genuinely helps him to improve his life. allows him to be able to. handle the computer. It allows him to play video games. So his quality of life is dramatically improved by having this computer inside his brain, right? But I think because it allows him to do stuff that normal human beings are also capable of doing, nobody really thinks, okay, that's a little too far. But maybe as soon as we get to the point where we can have chat GPT or Claude directly running into our brains. So we get some people who are enhanced with the BCI. think then some people may argue, yeah, now you're giving people supernatural powers and that is a different game. That's something entirely different. How do you, how do you view that? So there has been this long running debate. among philosophers and ethicists about is there a difference between kind of medicine, therapy and enhancement? And there are some people saying that there is an important difference and this is why enhancement is not okay, but medicine is okay. Michael Sandel, for example, a somewhat famous philosopher argued that, yeah, getting up to normal, that's fine, but not going beyond that. And I have been arguing against him. because obviously normal medicine is actually really blurring that. ⁓ There is preventative medicine that seeks to prevent us from getting sick in the first place. Getting sick is actually a fairly natural and normal thing. If you don't do anything in particular, you're gonna get sick sooner or later. So preventing that is actually in some sense not normal. If we have vaccines, that means that we're now immune to diseases we never encountered. I would argue this is an enhancement. It's not an enhancement that gives you a superpower, except of course, that if you're vaccinated against a horrible disease and go into a hospital full of people with this disease, you're actually now having a power that normally few people have. So I think that this blur distinction goes all the way. I think we have kind of concerns about various enhancement. So if I'm being very witty and smart at a party or in a philosophy lecture, Is that Anders or is that ChatGPT? That is a valid question. It's kind of already a question for me because I realized I was looking up stuff in Wikipedia without thinking. I was not even noticing that I was using Wikipedia a few years back until I got to China and it was censored. And suddenly I noticed that without being aware, I was using Wikipedia all the time. And a lot of the knowledge I believed I had in my head. was of course already residing somewhere in the cloud being written by somebody else and edited by a bunch of people. don't know. So being clear about what our technologies are doing to us and being careful about how they might have a side effect. think is important. We might also have opinions about when it's appropriate and not appropriate. It's a bit like the eternal debate about norms around cell phone use. Is it okay to talk on the cell phone on the train? Is it okay to have it on the loudspeaker? Is it okay to use the cell phone during class and school? Is it okay to look up stuff on the internet during a quiz? These things don't have really an answer based in science or even fundamental ethics. We kind of need to make it up as we invent what does it mean to sit on a train? What does it mean what you're supposed to be doing at school? Once you decide on that, and again it's going to be contentious because people have very different views, we can kind of come up with norms. So that brain implant to give you extra abilities, nobody really argues that it's a problem when you're trying to regain and get up closer to normal. But normal is also pretty fussy. If you talk to a normal gang of particle physicists, they're much smarter than the average person in the street in general. Not always, but quite often. So normal in that group of people, that means that of course you can solve differential equations in your head. That is kind of a weird thing. And now the person with street might say, actually, I want to be normal. I also want to be like a particle physicist. And I think you, many of us would say that requires some pretty hefty enhancements of your brain. Yeah, no, that for me, would require some, enhancements for sure. ⁓ And how, because we've mostly discussed ⁓ enhancing ourselves, having the freedom to make adjustments to our own body. How does ⁓ transhumanism relate to technologies like CRISPR? So for example, when we are creating new life, for example, do you think that makes a difference if we, because the... the soon to be life is not able to make their own decisions yet. Yeah. And you could argue that the soon to be life is kind of a pre-person. It's not a person, but we might still recognize that this is a special kind of thing that we might want to be careful about. And again, there is of course a long running debate in bioethics about what rights do we have to modify future generations? This is an active issue because people are doing genetic selection right now. People have been doing it for years. Many people say, ⁓ especially in Europe, ⁓ no, eugenics, ⁓ this is super scary. That's why transhumanists are bad. That's why we should not even think about these things. But