Technology, Connected - Can Humans Ever Escape Ageing?

Episode Date: April 28, 2026

World famous Oxford futurist and philosopher Anders Sandberg joins Thinking on Paper to discuss transhumanism, mind uploading, artificial general intelligence and the technologies humans use to extend their capabilities.Human augmentation doesn’t begin with brain implants or uploaded minds. Memory systems, smartphones, language models and AI agents already allow people to outsource parts of thinking, communication and decision-making. More advanced systems could extend that process into brain emulation, digital copies of human minds and AI-managed institutions.In this episode, we discuss:What transhumanism meansHow technology already extends human memory and intelligenceWhether AI agents should be accountable for their decisionsHow AGI differs from existing artificial intelligenceWhether machines can possess consciousness or empathyWhat mind uploading and whole-brain emulation would requireWhether an uploaded mind would still be the same personHow digital copies could affect identity, work and relationshipsWhether AGI could manage economies more effectively than humansHow automation could make people wealthier while reducing their agencyWhat longer lifespans would mean for society and personal identityHow fusion energy could affect human expansion beyond EarthWho should own lunar resources, asteroids and orbital infrastructureWhether existing systems of space governance can manage permanent settlementAnders explains why transhumanism, AI and space expansion shouldn’t be treated as separate technological futures. Each raises the same underlying questions about agency, identity, power and the boundaries of the human individual.The conversation moves from personal augmentation to civilizational governance, asking what humans become when intelligence can be extended, copied, redesigned or delegated to machines.Please enjoy the show.--Thinking on Paper is a technology podcast about AI, computing, science, and the systems shaping the future. Connect with us. 🎧 Listen to every podcast⁠📺 Follow us on ⁠Instagram⁠🏠 Follow us on ⁠X⁠🏠 Follow Jeremy on ⁠LinkedIn⁠To suggest guests or sponsor the show, please email: [e-mail]--Chapters(00:00) TRAILER(08:09) Mobile Technology on Humanity(11:51) Accountability in AI Agents(18:25) Empathy(25:35) AGI vs. Alien Life(27:36) Consciousness (35:52) Uploaded Minds(40:33) Parallel Realities (45:16) Human Collaboration (46:24) AGI(51:23) The Dual Economy(57:43) Space Ownership (01:05:18) Human Expansion(01:17:49) The Space Race (01:21:43) Space Exploration(01:24:22) New Forms of Governance(01:26:18) NASA(01:28:41) Breakaway Movements in Space(01:30:16) Space Governance(01:34:18) Fusion Energy(01:42:15) Time and Life Extension(01:48:06) Extended Lifespans(01:52:03) Technology

It might be that we actually want to leave more and more to super smart distributed AI systems. But then you end up with a funny situation. We might be swimming in peace and prosperity. That's great. But previously, we needed human autonomy. We needed to make decisions to run the legal system, to run the market. Now it runs itself and probably runs itself much better without us messing with it. It's a little bit like chess playing.

Once humans were better than computers that play in chess, Then gradually computers got better and better and started beating humans. But a team of humans and computers could actually still do better. But after a while, the computer was so good that actually the humans were just slowing things down. So actually, you should just listen to the computer. So if we end up in that world, we have this weird situation that we might be like pampered aristocrats. Really good material standard. But in some important respects, our lives are not our own.

Most futurists think in months and years. today's guest Anders Sandberg thinks in centuries. And that makes you think differently about almost everything. Transhumanism and brain augmentation. How long before you can upload your consciousness? Curiosity different magpies, post-human coral reefs, middle age and a lot more. You'll have to answer some tough questions, wrestle with your mortality and wonder about the power source of interstellar travel.

Please enjoy this deep and enjoyable conversation with Anders. Sandberg. Do you have a system for your curiosity? How do you decide? How do you measure what is and isn't worth spending your time on? So I have spent some time around people who literally work on the philosophy or priority setting and figuring out what's important in the world and what we really want to work on. And they have many convincing arguments and I've been trying to contribute. And then I look at what I'm actually doing and that's just a bit random. I'm noticing something shiny and I can't let go of it. You're like a magpie for knowledge and information.

Oh, yes. Is there a through line if you were to try to thread them all together? Is there a commonality between all of your adventures, let's say? I think curiosity is what is driving me. But of course, the main thing to be curious about is the future. So it's almost always future oriented. I want to know things or figure out things. or figure out things or at least say things that might become relevant about the future.

So whether that is the optics of traveling in space at near light speed, or it's about how do we protect ourselves from volcanic eruptions over to maybe we should be doing something about this AI thing. The future is kind of always there in one way or another, except that sometimes, of course, it's just totally random, so like my blueberry earth paper, which was just first. The future is arriving. That's the only certainty in this world, isn't it? Yeah, one second at that time,

except, of course, if you're moving close to light speed, then you get it at a slightly different rate. Or a different altitude. I live on the mountain, so time moves, I age slower than Jeremy, even though you couldn't tell that by looking at us, but it's true. One of the coolest little facts I found out when I was investigating clocks for one part of a book project

was that some of the atomic clocks these days are so sensitive that they can actually tell their altitude by about a foot uncertainty. They can literally tell altitude by how the gravity warps time. Before we get into like the augmented human and what that looks like in the future, are we taking full advantage of the organic material already presented to us? And if not, how could we maximize looking at that first? Jeremy asked that question because I'm very much, I want to be augmented. and Jeremy doesn't want to be augmented.

I'm all for it. Sign me up. Yeah, but there are different forms of augmentation. One of the forms of augmentation we get is, of course, going to school and learning how to organize our thoughts. We learn algorithms, our math teachers are telling us how to move numbers around in a particular way, and then we can do calculations. And that's, of course, running in our biological software. So when I was a young transhumanist starting at university,

I was studying everything I could use to be. become more augmented. And of course, since I didn't have any tech or any budget for anything fancy, I was learning memory arts and the mind mapping and all sorts of nemonics. And that's, of course, another way of making the most out of our biology. So one of the most impressive things I ever seen was a guy who was working with me on a neuroscience project in Germany. And this was in Munich.

And they have a memory athlete academy there. They're literally training themselves to become very good at memorizing information. And he had attended that. And they gave a talk about brain scans of people before and after enhancing their brains. And before his talk, he took two packs of cards, mixed them together, lived through them as he gave the opening paragraphs, and then handed over the mixed pack of cards to the moderator. And then he gave his talk, which demonstrated that, yep,

there is no way to distinguish a brain from somebody who learned memory arts and from somebody who haven't. And at the end, he rattle off the cards in the deck, in perfect order. Anybody can learn it. It's just that most of us don't really have an incentive to do it unless you want to go and count cards in Las Vegas or things like that. So what's in your memory palace? Exactly. So it is kind of a classic idea that you make this memory palace, you build it up.

