Discussion between Anders Sandberg & Kristian Rönn on the AI Arms Race & the Darwinian Trap. Kristian Rönn is the CEO and co-founder of Normative, and author of the book ‘The Darwinian Trap’. He has a background in mathematics, philosophy, computer science and artificial intelligence. Anders Sandberg is a researcher at the Mimir Center for…
Why should we prioritize improving the long-term future? Longtermism is an ethical stance motivates the reduction of existential risks such as nuclear war, engineered pandemics and emerging technologies like AI and nanotechnology. Sigal Samuel summarizes the key argument for longtermism as follows: “future people matter morally just as much as people alive today; (…) there…
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 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…
Many of you know the sad news that theoretical physicist & mathematician Freeman Dyson has passed away, so in celebration of his life and achievements, Anders Sandberg (Future of Humanity Institute) discusses Freeman Dyson’s influence on himself and others – How might advanced alien civilizations develop (and indeed perhaps our own)? We discuss strategies for…
The topic of is controversial (and often misrepresented); it is considered by many to be repugnant – provocative questions arise like “who’s morals?”, “who are the ones to be morally enhanced?”, “will it be compulsory?”, “won’t taking a morality pill decrease the value of the intended morality if it skips the difficult process we normally…
Anders Sandberg discusses ideas & values and where we get them from, mindsets for progress, and that we are living in a unique era of technological change but also, importantly we are aware that we are living in an era of great change. Is there a direction in ethics? Is morality real? If so, how…
Anders Sandberg discusses solving coordination problems: Includes discussion on game theory including:the prisoners dilemma (and the iterated form), the tit-for-tat strategy, and reciprocal altruism. He then discusses politics, and why he considers himself a ‘heretical libertarian’ – then contrasts the benefits and risks of centralized planning vs distributed trial & error and links this in…
Anders gives a short tutorial on the Singularity – clearing up confusion and highlighting important aspects of the Technological Singularity and related ideas, such as accelerating change, horizons of predictability, self-improving artificial intelligence, and the intelligence explosion. Tutorial Video: Points covered in the tutorial: The Mathematical Singularity The Technological Singularity: A Horizon of predictability Confusion…
Understanding heavy-tailed distributions are important to assessing likelihoods and impact scales when thinking about possible disasters – especially relevant to xRisk and Global Catastrophic Risk analysis. How likely is civilization to be devastated by a large scale disaster or even go extinct? Anders discusses how heavy-tailed distributions account for more than our intuitions tell us….
The Quantified Self movement is usefully encouraging loads of people to record metrics about their personal health – the resulting big data will be useful to mine in doing research on how food and lifestyle impact health. There are also some ethical issues around privacy if personal metrics are used inappropriately. Here is an interview…