actually selecting embryos for them being healthy, that's standard in in vitro fertilization. Simply because it's tricky process and you want to make sure that you put in the embryo that you think has the biggest chance of becoming a baby. In this case, it's not an enhancement directly. It's trying to go for healthiness in the sense that this is going to produce a baby. And we're doing it for the sake generally of the baby. We want there to be a baby who's hopefully a happy person that is going to appreciate existing. But there were several other fertilized cells in that test tube. that you could have implanted. And you can also sometimes select them to avoid genetic diseases. And this is getting to an interesting point because the standard scary scenario is parents want to get a kid with certain properties and that's generally seen as bad. Why is it bad? Well, it's not for the sake of the kids usually. If you really are trying to have an athlete or a piano player or a super soldier as kid, you want the super soldier You don't want a kid. That seems to be a really bad form of parenting. The parents that really want to force the kid to be a really good athlete, they are probably bad parents. But on the other hand, the parents will say, I want a kid that doesn't have this genetic disease me and my wife has. That seems to be a valid reason. If me and my husband want to have a kid, but we happen to be both male, but we want to do some bioengineering to actually get a kid that is genetically our offspring. That also seems to be for the sake of a kid. Now the interesting part here is there are many forms of enhancements that probably are good for anybody. So there is something called the principle of procreative beneficence that a colleague of mine, Julian Sabulescu, coined and he argued that if all things are equal, you want to give the kid those properties that good for any life product, long life, high intelligence, kind of stable emotions. ⁓ you want not to have some stuff that makes them sick or the, some weird property that would only be good for a particular life project. Some people might want to be green and have wings, but generally most of us don't. It wouldn't be a good thing to have that, ⁓ if your life product doesn't involve being green and have a wing. So you want to give us generic properties for the good. then. Hopefully, of course, as the kid grows up, they can decide, OK, actually, I'm going to turn myself green and get wings now when I know what I want to do with my life. So I think there is that important aspect of doing these modifications because you actually want the kid and you want the kid's life to be good. It's for the sake of the kid. Many people still think that this is way too much an imposition. We should just let nature decide. But nature quite often decides, OK, let's go for cancer. go for various illnesses, let's go for stuff that really break a life. think unfortunately nature is very inhumane and we humans for all our faults can be humane to each other and our kids. Yeah, no, I understand that distinction. So basically if I understand correct, if parents decide to do CRISPR in order to create the new Cristiano Ronaldo or Lionel Messi, So they become the parent of a superstar, which generates them a lot of income potentially and makes them famous and has all these benefits. Of course, it might benefit the kid, but the decision is driven by the motivation of the parents to benefit off of that. Whereas the distinction is just, will it objectively improve the life of the kid? Meaning. Can we do something about it, not becoming sick? Can we prevent it from ⁓ also getting this nasty disease that runs in the family? Yeah, exactly. And the biggest problem is of course, trying to get your kid to be an athletic superstar. Well, having the right jeans is not enough. You need the training. And you need the motivation and it's totally likely that the kid at 13 years of age says something rude to the parents and says, no, I'm going to be a musician. And that is kind of a good for the kid. I don't know whether they're going to be a good musician, but it's important that our life projects are our own. Parents, the good parents help the kids of course, get their own life projects. They might open doors for them. a good parent to take them to try out sport and show them opportunities. My parents, for example, got me to try both dancing and a little bit of sport. Didn't work out at all, but also showed me how to use the local library and that worked out really, really well. Yeah, no, that's very true. And ⁓ yeah, if we're talking about transhumanism in general, not necessarily CRISPR anymore, I believe one of the most heard counter arguments, so an argument against transhumanism is what about accessibility, right? So let's say we're going to be able to live in a future where some, where the rich people are able to hook up clots straight into their brains and they'll live to, instead of 80 years, they'll live to 150 years. ⁓ And this is only possible for people that are very wealthy and have access to this technology. ⁓ How do you view the problem of ⁓ accessibility in light of transhumanism? I think it's a temporary problem. Most technologies are super