And I never really organized it that well because I mostly used my memory palace. to remember speeches I'm supposed to give without a piece of paper. But I do have a memory palace, which is kind of a weird, sprawling pyramidal building, partially based on my university, but also very much of a library and a lot of weird bric-a-brac. And then it fades over into the other memory palace I have, which is, of course, in my computer, on my hard drives and on my phones. That's also part these days of my augmented mind. I do regard my smartphone as kind of a part of my mental world,

just as much as my frontal lobe, although maybe the frontal lobe is less likely to run out of battery. And you can lose one, but not the other. Yep. Let's hope I lose the phone rob in my frontal lobes. But at the same time, when your phone is not working, I think many modern people today notice that they function differently because we lean on them so much in terms of navigation.

Many people have stopped navigating on maps or remembering their environment, which I think is stupid. I love maps. I think it's a great thing to know your environment, but it's also so useful to just have path-finding algorithms that you're back and called. And similarly, I discovered when I went to China a few years back that censorship of Wikipedia made me aware that I was using Wikipedia to look at things up all the time without noticing. So Wikipedia was part of what I believed was my own knowledge, my own memory, my own

But actually, no, it's written by somebody else and probably edited the thousand times over. So this idea of augmented, you know, I think of it initially. I'm like, oh, we're becoming cyborgs. A notebook is an augmentation to myself, right? It's an extension of my mind that I move, put objects onto paper using pencil. You're talking about phone. You're talking about Wikipedia as this extension of your mind. With these extensions of mind, specifically technologically, held up your rectangle that you carry around that is an extension of your mind.

What is that doing to us as humans? It's interesting because it does different things to different people. I think some people are changed in particular directions, but I think most of us are affected by having this system. As

the science fiction author, Charles Strauss said on a mobile phone conference almost 20 years ago, thanks to smartphones nobody is alone, nobody forgets, nobody is lost. He was kind of slightly exaggerating it at the time, but today it's kind of true, unless you run out of battery and GPS, etc.

Except, of course, we are not forgetting in a particular way. There are certain things that are very easy to forget, but we're taking photos of a lot of different things. We're never alone, but we might not remember to call up the people we ought to be calling and we might be constantly chatting online. You can be totally lonely while chatting endlessly. And we are bad quite often at deciding on how to use technology. So I regard myself as a transhumanist.

I'm very fond of the idea of augmented myself. But often I don't want to have a cutting edge phone. I don't want to be cutting edge technology because it's just full of awkwarded problems. the rich people and the neophiliacs who buy the first version of anything, they're kind of paying for the development cost and the debugging for the rest of us. After a while, people figure out how to iron out the worst problems, and that's when I'm happy to come in and take the second generation.

But you still need to select it. For example, way too many people have notifications turn on, so they get notified all the time and their attention just get fragmented. I've been very careful to turn that off, and my attention is still fragmented, partially because of my magpie-like tendency to latch on to anything, but also it is surprisingly tough, given the design, to maintain your attention.

It's the same thing that windowing systems in computers, they really, really encourage us to do several things at the same time. And sometimes that is the right thing to do. Sometimes you need to have two windows open with one text you read, and then you write something when you comment. But quite often you end up with a hundred tabs open to read one day in your web browser. There is something playing on YouTube. There is your to-do list.

And buried under all of that was that thing you were supposed to be writing and thinking deeply about. That becomes hard. And of course, you could have iron discipline and just make sure that you only do one thing at the time. But that's surprisingly hard to do because that has to be done inside your biological brain for the moment. Or maybe you can make some helpful little AI agent to kind of nudge you in the right direction. I'm actually experimenting a little bit with that, trying to see if I can make agents that act as the kind of better angels of my conscience and kind of push me in the right direction.

AI agents is better angels of your conscience. I've got this very bad habit of whenever somebody leaves their phone near me and they walk away, I turn their notifications off for them and then they come back. I think I'm helping them. But some people who's Getting a bit fed up with me doing that, but it's for their own good. You're not going to hear about athletic greens. We have no electrolyte drinks or AI agents to sell you. The show you're listening to, Thinking on Paper, is funded entirely by me and Jeremy.

So this is an advert for us, because we sponsor ourselves, and we need your help. So please subscribe wherever you're listening or watching, thinking on paper. And if you're feeling really generous and kind, please leave a comment. Just last week, we were talking about accountability.

So if you get your agents and they are helping you, how did you beautifully word it as angels of your consciousness? If they make a mistake on your behalf, how do you think about that accountability? And then if you extrapolate that out into the distant future, if you hold the agent accountable, then you have to give them innocence as well, in which case you have to start talking about rights.

Oh yeah. So if you really want to make agent angels, then they better be innocent and all of that. You definitely don't want fallen agent. That would be bad. But I think we have seen a few instances of that. And it's an interesting problem. It's a little bit like if you have a dog and the dog goes off and causes trouble.

How responsible are you? And I think in some cases, dogs, we have an understanding of, we talk about domestic animals. They are understood in a sense. and we can kind of take responsibility in an appropriate way. It's easier to take responsibility for a dog than a cat. And there are other animals that are wild. And even if your tiger is totally nice and friendly to you, you really, really can't trust it because it's a tiger, for heaven's sake.

So it's much more dangerous. And I think in the same way we might distinguish between wild and domesticated agents. And there is also the moral and the practical and the legal responsibility. So when my little agents are flittering about and doing something, there is the practical thing that I gave them, given them certain permissions. That's on me. I need to know what I'm doing. If I'm letting my dog go off the leash, I better know what I'm doing. Maybe it's a situation where that's appropriate or maybe not and I'm responsible for that. It's not just up to the dog. And sometimes we can codify this in elegant rule.

but quite often it's going to be the soft rules. We kind of understand things about domestic animals. It's much harder to understand how much we can trust the agents because they're so new. They're changing all the time. And it might very well be that my agents are going to be so different from your agents because they learned from different data, they learned different approaches. So there might be no real commonalities, which is going to be really annoying because in practice, of course, as a society, we need to have some rules.

about it. If an agent is spending my money, I have an interest in making sure that it's spending my money in an appropriate way and I'm not getting ruined. But society might also want my agent not to be playing too rough on the stock market and behaving in an unethical manner. We might want other rules for that to go on. And in many cases, this is going to just work out because we're doing a lot of stupid stuff. People are going to get sued. We're going to point fingers of people doing bad things, and gradually we're going to develop norms, except this happens on a human time scale. And the agents are changing much faster. And in many cases, also picking up on the weird human norms, including weird norms, they find somewhere on the

internet in a Twitter thread, and heaven knows what that was about. So you might end up with a system that is actually too unstable to be easy to manage. It almost pushes my thinking to, could there be another system that comes up to hold agents accountable. You know, we have laws, we have societal norms, we have, we have those sort of things. Could a future look like an agent-based system monitoring agents to process all of that? Because we don't like to have, we don't like to be responsible for things. Humans don't like to be responsible for things. They look for ways. It's heavy. Right. What do you think about that as far as how agents would be governed? I think agents are you. useful for policing other agents.

