Anders Sandberg – Living inside the cyborg leviathan: artificial intelligence from the 17th century to the posthuman future

At this years Future Day event, Anders Sandberg will be speaking on his new co-authored book – Law, Liberty & Leviathan.

Abstract: Being human is hard: we are stupid and somewhat selfish, yet need to work together with other stupid and selfish people with their own goals. We survive by building societies, filled with institutions and habits that help us solve these tough coordination problems. These institutions often act as extended cognition, allowing us to go far beyond individual power. We are to some extent living inside artificial intelligence systems, and they have enabled us to take control over the planet… as well as caused the worst disasters in history. As we build AI, we are also making something that can slip inside our extended cognitive systems and enhance them into literal cyborg systems. We need not just enough of “first order alignment” – getting AI to do things we want safely, but also “second order alignment” – AI that plays well with our societies and structures. Otherwise there is a real risk we may lose our own ecological niche and find ourselves in a world that may be safe and prosperous, yet unfit for human flourishing. If we play it right, however, we might become part of something far grander: a cyborg civilization able to reach full autonomy.

About the up and coming book in a blog post, Anders wrote :

“Much of the year I have been working on the book Liberty, Law, Leviathan. We argue that much of society can be seen as collective cognition. Institutions on all scales are mechanisms achieving useful coordination, but also embodying knowledge in collective cognitive structures. These structures are not wholly human – right now much is also on pieces of paper and databases, but increasingly there will be AI components. As we argue, these non-human components are likely to slowly become dominant.

Anyway, this is the point where I look back and realize that those groups of people (and AIs) seem to have a lot of agency, knowledge, and other ethically relevant properties. Maybe we can say they supervene on individuals organised in the right way, but things look pretty emergent. And given that I am roughly a functionalist when it comes to minds, maybe I should not be too surprised: parts can come together to make interesting and important emergent systems. Still, it was an update.”

Bio

Anders Sandberg is a neuroscientist and futurist well known for sizing up the biggest canvases we’ve got. Formerly a senior research fellow at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, he’s worked on AI, cognitive enhancement, existential risk, and those deliciously unsettling Fermi-paradox puzzles. His forthcoming books include “Law, Liberty and Leviathan: human autonomy in the era of existential risk and Artificial Intelligence”, and a big one – “Grand Futures—a tour of what’s physically possible for advanced civilisations”. He authored classic papers like “Daily Life Among the Jupiter Brains” (which came out in 1999), and co-authored “Eternity in Six Hours” on intergalactic expansion, and “Dissolving the Fermi Paradox.”