expensive the first time do it. For example, brain computer interfaces are super expensive, partially because we're experimental still. So you get every one of them fairly unique and that means that they're expensive. They're also expensive because you need a full hospital of doctors and nurses to put them in and do treatment. And they're also expensive because you need to train yourself to use them well. That takes time and that's also in some sense, expensive. But most technologies come down in price as you use them. It used to be that cell phones were super expensive. In Sweden, we actually have an expression, a juppinalle, a jappies teddy bear for those big bulky phones that people were having in the early 90s and showing off that we're having it. And we're all joking about the jappies were going around with the little teddy bears. But of course over time, they became smaller, cheaper, everybody got them. And today, most of us are carrying around these things that are pinnacles of human technology. This is close to the cutting edge of what we can do in terms of ship manufacturing materials and all of that. And they're mass produced, not just in the West. They're also over in the developing countries where they're even more important. Maybe it's not the latest models, but it still gets cheap because you can mass produce it. That is a problem for some things that are services. If your enhancement requires a doctor and a nurse to do something with you, you need to pay their salaries. And their salaries are probably not coming down much up until the point we get AI run medical robots, at which point even that might become cheap. So I'm not too worried in the long run about these prices because many things that start out expensive becomes super cheap. And in some cases, expensive things that are really good. might also have societies decide, okay, this is so good. We want to do that. A good example is actually education. as I mentioned, it's a kind of enhancement and it's super expensive. It takes a lot of teachers to do it. And we decide in most society, it's so important that we pay tax money to make sure everybody gets it. Indeed, it's so extremely good that we made it mandatory. Even if a kid doesn't want to be in school, we're gonna put the poor kid in school and enhance them. Is that going to happen anytime soon for many of other enhancements? I don't know. I have a feeling that we might end up sooner or later that social services say, yeah, actually you need to have a smartphone in order to interact with society. If you don't have one, you must get one. So here is the state subsidized phone because otherwise you can't actually function. It's a little bit like ID cards. If you don't have an identity in the modern society, you actually cannot access much of it. That ID card or identifier system, whatever it is, is so essential that we're making it more or less mandatory. And I can see some people finding that super creepy and problematic and kind of get what they want. But the interesting thing is when do you get these splits? I think the big split in the future might not be rich versus poor people when it comes to enhancement, but the people who want to kind of stay natural and the people who say, no, please sign me up. We're already seeing that with the anti-vaccine movement. Many of their views are kind of conservative, also in a biological sense. They don't want somebody to impose something on the body. They do it for all the wrong reasons, in my opinion. But I kind of think that we are going to see more of that. People saying, I don't want to be enhanced. And others saying, OK, cool. But then you can't do this job. And they are going to say, no, I should be allowed to do this job. Yeah, but you're slower, more stupid, inefficient, and do a lot of mistakes. You shouldn't be a surgeon. The surgeon should at least have good eyesight, that you're not even wearing your glasses. So I think there is a potential split here. There might also be a split between different forms of enhancement styles. So earlier I was riffing on Bruce Sterling's shapers versus mechanists. And I still think we might see that some people say, yeah, drinking coffee and taking natural herbs and even some peptide, Yeah, that's normal, but those implants are creepy for other reasons. So you might get different styles. It's a little bit like iPhone versus Android. You might even have incompatible enhancement. My brain implant might be an Apple implant and you might have an Android implant. So we can't interface with each other. Super interesting. ⁓ the morphological freedom, is it something that Let me try and think about this correctly. Is it just that you believe in the freedom that people should just be able to pursue this enhancement if they wanted to? Or is there a bigger goal behind it? Should we enhance ourselves in order to preserve consciousness in the universe, for example? Should we enhance ourselves in order to biologically engineer ourselves so that we are able to also live on Mars going forward without spacesuits and therefore enhancing the odds of preserving humankind across the universe or is it just something that you think people should be able to do and it doesn't really have to have