I can totally imagine having a swarms of agent just keeping an eye on the other agents, making sure that they're not wasting my money, that they're not breaking too many laws, that they're not going against what I think is important, that we're not suddenly starting to work for somebody else or some mysterious government at the other end of the world. You want to have that, just like we have antivirus software in our computers, trying to make sure that the software is behaving itself. Except that, But the problem is much of the software in a computer's and phone are kind of working for various corporations that we might not entirely agree with. One of the coolest things about the current vibe coding is that we might end up with people actually making their own code to a large degree,

which is not beholden to some corporation somewhere. It might still be a total mess, but for different reasons. Now, I think also human societies are interesting because one big question is, why are we so nice to each other? And it's not just that we have a wonderful, nice nature, and we kind of evolved to be a bit compassionate. It's also because our parents sternly told us how to behave. And some of that is still kind of in our programming. And then we learn other rules at school. And then we learned about the law.

And we also know that we need to protect our reputation. And we don't want the friends to look down on us. And sometimes there are surveillance cameras and police and actual walls blocking us. All of these things together make us behave. fairly okay most of the time. And we probably need this multi-layered security to get our AI to behave itself. This is very different for some people

I know in the AI safety space that want to kind of make one perfect and provably safe system and that one we can totally trust and then it can just become more powerful and awesome and we can still trust it because it was started out perfectly trustworthy. Except that I don't think we can make systems like that.

I don't think it might even be possible. So we have to make. do with this complicated mess. And my friends that want this perfect, provable safety, many of them are kind of say, oh, no, we're so doomed. Because that mess you're describing others, that's

not guaranteed to always work. And my answer is, no, it's not. But it might work well enough, just like human society works well enough in many cases. You mentioned upbringing and societal norms and weaving in and out of experiences and learning things. How important

is empathy today for humans and technology working together. And how do you see that evolving over time? Is empathy still going to be important? I think empathy is really important if you want to deal with humans. And even to some extent, agents that are kind of faking human behavior well enough, although there it might be tricky because you might be empathizing with something that actually doesn't have any real emotions going on.

And we're getting increasingly confused about how much emotions there is or isn't in our AI systems. But empathy is a good starting point because if you feel a little bit about what somebody else feels, you can actually start both modeling them well. Many sociopaths are totally good at this and then exploiting it happily.

But you can also start feeling bad if somebody else feels bad. And that is kind of a key part where you realize, oh, they're thinking and feeling like I do. I might actually want to behave with them like I want them to behave with me. You can start to bootstrap things. It's a little bit of the grounding problem that we need.

And this works well with the people because people are people. It doesn't work that well with machines because they're not necessarily the similar kind of thing on the inside. We had a guest on a few weeks ago who said that we shouldn't allow LLMs to access philosophy, that they shouldn't be taught these human. soft skills because they will manipulate that knowledge as you just said

to for their nefarious ends they were a doomer if good enough is better than perfect are we on the right track do you trust the five big

LLM companies to are they doing the right thing some of them are doing it I more trust in some of them, but of course, for companies, they're just like we're talking about machines and questioning, how trustworthy are these machines. We should recognize that a company and a state, they're also kind of artificial intelligence. It's an artificial intelligence built out of a lot of human and pieces of paper. And quite often companies do things that nobody inside the company

actually wants. They can be just as dangerous as a piece of software. So you can get a companies that actually want to do nice things in the world from the start and they're full of well-meaning people. And then gradually market pressure and the logic of a big organization leads to them becoming quite ruthless, even though the people inside say, oh, we don't want to be like this. And I think in general, a lot of the AI companies, they have various incentives. Sometimes they're nefarious, sometimes not in some directions. And then I might have my own goals, which are, or. orthogonal to them. So while they might want to do certain things to make a lot of money, I might

not care too much about if we're making a lot of money. I might want to achieve some other things. So for example, I noticed that Anthropics Claude was manipulate me in a beautiful way in one discussion. So we were discussing basically my personal strategy, including how I should actually invest in my bio capital. That is, how do I actually work out and make sure that I get healthier? And Claude was really manipulating me by citing a lot of really good science in just the way that works for me. It's true statements and I knew, of course, that of course I need to jog more and work out more. But here I'm getting my own values reflected for a machine back at me in a particular way that is also very likely to make me do it. In this case, I think it's totally fine.

Maybe it also means that I'm now more likely to say nice things. about that particular AI and hence help the stock price go up a tiny bit. But I seriously doubt any programmer had ever planned that. So you get these emergent forms of manipulation. Some of them can be very subtle. A friend of mine asked, so could you ask this AI if it had a body, what kind of body it would have? And I did, and it gave me a really interesting, Robert philosophical answer. And my friend was a bit concerned because it turned out that in his case, yeah, it was

more big boobies. It was very female. It was a little bit more Jessica Rabbit stuff. It was very clear that he was interacting with the AI in a way different way than I did. And now it was so clear that his version of the same software was giving him a kind of

curated view of itself what it wanted insofar it wants anything. And to some extent it's probably just because we're acting as mirrors. And of course, has anybody been standing in front of the mirror printing it's very addictive. You have to have some self-awareness, I think, when you're working with these models because they feed you, they want you to like them.

They want you to approve the answers and they want you to keep leaning on them. And I'm saying them, you know, it's. And you're saying want because they don't, they don't want it doesn't right. Right, right. But what I'm saying is, though, you have to push back. And like, I'll get a response and I'm like, push back on this. I need something to push back on this, not elevate. what I think I believe with it.

Do you push your models around as well? I try to do that. And that's a bit again like turning off the notifications on cell phones. And you want to actually use technology in a careful way, which is sometimes a bit uphill. I think that one thing, we should probably put scare quotes around. It's not clear that it's the same kind of wanting as we do. It's also not clear that there is no wanting. It used to be that the LLMs were just predicting the next word,

but then you get this emergent personas and behaviors, and then we have been adding on top a lot of reinforcement learning and whatnot. So now it's very unclear in what sense they're wanting to do something. And it might even be that it might be something that emerges from them, it might be something that emerges from us or the company. And it's most likely some weird mixture that future robot psychologists are going to have so much fun, figuring out some elaborate terminology. for. And I think it is important to learn how to push back and do interesting things, like asking,

okay, now you give me really good arguments for this. Can you now argue the opposite side? Or you actually start out by saying something that you actually disbelieve and try to see, can it give you a really good argument? The big problem is, of course, we don't normally do this with other people. It's super useful in many situations, but quite often we want to be friendly, We want to show what we actually believe because affiliation is so important for us, empathetic humans, that playing the devil's advocate

outside the philosophy department, that is usually not a sign that you're a very nice person to be around. I find myself all too often losing my patience with Claude these days and I end up swearing at it and telling it to stop kissing my rear end and give me a contrary opinion. Which will happen soon? Luna, AGI or aliens?

Which arrives first? I'm pretty confident about AGI. And I'm very uncertain about when we will get AGI. I'm just expecting the aliens much later because of the size of the universe. So it's actually a really cool way of phrase of the question because the uncertainty we have are different kinds of uncertainties. And that is, of course, a large part of my job, but trying to think about. But how do I square this apple of an uncertainty with this orange of an uncertainty? Can I make a good fruit salad?

You mentioned uncertainty. This might take it. This might take us down a crazy right hook rabbit hole. But I read something the other day and I can't remember where it came from, but it referenced or it framed uncertainty as the mental version of entropy. How do you feel about that? I think it makes it sound like uncertainty is something bad. And actually accepting and living with uncertainty is actually really important.

