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Grand Futures – Anders Sandberg

Grand Futures – Thinking Truly Long Term.

What are the limits of what advanced civilizations can achieve?

What is the upper limit of value?

Anders Sandberg

Anders Sandberg speaks on existential hope about the far future and his upcoming book ‘Grand Futures: Thinking Truly Long Term‘, and how to be an optimist about the future.

Synopsis: How can we think rigorously about the far future, and use this to guide near-term projects? In this talk I will outline my “grand futures” project of mapping the limits of what advanced civilizations can achieve – in terms of survival, expanding in space, computation, mastery over matter and energy, and so on – and how this may interact with different theories about what truly has value.

For some fun background reading, see ‘What is the upper limit of value?‘ which Anders Sandberg co-authored with David Manheim.

This talk is part of the ‘Stepping Into the Future‘ conference.

Anders Sandberg is a senior research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford and research associate at the Institute for Future Studies in Stockholm. Anders background is computational neuroscience, but for the past 20 years he has been working on neuroethics, global catastrophic risk, long-range futures and reasoning about uncertainty.


Previous interview with Anders Sandberg on Metaphors for the Future

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One Comment

  1. I wonder what “adding more brains” looks like in terms of thinking about future possibilities. I am personally willing to contribute my 2 cents into predicting likely outcomes,but would like to do so in a useful way. My knowledge is broad rather than deep.

    Whose interests are being aligned to? How do we include the interests of future generations? I’m worried that there are blind spots when we talk about ‘human interests’.

    I hope it allows the possibility of all humans to co create spaces for themselves or others. Needs to make sure that if there are gate keepers of this, that the gatekeepers aren’t keeping people out based off wealth, or disability, or technological literacy.

    In other words long term future design must build in democratic and liberal institutions and values.

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