a goal per se? So you're actually getting at one of the most interesting things to me about transhumanism, but it doesn't necessarily answer the question why. You need to plug in an answer to that question and then you get slightly or completely different transhumanisms. I actually did a survey of transhumanists about their idea of the meaning of life and I found that you found that they are all over the place. Name any kind of meaning of life and you will probably find some transhumanism somewhere that believes in that. ⁓ So there is a lot of people who say, ⁓ I want to be smarter. I want to live longer. I want to be healthy. I want to be able to see ultraviolet light so I can see the spring flowers in the full glory. It's all individual. It might be a very selfish thing. It might be a very virtuous thing that, ⁓ I'm going to reshape myself into a good person. But there are others saying, actually, this is good for society. A society of smart, healthy people who can do things efficiently. That's good for everybody else. Even the people who are not enhanced might benefit from having people around. We might want to improve on society. We might want to make sure we integrate AI in our decision making processes to make things better. And then you could say, ⁓ actually we want to do this for future generations. We might want to ensure that they are healthy and they get opportunities we didn't have. And then you can go all the way to the cosmic scale and say, actually, yeah. we have a kind of moral duty to spread life across the universe. Or maybe it's diversity. We actually should explore the realm of the trans and post-human existence. Just as there are states of human existence that are fantastic and really worth trying to pursue, there might be even more fantastic states of post-human experience that we cannot even envision. We need to have those brains and bodies that allow us to discover them and then see these amazing new things. So at the very least we need to do that exploration. And then once the explorers discover that, whoa, over here, this is something that is really valuable, the rest of us can start deciding to go in that direction. So I kind of think that there is individual transhumanism, of collectives and transhumanism, kind of Cosmic Transhumanism. And I'm a bit of mixture of all three of them. But there are others who focus really on one of them. I think it's kind of useful to recognize that we have plenty of interesting disagreements about it because I'm surrounded by philosophers here in Oxford. We love to disagree with each other, even coming up with good theories about what is value and what is valuable and how do we know that is of course something we can go on endlessly about. But then that should leave the philosophy department to kind of enter everyday life because we need to. decide to live a good life, whatever that means. And that means deciding which philosophers or other people to listen to and then try to pursue that. Right. And one thing I really want to touch on is ⁓ cryonic preservation. when preparing for this episode, I read that you signed up to be cryonically preserved, if that's how you pronounce it. So I was wondering maybe what inspired that decision and how does that work in practice? So the idea with cryonics is that if somebody is dying right now, they might be dying of something that in the future is easy to treat. But right now we have no way of saving the person. So what if we freeze them? So there is no more damage being done to the body and the body gets to the future and the future is advanced enough to fix it. both with freezing damage, because this process is of course going to mess up the body to some extent, and whatever was killing them. So historically, for a long time, if people were not breathing, they were dead. And then we discovered assisted breathing actually. Okay, we can get people to start breathing. So people who previously were regarded as dead, actually now we're just treatable. But now people said, okay, the heart is not beating, now you're dead. ⁓ heart massage, we actually have ways of fixing that. Currently, okay, the brain is not active anymore. That means that you're dead, but there might be ways of fixing that. So I'm signed up for cryo-analysis. I have this little medallion. So if I end up in a hospital, hopefully they read the instructions to see that if this patient is dying, contact this number in America and follow the instruction for the cryostasis protocol. And if everything works out perfectly, which is unlikely to happen if I can't talk to them and set things up. then they would cool down my body with ice to lower temperature so the breakdown processes slow down. That brings you a lot of extra time. The brain of course starts going bad within minutes without oxygen. But if you cool it down, it can survive for hours. And that gives you more time to actually do something. then you might inject heparin, preventing the blood from clotting. and other cryoprotectants that protects the cells to some extent from ice crystal formation. Because whenever I say freezing, most cryonists, they kind of shudder because they don't like ice. Ice crystals are sharp, they puncture cell walls and really mess up