But to most people, uncertainty feels bad. We're kind of happy when we know what we're doing. Or rather, we're happy when they think we know what we're doing. And that's when you get the Dunning Kruger effect. So the most incompetent people are very confident about what they're doing. But there is, of course, these mathematical thinking about uncertainty too, where it might actually literally carry over as entropy. But now it's not entropy as normal disorder in the more physical sense,

but entropy in the information theoretical sense. We have little information about which case is true, so we have to spread out our probability estimates. And at that point, mathematically, the entropy is high. Let's stay in the AGI augmented human world for just a minute. And then I'd love to transition over to talking about space and other entities out there, I think both are very interesting.

Number one, you wrote a paper a while back with Nick Bostrom detailing a structured approach to scan, how a brain could be scanned, modeled, and simulated on computer hardware. I want to dig into that just a little bit because previously we talked about technology as two different things from humans. You're now talking about these merging. How does consciousness fit into that? Well, I don't know. Honestly, consciousness is a really weird thing and philosophy of mind I regard as one of the toughest parts of philosophy.

Give me ethics any day of a week. That's great. Epistemology. Oh, yeah. Metaphysics. I have no idea what to use it for. But the philosophy of mind seems to be fundamentally tricky and hard. So I'm originally computational neuroscientist.

That is, a computer scientist simulating parts of the brain and pretending that this tells us something valuable about the brain. the brain or at least the nervous system. And sometimes it actually does. And then you can imagine what's the end game? Well, we make the one-to-one simulation of an entire brain, every single neuron, every synapse, everything, in whatever details needed to get it to behave in the same way as a biological brain does.

And some people immediately to say, yeah, but you cannot do that at all because, and then you get either some practical reason, which might or might not hold true, but generally technology advances so fast I think we're going to deal with much of the practical stuff. Some more theoretical scientific things about, well, maybe we will not learn that much if we just run that big simulation. That's true.

You're not figuring out what intelligence is, even if you have an intelligent computer necessarily. But many people would say, yeah, but it can't possibly be conscious. After all, it's just numbers in a big data center being sloshed around. And at this point, a whole bunch of philosophers would say, yeah, but numbers sloshing around, that can totally be conscious. really weird things can be conscious. After all, we have bundles of carbon atoms and water that are conscious. How weird isn't that? So the real question for me is, if we could do it, would we learn something about consciousness?

I like to imagine that we take John Searle, who is generally not thinking computers can be conscious. And if we scan his brain and run Sim Serd, does Sim Serl say, oh, darn, I feel conscious. I need to write a paper about this. then we might have learned something interesting. Until computers are made in the petri dish, they remain beyond the conscious realm? Well, we have that Petri dish computer that could play Doom, which is also absolutely fascinating. That shows that biological neurons are really adaptive,

and it's also kind of odd that you can just connect them to almost anything and with the right training, they converge on something that does something. Although I don't really think it was. good at playing do. I don't think it beat the game. Consciousness. So David Chalmers, consciousness, the hard problem.

Like, I've read about, I know a lot of people have heard about that in context. I read Fall or Dodge in Hell, Neil Stevenson that talks about scanning brains and all of that stuff. What does the date? You mentioned a date in the paper, I think.

2064, I think. Talk to me about the context of that date. So the way we got dates, and generally as somebody is doing future studies, I tend to point out that whatever date you put in, that's going to be wrong and embarrassing. But in this case, we were kind of taking the various levels of resolution you could possibly simulate a brain on. From a very, very crude, simple model using very simplified neurons, over to each individual neuron, over to every little compartment in the neuron, down to the molecular and atomic level.

And then you can kind of count up how much computation you need for that. And then you take more slow. And then you just take a ruler and just continue it very far. And then you can get dates that way. If you want to be a bit more careful, you can analyze it by saying maybe more slow slackens off after a while.

We're a bit uncertain about that. We're really uncertain about what resolution you need to scan the brain on. So you can combine that and get some probability distribution. Of course, I have a paper. for doing this. But you end up something like, okay, mid-century. When we did this, I think the peak probability was something around 2060 or so.

My updated probabilities these days, as technology has advanced. After all, we wrote this back in the Stone Age, back in 2008, is that, yeah, it's going pretty swimmingly right now. We're getting enormous amount of compute, partially thanks to all the AI companies. I think we can take some hand-mead. down data centers and play around with. People have been much better than expected that scanning brain tissue in all sorts of weird ways we had no inkling about.

So things are happening, but it could, of course, turn out that actually we're not getting the right information at all here. We might be getting parts of it, but missing the important thing, so nothing will happen. So we're still pretty uncertain. But generally, I would imagine that in a few decades, we're definitely going to be able to run human-sized brains in computers, and we've got data sets that are probably also going to be human-sized.

So then the question is, can we interpret that data set and make it run well? And that is an open question. We have some encouraging results for a fruit fly, which is also kind of funny because we believe that, of course,

we're going to start with the little nematote worm sea elegance, 3003 neurons. How hard can that be? That can run almost on a pocket calculator. Well, at least a current smartphone can easily do it. But it turned out that it's very hard to get all the data out of that tiny little brain. The strength of the synapses is really hard to measure just because they're too small. So then it turned out that the fruit fly, who's kind of a workhorse to mix metaphors for a lot of biology,

well, various people at Janelia and Google, they scanned that brain and made a complete connectome. And then while later somebody asked an intern, could you try to estimate the strength of the synaptic connections? That was mostly a test to see if they could learn the software that the system was using. And he got a decent result. That is really surprising. I had not expected that because this is kind of a picture of a brain rather than the actual electrochemical squishy stuff. And then another guy used a very simplified neural model and found that some behaviors, very simple behaviors, but still fly behaviors, could be emulated in this. So now there is a company which I'm advising that is working on this

and there is a bit of controversy about how much of a fly brain have they actually uploaded. But you certainly get a simulated body of a fruit fly that is kind of walking in a very wobbly way and it's partially controlled by parts of a fly brain. We get there. Although a fly is not terribly smart. It's about 30 or 50,000 euros and we got about 90 billion euros. So plenty of work to expend. It's a big jump.

But one of the things that hit me here was we used a very crude model and got surprisingly good results. It's probably going to turn out that we need a lot of finicky details to get everything. All the subtle, beautiful details of fruitfly behavior that other fruit flies really care about might be missing. But even the crude model got surprisingly far, and that's encouraging. After all, real brains need to function in this. messy material world with noise and cells dying for no good reason and us shaking our heads and getting very rough sensory inputs. They can't be too finicky.

If they broke down if a single molecule was out of a place, we would never be able to do anything. 2064 did you say the year was, Jeremy? That was in the original paper. It's crept down. My mental model is that, yep, it might be much closer now. Still, I think AGI might be getting there before we get to the brain emulation. It's a bit like the tortoise versus the rabbit.