the microstructure. So you want to add chemicals that make water turn into a kind of glass as you cool it down. It solidifies, but in an unordered phase that seems to be much better for the preservation of the tissues. And once you're below the solidification temperature, you cool down to minus 196 and store the patient in liquid nitrogen. And at this temperature, no chemical reactions happen at all, more or less. So now they can be stored for centuries. And then you just wait. Now, does this work? Well, freezing it works. Towing people up, not yet. Nobody has a return from being cryonically frozen. ⁓ Lab animals, well really small ones like nematode worms and some insects we can do this with but that's not terribly impressive. It works for some organs and that's an interesting side effect of all this research. If nothing else we might end up with a way of storing organs for transplant until they're needed which is super useful anyway. But the fun thing and this has a link to your previous question about why are we even doing this is of course that I'm interested in seeing the future, as you can probably tell from the way I'm thinking about science fiction. I'm curious. I want to see where we end up, which means that if I get to toward out in the far future and the humans or post humans there say, so Dr. Sandberg, you made a lot of foolish predictions in your PowerPoints and interviews. Let's see how it turned out. I'm very happy to sit there and blush at how wrong I was because I get to see where we go. But there is also another interesting aspect because the risks to human civilization become personal risks if you're frozen. If you're frozen and civilization collapses, you're not going to survive. You better make sure civilization works. A lot of my research is about reducing global catastrophic risks, trying to understand what we are, trying to see what can we do about bioweapons, nuclear war, about ⁓ badly programmed AI. Can we do things to make our civilization last better? And this from a purely selfish standpoint is of course good both while I'm up and around. I don't want to be a victim of a nuclear war, but if I'm frozen, I'm also getting maybe decades and centuries of existential risk too as a personal risk. And of course, future generation might be somewhat happy that somebody cared about them enough to want them to happen. Because I think that is actually one of the key motivations for me. We're early in the history of humanity. We're kind of just out of the caves. And we... are very foolish and we have dangerous technologies. So if we flub it right now, if we wipe out our species or the biosphere, there is not going to be any future. The future might be much wiser, better technology might know a lot of things we don't, but they come later. We have this primitive position ⁓ in history, which means that we have a lot of foolish power and we need to quickly learn how to use that well. Future generations are going to thank us hopefully if we manage to do that well, and we're going to curse us if we mess things up, but not so badly that they cease to exist. Yeah, well, it's very interesting. And I'm also curious, the thawing, that something, I mean, obviously the technology doesn't exist yet, so it's pretty hard to ⁓ discuss it, but ⁓ Could you also see a future where the thawing would happen digitally, so to say, where they could make a digital copy of your brain? Because I believe that's something you wrote about in the past as well. ⁓ yeah. So I call it whole brain emulation. Many people call it mind uploading, and it makes me cringe since I've been around philosophers too long, because mind uploading presupposes that we move the mind, whatever that is. And uploading has this idea that, yes, it's just like transmitting information from a hard drive through the cable to something else. But in practice, no, we need to reconstruct the brain and then hopefully the mind follows. Because toying out the people right now, people are thinking about ways of using microwaves to heat up the tissue the right way. Maybe you can use nano machines in the future to go through it. literally cell by cell, atom and atom are repaired. It all seems very complicated. So maybe we instead could just scan the brain, make a one-to-one copy in a computer and run that. Now there is both interesting scientific questions here about how easy it is to scan a brain, even if it's frozen and fixed in place, and how much information you can get from that process. And deep philosophical questions like, okay, wait a minute, is that Sim Anders really me? Could it even be conscious? are plenty of philosophers who think that no, no, can't possibly be conscious. And other philosophers say, no, no, the software can obviously be conscious. I belong to that side, but I'm honest enough to know that I don't know for certain. We need to test this. Similarly, personal identity. think honestly, there is no real answer to the question. Some people have a view of personal identity saying that obviously that's a copy. That's not me. Well, I would say actually there can be many addresses. All sufficiently Anders-like processes is an Anders. And I think this is just the labels we put on things. But again, big argument in the philosophy department. The really interesting question is whether we can actually do this. And right now we have managed to scan the brain of a fruit fly, which doesn't sound very impressive, but it's way better than I expected when I wrote that original roadmap back in 2008. We believe that the first animal to be really scanned would be the nematode worm, sea elegans. It has 302 or 303 neurons, depending on whether it's a hermaphrodite or a male or female. And we know what the neurons are. just that actually finding the strength of the connections turned out to be a finicky technical problem. So for years, people were trying that and failed. And then eventually we just moved on to the fruit fly and people managed to scan that. and actually run a simple version in a computer. So it's not a particularly smart fruit fly. It honestly seems to be having a serious hangover, but it's actually up and running somewhat. And we're gonna refine that more and more. today we have enough computing power to do that. And the company that did that fruit fly simulation, very optimistic. We're totally gonna be able to do a mouse eventually. just give us enough money and we're to scale this up. I'm advising them. I find this super interesting. I don't know whether it's going to succeed, but I'm very eager to test it. And then we might end up that maybe frozen people in the future end up waking up not so much in a physical hospital bed, but in a simulated hospital bed and being told by people that, actually you're in one of our servers orbiting Earth and now... ⁓ We might want to look at what kind of body you want to use in the virtual reality. you seen the Black Mirror episode called San Junipero? Yeah, a long time ago. Yeah. Yeah. But that's basically this concept, right? Where terminally ill people... ⁓ get the choice or sick people get the, get the choice to have their mind uploaded in San Gennepiero. And, ⁓ if they die, they have the option to be, be uploaded permanently and basically live forever in this utopian world. it's, ⁓ yeah, it's an, it's a copy of themselves. Do you think in such a scenario? It's perhaps the only optimistic Black Mirror episode ever. Yeah, it is pretty. It also even has a pretty good ending as well, which is also unlike any of the other Black Mirror episodes. Because the interesting thing is of course, often when we tell stories, they need to have a twist. They need to some drama, which is why most science fiction actually is all about this fancy new technology and how it goes wrong, how it's misused. bad consequences. It's kind of odd that many people in technology like reading science fiction because science fiction is among the most critical literature about technology. But at the same time, once you can do brain emulation, you can do a lot of fantastic and awful things. So it is one of those technologies that you want to think carefully about before you do it. I've written the first proper paper about the ethics of brain emulation. And even long before you get to putting me in San Junipero, we're going to have a problem with that mouse. Because if I have a mouse in my lab, I'm not allowed to pinch his tail for no reason. Inflicting pain on lab animals, that's bad. The home office here in the UK will have words with me if I treat my lab animals badly. And what about the virtual mouse then? I could use my VR glove and pinch his virtual tail. The simulated pain signals go to the simulated brain. and generate a simulated squeak and now it's trying to get away from the bad hand that is pinching its tail. Maybe this is actual pain. I've done something equally bad at pinching a real mouse, so I should not be doing it. Of course, for other people say, no, no, that's just numbers in a computer and there is nothing there. It just looks like a mouse that is in pain. But if we don't know, we should probably abstain from that. actually, virtual lab animal ethics is something I think we... need to think carefully about. I think that if you can be conscious inside a computer, then you can be in pain inside a computer. I actually just recently finished a paper about the weirdness that happens when you can start editing the pain and running pain backwards. Nobody really understands that question yet. Me least of all, the paper, like any good philosophy paper, ends up with the conclusion that something really weird happens here and we don't know how to think about it. Yay, we need to write more papers and understand it. being also a lapsed computational neuroscientist, also think, yeah, and we probably should be running computer simulations. We should try this. We can learn quite a lot, but we need to be careful. And especially once you get to humans, once you scan a human brain, you could have something that could be as conscious as a human can think about itself as human, but might still be broken because the scan was really bad. I don't want to be the first brain scan. I want to be the hundredth once we know that this works really, really well and the patients are all happy without us making them happy. And even then, of course, you have practicalities of living in a virtual world. If somebody turns off the server, you disappear. You better have backup copies and