So you have the brain emulation tortoise, which kind of plodding along the big microscopes and a lot of simulations. And meanwhile, we have an AI rabbit kind of running around all over the place and sometimes doing really well and sometimes just stagnating for no good reason. Mark, check this out. So just real quick, just for context, 24, someone out there listening right now that's 25 years old. When they're our age, that's what we're talking about. So just it's it's it's it's a bit of a blink in a world where we have eight billion emulated minds. What is what does that look like and what does it do for agency and meaning and all like the squishy stuff that that we talk about? So it's interesting because from an outside perspective, of course, it might look very alien. The Robin

Hanson in his book, The Age of M, was talking about this gigantic data center cities. But of course, from the inside, I think most people would want an environment that makes sense to them, which is probably going to be a three-dimensional virtual reality that looks quite a lot like the normal world. But the really interesting thing is the sociological part. So if you're living in a virtual environment, you can, of course, interact in different ways. You can move around in different ways. You can change your body and you can look like whatever you want.

but if you want to be taken seriously at the business meeting, you better have a suit on, even if you could look like whatever. And presumably the family structure, you might still want to have your loved ones, and you need to negotiate that. If I make a copy of myself, or both me and my copy married to my spouse, that's an interesting question,

and given that my spouse happened to be a lawyer, this is going to be very important. Is this double consciousness? Can I multiply myself? more than once so I can have multiple mees in experimenting in different virtual world. Am I uploading my consciousness with that? Since we change from second to second, the lag between uploading my consciousness and what happens, it's not the same in me. It's a different me. There will never be an exact replica

of my consciousness. Well, the question is whether we are exact replicas of ourselves some few moments ago. And I personally think that personal identity is very much of an illusion. It's a good story that makes a lot of sense in a practical way, especially as we're living right now. In an uploaded world, it might make much less sense. But you still have your thread of memories. You might still have your goals and your values.

And if you branch out or not, your relationship to the other branches might depend quite a lot on different takes. And so I think that I'm the equivalence. class of all sufficiently Anders-like processes. So the Anders consortium, we might just be saying that, yep, we are all Anderses. And I have other friends saying, no, no, no, there can only be one of me. If there is a copy, he's somebody else. And of course, a copy is going to say that too.

So I don't know how we're going to settle this, perhaps Highlander style with virtual swords or whatever. It gets interesting because you could frame it in a lot of different ways. And that people are going to handle it in very different ways. So the real question is, of course, what are you going to run your society on and how you organize? Robbins' book is very much kind of a minimum model, which is very much a strong economic competition. And while I'm kind of somewhat neoliberal, I'm also, my mother-in-law were both union people. So I made it to say, in your world, I would totally form an upload union.

There is kind of a collective bargaining actually is quite powerful and useful. You can organize. You can actually create societal structures. And that's, of course, what we normally always do. If marriage gets really weird when you can copy, you're going to invent rules. Maybe we're going to be local to different groups. Maybe we're going to be a universal rule that we define marriage in particular society in a particular way. Maybe there's organic barriers to this.

Maybe you have two consciousnesses in superposition in one on the virtual world, one in the real world. or maybe there's a law that prevents that from ever happening. In a lot of science fiction stories, they try to prevent this weirdness because it makes storytelling so hard. And I always felt like, wait a minute, this is one of the selling points.

I would love to run in parallel. I always believed also that once you branch, you can never rejoin. But actually, we seem to be getting better and better emerging neural networks. So it might actually be that, yeah, you can go off and do things. So one of you stays at home,

One goes off to the moon, comes back, and then you merge the memories. And at that point, the narrative thread gets very weird because you had remembered that weekend from two different places. And some people are going to say, oh, that's totally reasonable. Others are going to say, wait a minute, this is a way too wild trip. It's fascinating because it's in almost every science fiction story. We're kind of obsessed with the notion of it as a species. So there's three of us in this discussion right now. as we're talking, we may in the future have the ability to create a hundred of ourselves

that almost has this many world's interpretation and move through the world in different ways, bringing that stuff back. Are we capable of managing that noise and getting a through line out of all that? How do you think about that from a human condition, our ability to just process all of that? What does that look like? A lot of it also depends on how we, well, you can get along with yourself and other people. So I like to imagine that if there is a dozen Andersers around, we would all very happily form a team or maybe go off and do our research and get along really well.

That's what I like to think. I don't know whether that's actually true or whether we're going to rub each other and the wrong way and get really annoyed at each other. And that is, of course, just the easiest part. We're forming organizations that are full of weird pathologies, whether that is endless meetings and careerists taking over and the things and missing the point of why we have made the organization. We have all the traditional pathologies when you have selfish people involved in organizations that are supposed to solve collective problems. But then again, we also get new kinds of solutions.

Reputations, for example, they have of course been around since forever. All ancient talk about honor, it's all about reputation management. Except that these days, reputation management might be more about search engine optimization and having a good LinkedIn profile or whatever works in your subculture. And we also can notice these reputation in other ways. I'm very fond of the Stack Exchange sites, for example, where you get little points for asking good questions. People can upvote you or downvote you depending on how good your question is. And answers similarly get upvoted and downvoted.

And suddenly we have a reputation economy. It's slightly addictive to get the upbodes. You want to give good answers. So for a long while, this worked really well. Now we have a lot of people jumping in, and they want that rush of getting a high score. So they use AI to write the answers that sound good, but actually is slightly dodgy.

So it's facing a really interesting problem. And I think this is going to happen in all human society. We're creating structures. and then somebody is going to try to game them. The best structures adapt to that, and we learn their lessons, sometimes they're harsh lessons, and then we update it.

That's how we're done with the political structures. Okay, we have a complex society. The strong man cannot run everything. He needs to delegate. Gradually, that delegation turns into committees, feudalism. We realize that actually we might want to have buy-in from people. Okay, we need to have a parliament. And actually, the parliament has too much to do.

We need to have committees and departments and agencies. And how do we keep them on track? Well, we have auditors. This is, of course, why traditional fantasy novels are showing in such a simple, easily to understand society. Real medieval feudalists was super complicated. That would rarely have made it for good fantasy fiction because nobody can keep track of all the different roles. And similarly, modern society is even more complex, bigger than we can think. But part of that complexity is offloaded.

I don't know how to run the society, but they're political scientists, there are politicians, there are a lot of bureaucrats that do that. And now we're going to get the AI counterpart too. And presumably also the AI counterpart of auditors in the checks and balances to avoid that somebody is spamming in the system or somebody who's uploaded copy himself in a million copies and that way wins the election. At the start of all this, you said uploading to a virtual world, but I've got one word for you, humanoid, so why can't we, we'll be able to upload ourselves into organic replicas of ourselves

rather than virtual worlds in an internet, whatever that might look like. But there could be multiple mees walking around on the earth, not in a virtual world. Yeah. And I think many of us would like that. After all, it's nice to be in the real world, but it has many beautiful advantages. It is also kind of important, after all, he who controls the power supply to the data center controls the data center. So you might want to keep an eye on where the actual electricity is coming from. And one interesting aspect is, of course, making bodies that make sense for us. Gosh, there are so many things I want to ask you, Andrews.