you want to distribute them widely. You don't want to get hacked. You don't want somebody to pirate you. No, for sure. And I think that like brain emulation. ⁓ Black Mirror actually explored this topic multiple times. Also in the episode White Christmas, I believe it's called, you must have seen it as well, where they emulate someone's brain in order to get them convicted of a crime. So they were able to copy this person and then fast-forward, kind of torture them in a sense, by fast-forwarding time, like 200 years for their perception. and ⁓ recreating certain scenarios that simulated the crime scene in order to give them up ⁓ certain information. And in this fictional world, of course, they were actually allowed to use that as evidence to convict the real version of this person, which is, yeah, it's very interesting. Yeah, and there is already a debate about what kind of evidence neural data is. Again, there is a movement for neuro privacy that my brain data is mine. You're not allowed to have it. The government is not allowed to read my mind without my permission. And there have been actual legal cases where people have been using brain imaging to try to prove that somebody knows something. This is very dodgy, both from a scientific ethical and legal perspective. And I've been arguing against it. But in the future, I think we should expect that eventually we can make our minds readable. And that means what we need to have legal protections for me, just like we might want to have legal protections for my digital world, who has a right to go through my smartphone. I put a lot of my mind and my life in that smartphone. And it seems reasonable to say that I have a right to some form of privacy. And again, it's not something that is given by the technology. You could implement the technology in all sorts of different ways. We want to make sure that we have social norms, we have laws that protect us. When it comes to brain emulation, this gets even more important because now literally we have pieces of code that might be people. And I think software people are people too, and we need to respect that. But you also get all sorts of practical and political problems. If I'm uploaded, I have so much to do. I have so many ideas. So of course I want to have a few copies. So maybe we end up with a problem with too many addresses and we're all of course generally voting for the same political party. Am I now doing ballot box stuff? So you might say actually one man, one vote might be that if you copy yourself, you will get to share that one vote. But what about my copies who had a political change of mind and now decided that no, we're actually socialists. We're the socialist Anders fraction and we disagree with the liberal Anders fraction. Do they suddenly get one vote to And these are slightly silly problems right now. Make for good fiction. Eventually we're going to have to solve them just like we have to solve the problem of who owns ⁓ information in a computer. If I use AI to generate an image, is that my image or is it that it's nobody's image or maybe it's everybody's image? These are practical things that we resolve. It's not necessarily fundamentally hard, but it's going to be an endless amount of lawyers and politicians talking. Yeah, no, for sure. And, and I believe you mentioned there about neuro rights. I believe Chile. is doing that. believe they ⁓ edited their constitution and right now people actually have their their neuro rights protected and I believe some, there are proponents of neuro rights but then there's also other people who argue that they are already implicitly protected by regular constitution so therefore explicit protection wouldn't be necessary. Yeah, I don't know how that works in different legal systems. I'm not a lawyer. I'm married to a prosecutor and that leads to some very fun conversation. And I've been working on a book together with a professor of law. So I picked up a fair bit. And one of the funnest things is that I used to think as a trained computer scientist that laws are like rules in a program. They're an operating system for society. And then I realized when I actually saw how law actually works, it's a social activity. When you go into a courtroom, yes, there is a thick book containing laws and people generally know how to interpret that book according to a certain way and you're supposed to interpret it. It's not just the literal reading of a text, but it's a social activity. People are making arguments. People are convincing each other about things. And that is a good thing. We might be making the law more electronic and automated in the future. It's actually going to be important to retain many of the human aspects of how we do law in that world. A world of robo-judges, robo-lawyers and robo-prosecutors. You want them to still notice that, ⁓ wait a minute, the law is crazy in this case. This cannot actually be a reasonable conclusion. We need to appeal or we need to do some changes. If we don't, then we locked ourselves into a digital prison. And in the past, we have quite often seen with many over our technologies, that we create situations where we're locked up by technological assumptions. We see it every day, of course, with the limitations of our smartphone and intellectual property and operating systems. And as we integrate technology in our own bodies, we better make sure that we don't get locked up inside our bodies too. Yeah. ⁓ Yeah, and I was just wondering before we ⁓ wrapped up, you seem like a very optimistic person. Are you optimistic for the future? ⁓ yeah, I'm kind of a funny optimist because I spend much of my time thinking about dreadful disaster scenarios. Every time I come to a new city, I kind of look at where would I put the nuclear airburst to destroy this or how would a pandemic rip through this or... this new system, how could ⁓ a badly aligned AI wreck it? But I do that because I want to preserve the future. I think we have a perhaps 90 % chance of getting to a future that's livable. And I think it's very likely to be amazingly good. As a transhumanist, I think that most people underestimate how good we could live. We could have really great lives, lives that make our current lives look like we're in a very poor medieval village with mud and dirt and bad rotten food and no education. of course the medieval village would say, yeah, life isn't too bad. Except that we would say, actually it is. You just don't know how good it is to have a refrigerator and a clean house and vaccines. And the post humans of future might go, ⁓ you poor guys. You didn't have this augmentation. You didn't have quantum thinking. You had to live without nanomachines. You poor, poor guys. It was probably good that you didn't quite know how bad it was. But that glorious future needs to be made. It's not just that it's going to happen by itself. We need to prevent disasters from occurring. And there plenty of things that can go wrong. And we also need to implement it. as I kind of been demonstrating again, again, many of the wonderful technologies that I kind of foresee and look forward to, they can be misused and we need to come up with a way of at least make it less likely that they get misused. And the misuses I can foresee and talk about right now are probably going to be very different from what actually happens. When people were designing email in the early 1970s, nobody considered spam. It was just such an alien idea. Everybody is using email is a computer engineer at the mayor university or American military. Of course, we're not going to send out the advertisement to everybody. Nobody thought about it. So they designed a system that 20 years later, when it became widely used, it was suddenly easy to send spam email to everybody. And it became a problem. We were seemingly going to get surprised by all sorts of crazy problems in the 10 years, 20 years, a hundred years. that we didn't foresee, but hopefully we have the agility to handle that. I'm kind of optimistic about it. That's incredible. ⁓ is there, is there anything you would like to mention or emphasize before we wrap it up today? Hunters. People often think of transhumanists as this unified moment kind of imagine that, ⁓ we're, we're all wanting the same thing. That's of course not at all true. constantly arguing about it. have friends who think that uploading into computers, no way that cannot do work and it's not me. Others saying, the traditional cryonics people, they're doing the wrong thing. The only thing is brain preservation. Others who say, oh, why are you even caring about that? We need to be collective. I have friends who are social democrat transhumanists and I have a libertarian transhumanist friend. Transhumanists are kind of all over the place. very wide idea. It's a bit like humanism. Many people think that it's a good thing to get education and refine the human condition, even if they're not going around all the time telling everybody, I'm a humanist. So many of the transhumanist ideas are out there. In some sense, the transhumanists don't matter terribly much compared to what we actually do with what we're buying, what companies people are starting, the government project. It's just that that transhumanists focus on what do we want to make the future into? Thinking clearly or at least attempting to think clearly. That's something that unifies both the people doing future studies, the science fiction authors, the transhumanists. And I think everybody should spend some time working and thinking on it. Well, I'm definitely inspired to think some more about it. This was a lot of fun, honestly, very, very interesting conversation. Where can people go if they want to keep up with your work? I'm a little bit all over the place. I'm sometimes tweeting and sometimes on Blue Sky. I'm writing academic papers. Quite often they get a fair bit of circulation because I'm one of those academics who write weird papers that people like to do podcasts around. My most successful paper was about what if Earth turns into blueberries? And that has led to an endless amount of responses. So generally just search for me. I'm easy to find. Well, I'm definitely, yeah, I definitely hope we speak again in the future because this was a lot of fun and I'll definitely stay up to date. Follow you on Twitter, see what other crazy papers are coming out and hopefully we can discuss them again. Thank you so much for today. Thank you. Have a wonderful future.