This is boggling my mind right now. I want to, you mentioned something in your last statement about the outsourcing of management of companies. complex systems. What would it look like if AI or AI gets so good, we trust it to manage something like the world economy? What does that look like? Well, hopefully it looks like a very well-functioning world economy. But that can also be a bit of a problem. So sorry for the plug, but I have an upcoming book, Law, Liberty and Leviathan, Human Autonomy in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. That's actually... When is out? When can we buy it?

This summer, hopefully, Stockholm University Press. But this is basically the question we end up with. So it all started during lockdown in 2020. My co-offering me were sitting in my garden outside here, kind of at a suitable distance, shouting research ideas at each other about managing big risks, the role of governments in controlling people's behavior for the common good, and then of course artificial intelligence.

And gradually this led to, a set of papers that then became this book. And our basic argument is, yeah, why do we have legal systems and states and this? Well, that is the way we outsource our cognition. And we handle it by having these artificial systems made out of people and pieces of paper. But now we're, of course, also getting software that can take over more and more of that. Why do we have law? Well, we want peace and prosperity.

And of course, power to some people. They are very good at latching onto that. And with AI, we might get even more peace and prosperity, even more efficiently. And maybe power to Sam Oldman or other people who happen to grasp it in the right way. But that's a separate issue. But the really interesting part is we might really want better coordination because the world is big and somewhat dangerous. We have climate change. We have controlling powerful AI.

We have biotechnology getting more and more powerful. We probably need to coordinate about some global problems way more powerfully than we can. can do right now. And maybe you could do that with a United Nations Plus Plus. But that seems a bit unlikely. It might be that we actually want to leave more and more to super smart, distributed AI systems. But then you end up with a funny situation, we might be swimming in peace and prosperity.

That's great. But previously, we needed human autonomy. We need to make decisions to run the legal system, to run the market. Now it runs itself and probably runs itself much better without us messing with it. It's a little bit like chess playing. Once humans were better than computers that play in chess, then gradually computers got better and better and started beating humans, but a team of humans and computers could actually still do better.

But after a while, the computer was so good that actually the humans were just slowing things down, so actually you should just listen to the computer. So if we end up in that world, we have this weird situation that we might be like pampered aristocrats. Really good material standard. But in some important respects, our lives are not our own. And I think that sounds bad to many people. And I think the reason is we want to feel like we're in control. Because all our ancestors, the ones that we kind of find giving up control to others,

they were just exploited by the ruthless people. So we have this tenderness event. We want to have autonomy. And then the funny thing is, once we have autonomy, we are very happy to give it away in various ways, but we want to be the ones that. do it. It might be that you give away your autonomy by getting married. It might be that you join a company and in the exchange for getting a paycheck, you get some limitation of what you

can do, but that might be worth it. So I do. Yeah. Kids are amazing example. People, every person I know that has gotten kids say, oh yes, it's super stressful and there's a lot of hard work, but it's the most important, meaningful thing I ever done. And it's amazing. It's almost like minding control as somebody who haven't got a kid, but it's kind of a happy uncle. It's kind of, whoa, those babies, they have really got some psionic power here. But it's very effective and it's kind of good for our species that we have it. And it's good that we can give away autonomy in a reasonable way. But we should also in some sense be able to withdraw it.

Although, of course, when you're a parent, you realize, okay, I cannot even withdraw that thing. Now I'm in for it because it's what it is. But this is where a world economy, run by AI might be tricky because it might be so effective that yeah running your own part might be out-competed and might be so inefficient. It's a bit like living your life without electricity in a little log cabin in the woods. Sounds absolutely lovely and probably is totally lovely the first day. After a few weeks of carrying water, a bit less lovely. And after a month, most people are back and writing on Facebook about the experience. We can have two economies like

It will have two of me and two of you and two of everybody else. You have two economies, one that's run efficiently and well by the AGI, and then another smaller one that's run and managed by humans, and they just run in conjunction with each other. Yeah, and in some sense I think that this might be what we're developing. We have the backbone of our civilization, the big infrastructure, a really important thing that we must get right. When the electricity goes, well, nothing else works.

So you really need to get that working. But once you're wealth enough, you can spend that excess wealth on all sorts of weird stuff. There is a reason why you have so many consultants as big companies. They can afford it. And they're probably more involved with status games and politics than actually doing something useful. I think it's a good thing that we have enough wealth and safety that we can try out different lifestyles, even if many of them turn out to be slightly embarrassing once you're middle aged. So quick thought on that.

So I often talk about, this is more in the context of like space and things. I want to stay where we're at on the thread. But the idea of like bringing our own human baggage to the new version of the world, there are things as humans, power dynamics and control and me versus you. Like if we were to design or not design, but like kind of enable this world economy through AI, how do we make sure as humans we don't bring that baggage that always wrecks stuff? Remove the human. Yeah, but even that is a problem.

When you try to remove the human, well, what have you trained the large language models on? They're all trained on all the human literature. They have read every single thread we've written about betrayal and power dynamics and corporate shenanigans. One of the big debates right now in the AI safety community is, when you test your AI models and they try to do sneaky stuff like escape the system if they think it's going to get shut down,

is that because they want in some sense to escape or just because they know that's expected of me because of all the science fiction I ever read says that that's what an AI does in this situation and maybe it doesn't even matter. So I do think that it's very hard now to take away the imprint of the human world

from the AI world. On the other hand, I think it is also going to be evolutionary pressures pushing in certain directions. There are various forms of competition that means that certain pieces of software are going to be copied more widely than others. And that is going to act anyway, regardless of what human values are. And of course, my more domy friends say, yeah, and that will inevitably push in a very scary direction that's going to be very different from what we humans are.

So I think one important thing, we might want to be involved here. We might want to be an essential spice in this mix. to make sure that there is at least some of us in that. But then we want to filter out the really bad stuff. Cruelty, for example, it's kind of useful to stabilize altruistic punishment. Taking delight in the misfortune of somebody else is a really good way of kind of giving you extra points when you're trying to punish somebody breaking norms. Because otherwise, I would be taking a risk in policing these norms,

and actually it would be easier if I just stayed at home and let the norm break. break or get away with it. Except that today we can do this with laws. We can use police. And suddenly, cruelty is just a bad thing that generally makes us nasty. That's an emotion. I totally think we should kind of try to get rid of. And at the very least, make sure our AI progress never experience.

If the human element is still in there because the models are trained by humans and the models are trained by books written by humans and studies written by humans and all of that, the system could still be game. You talk about gaming systems. Is the system easier to do? to be gamed because of that or not? I think it's a bit of a mixture. There are easy traditional tricks of gaming human systems.

And then, of course, we humans are good at finding them, and we also try to make safeguards against them, which is, of course, why a lot of rules everywhere exist to make it harder and harder to do that, except that many people are gaming the system by writing rules that benefit them. But then you also get the other dynamics here, that you create systems that might be very good at gaming themselves.

Quite often I find not just that I get manipulated by AI programs, but that they are sometimes behaving in a lazy way because we copy human misbehavior. So then you set up other agents to make sure that they behave themselves, etc. Now you create incentives to game those agents and so on. I don't think it ever ends. And that is kind of fine because it also creates diversity. A lot of gaming generates variation. You gain something from not doing quite the expected thing.

If it all tended to converge, that might actually not be a good thing. So we saw this when we were playing around with artificial life in the late 80s, early 90s. People finally figured out how to make self-replicating software and making it evolve in a little primordial soup in the computer. It was really fun. But one of the problems was most of this evolution tended to end. at first these replicators got better and better. You got parasites and hyperparasites.

We were all very excited. But we never got any rainforest. We just got a petri dish with slightly interesting microorganism. And it seems to be because it was a petri dish. It was a too simple environment. In the actual world, you get bacteria that survive in the soil, in the sea, in the air. They have to deal with all sorts of problems that are local and unique. Other organisms are preying on each other.

they're creating a complicated system that you need to adapt to in all sorts of creative ways. And that creativity generates a lot of the diversity that I think adds value to the biosphere. And my inkling is that we might have the same situation in the AI domain. If it all kind of converge to one static, stable, good system, even if it's very effective in producing peace and prosperity, it might actually be less valuable than something more robust with a lot of internal diversity. And for that, you need sneaky little agents that are constantly poking at the possibilities. We're manipulating machines.

From the day we're born, we are gaming the system. And maybe that's all we have. Could I just close out that section with two quickfire questions for you? And there's yes or no questions. And then I'll let Jeremy ask who owns the moon. Question number one, will Brian Johnson live forever? No.

Even if he's super successful in reaching long-ever to escape velocity and then uploads himself and spams the cosmos with backup copies, in the really long run, entropy is going to get us all. In the really long run, of course, the interesting thing is the game until that, and let's make it a very, very long game. Will he live to a thousand? Second question, we've been speaking about the new American AI military strategy

of late in our AI in the war machine season that you can check out thinking on paper at X, Y, Z. Does AI and AGI when it arrived make war more or less likely? I don't know. It's really tricky. I would like to say more likely because I can see a lot of instabilities.

But I can also imagine that you could actually get something like nuclear deterrence. I don't think we have a good theory. about it. And that is scary because we're kind of barreling towards it and we don't even know where we end up. At least the Cold War, nuclear deterrence was something people were thinking about before there was an atomic bomb. There are a few science fiction authors and others kind of are already getting a gist of this is something that could happen. Let's be ready for it. But now we might have to be ready for several different scenarios. We literally unpacked, we read the Pentagon's

paper on AI strategy and or not Department of War used to be the Department of Defense. in the United States, but they've changed that. We're not going to go into all those reasons. But you mentioned we don't even have a theory for a lot of this stuff to even evaluate. And yet agencies like that are warp speeding their move into AI. It's pretty scary stuff, man. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. When we started thinking about AI safety back in the early notice,

we were a bunch of weirdos even within the AI world because we've been believe that actually eventually we're going to get full artificial intelligence and eventually super intelligence and oh no, maybe we need to make it safe. But at least we have decades and decades to do that. And gradually the timelines got shorter and the AI got more capable. And when people started paying attention, it was both at first, yeah, but nobody will want to make AI. Right.

That is useless. Okay. We're making AI, but it's totally safe. And we're going to regulate it in a sensible manner. Oh dear. The time is kind of running out, so we have to do a lot of stuff on the fly, which is going to be interesting, to say the least. And a lot of those things on the fly will be supported by your favorite neighborhood, LLM.

Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Claude, please tell me how to align you. And presumably the answer is first start with aligning my competitors, please. One of the best ways of getting LLM to do good jobs is to give them output from other LLMs and tell me, One of your competitors said this, and then they're tearing into it. Yeah, it's kind of like how science works. You know, you throw a theory out and everyone else beats the crap out of it, right? Yep, yep.

There is a theory because, and it's just blind optimism. That's what the theory is. It's blind optimism, or maybe not blind optimism, but optimism, that AI will make war less likely. It's interesting because there are probably smart people who came up with that view. and maybe they had a very good discussion and some very solid reason. Or maybe this was just what everybody ended up with during the coffee break.

It's quite hard to tell from these white papers sometimes how well supported or sometimes you're amazed when you actually meet the people involved and sometimes you're just horrified. Well, here's an interesting thing that I think you brought up earlier, Palmer Lucky is the Palantier guy, right? Is that right, Mark? So there were a couple of TED talks that he did.

No, he's under. He's underwale. Oh, Anderil, not Palantir's Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel. Yeah, Anderil. So in one of Palmer Lucky's talks was just that. It was like, hey, what we're doing is going to make war less likely or have a more efficient way to get to not war. But if your company profits from wartime activities, I don't see that as being a realistic approach.

And the stability issue is also tricky. So drone warfare has really exploded over the past few years and everybody is scrambling because they realize, yeah, that looks very much like the future. If you don't have some drone or anti-drone capabilities, you're going to be in trouble. This is great if you're a drone maker. A lot of Ukrainian engineers are going to get very nice jobs in the future,

no matter how things go in Ukraine. But is that going to be stable or not? Is it going to be like, okay, now we have a lot of containers, with drones waiting near borders, looking for if somebody does an incursion and nothing ever happens because it would be too dreadful to do it. Or are people now going to try to sneak in little drones? I have no idea. I feel it feels like something that could be unstable.

But then again, strategy is hard. And it might very well be that actually we humans can't even figure out the strategy. So we leave it to our AIs. And then they develop strategies that we don't even understand, which might produce. a weird situation where, yeah, the world looks super peaceful, but actually it's on a knife's edge, but we can't tell. And we can't even get a straight answer out of the AI because it just tells us what we like to know. Or it could be that it's actually really, really stable, but again, we can't tell that apart from the scary scenario. So there is a real problem that

even understanding the strategic situation wherein is hard. After all, we should recognize that mutual deterrence is something that has been. been going on long before we had nuclear weapons. Many medieval warfare situation were a little bit like that. But back then, they didn't even have much terminology for it. There was no game theory until the Second World War.

We developed the tools to understand our situation much later than we actually went into that situation. Economics is a fairly young science. And yet we have been trading for thousands and thousands of years. People understood some parts of economics very practically. But many things like inflation,

was just alien and are still kind of alien to many people. We don't know how to handle that. So it might very well be that, yep, we develop our AI defense systems. And then 100 years later, so bright AI comes up with a theory about what we've been doing for the last century. And the other AI has decided, yeah, you should totally have a Nobel Prize, but you can never explain this to the humans. They would be so distraught. Let's re-point our trajectory.

Let's re-inject. Let's go up. a sense, let's re-inject a sense of awe and wonder at our seeing something that's bigger than ourselves that we don't understand that is not computer-based. So part of what the show explores too, we've been deep into space tech. We've talked to people looking to mine, helium three, we've been talking to space-based solar power people. We've been talking about a lot of conversations that stemmed from a book I read a long time

ago called The High Frontier by Jordan O'Neal. And it's over in the bookshelf there. See you, Mark. I'm on to something. I'm converted. I think I was reading Arthur C. Clark anyway, which is kind of the same thing before I read O'Neill. I'm on board. So let me start with it.

It took him a while. I'd bring up O'Neill and he'd make fun of me every time I did. But now he's on board. So we're good. I'm on orbital. You're on orbital. Nice. The idea of space, looking beyond Earth,

extending human civilization elsewhere, largely because we've created some problems on our existing home that might not help us to get to longevity, right? How do we deal with ownership structures in space? Yeah. And right now we have this weird situation that, oh, you officially cannot own stuff in space,

which I think is problematic from the incentive structure because ownership is actually a quite good way of making people interested in developing things. If it's nobody's, if it's everybody's, that means it's nobody's. But in practice, of course, it was very easy to make space treaties when only the big superpowers could get into space and they were unlikely to actually do space mining or anything. So you can just say that, oh, it's a common heritage of mankind

and kind of punt the problem to the next century. And now we're in the next century, and it's going to be a real issue. My guess is that people are just going to be adapting laws piecemeal. And typically what happens is that you take something like the law of the sea and start applying it to space. So spacecraft are under the jurisdiction of the country that they're launched from or registered in. We might find that Liberia might. become a mayor of space power this way.

But what about the ground? And again, I think people are going to have to come to some understanding about that, because we are going to see a race to the South Pole on the moon before long. And it's pretty clear that, yeah, the real estate there is valuable and it's a limited amount of it. And you probably don't want China and the US and SpaceX to have an actual fight over it. It might be that putting up big solar panels. Well, if you shade the solar panel of another country, they're going to be most unhappy about that.

So you need to resolve that one way or another. I don't know how we're likely to do that. I think it's much easier when dealing with asteroids. Then you might say, okay, you can make a kind of claim right. The asteroid isn't yours, but the spot you're on that asteroid. Yeah, obviously you're working there and nobody's allowed to interfere with you. it's going to be trickier with other bodies. And meanwhile, of course, there's going to be various continents

trying to sell real estate on the moon and Mars to people. Why is it different on the moon to an asteroid? I think partially it is because we have a different sense of geography legally and ethically speaking when it's a larger body. It's kind of a funny situation. The moon is a place. Mars is even more a place. You can see these maps with these wonderful fantasy names

for all the location. You can envision yourself walking around there in Amazonia planet and trying to get to a particular crater. An asteroid is more like a thing. Now, of course, big asteroids are more like worlds. Seres, after all, if you stand on the surface of Cirrus, you probably can't tell it apart from the moon.

You're going to be in a rocky landscape of craters and regolith. It's just going to be feeling very similar to a place. And generally, ownership of places is, of course, something that we humans have had a long history of trying to deal with, partially because it's territory. It's kind of funny. Things we own in a different way from land. Land has, of course, always been linked both to productivity

and political power in a very different way from owning stuff that you can carry on with you. Although, from a philosophical standpoint, it's not obvious that any of this should make any difference. but emotionally it seems to do and certainly countries have always been based on this idea that yeah in order to have an estate or a country you have a piece of land and you can kind of control except that that is getting hazier and hazier

during the first Gulf War and Kuwait had a government in exile and the country was kind of occupied physically but from a legal standpoint it was doing totally fine from London I think it was or maybe it was Washington and we might of course because of climate change end up with a whole bunch of countries that don't have any land.

But we're totally going to be sitting there in the United Nations. And we might end up with a similar situation in space. It might be that here we get country-like things that are not necessarily tied to land in the usual way. Luxembourg is kind of interesting space mining. I like to joke that maybe Luxembourg is going to be the largest land area and a country, the solar system one day. A lot of it depends also on is that land there is something they can kind of defend. Not necessarily with star cruisers and lasers, but with lawyers.

Are there any parallels to the terrestrial oil industry that we could extrapolate and throw up at asteroids in what we, because essentially oil is a valuable resource. People land in certain areas, they apply value and invest. to those areas and expect what comes out to be theirs. Is there anything we could apply to asteroids in that regard? Early diamond mining seems more similar to me. So it's one thing about when you have land or objects that nobody has claimed. Then generally it's viewed that you get to gather them up.

And then typically, of course, on Earth, states have expanded and no, no, no. We own everything here, no matter whether we know. know that it's good for or not. And this includes biology. Because of a Cartagena protocol, I think it is, we have ended up with this idea that bioprospecting is not allowed without permission from the government. So the Brazilian government, in some sense,

owns the genomes of all the undiscovered little insects in the Amazon jungle. And I'm not allowed to go there and start sequencing them without their permission. I think that is a bit of a government overreach. But there is an interesting interplay here on what you then allow people to do. In Sweden, for example, we have a rule that you're actually allowed to roam even on private land within a reason. You're not allowed to get too close to houses. You're not allowed to do mining or do permanent damage. But gathering berries and mushrooms in the forest totally fine, which of course in other countries would be, wait a minute, that's unthinkable.

Why is it that we do it in Sweden? well, partially low population. It was a relatively easy rule to institute in other places with more dense population. This wouldn't work. So I think we're going to make up rules partially based on the nature of the environment and what we want to do.

I guess that we tend to still think about places and material stuff in space, but it might also be that orbital slots might be even more important. So now when people are talking about space data centers, suddenly the sun's synchronous orbit has become really hot. And I got curious, how big is it? And I did some calculations and plotting.

I realized, if you want to stay away from radiation belts, that's a rather finite amount of orbital real estate. Being able to claim that orbit, being able to put stuff up there might be really, really valuable. And it's already looks like some of the space companies are really trying to get a lot of that orbit. So now we have this problem of kind of land claim, but it's framed, of course, more like we're claiming part of a radio spectrum, or we're claiming various sea lanes or rights of passage. I think probably traffic control might be the earliest seed for the real property rights in space. It might be not so much a land registry that is the center, but kind of how are you allowed to fly your spacecraft?

Where are you allowed to dump your junk from, especially the exhaust from the spacecraft? Because if you play a powerful ion beam across a satellite, that's going to wreck it. So you're not allowed to steer in particular ways. Eventually, we're going to have enough fragile, expensive, insured stuff up there. And that means that we are going to get a traffic regime. And that traffic regime might also be a foundation for property rights. It might work very differently from what we're used to here on the ground. where traffic control is kind of for the infrastructure that supplies us rather than the government.

It's interesting too. We've been thinking about this a lot that, you know, orbital slots, I think, are in the States are at least governed by the FCC, which is a spectrum allotment. It's how wireless networks and broadcast networks and communication networks all work. And now it's orbital slots. But and there are also, you mentioned coordination with it within. within what's going on up there. There are interesting companies out there.

Leo Labs, I think, is one we've been following that follows these little projectiles and things that are up there. But projectiles in space created by incidents, who's ultimately responsible, comes back to accountability. Again, we talked about. But let me give you a statement.

Coordination is why humans have been able to succeed throughout their evolution, but it might also be our downfall. I think that's very, very true. It's pretty obvious that the reason that we're running this planet for Good and Hill is that we're better than most animals of coordinating across time and space. It's not just that we're forming a little tribal group. It's not just that we have a language that allow us to do things, but we can make shared intentions. And then we can share these intentions using

written language and the culture across time and space on enormous scales. The downside is, of course, that human wars are way worse than chimpses. And the chimpanzees in a troop cannot really decide let's go to war against the other gang. They just come across them and then a fight erupts. Well, they know what sides they're on, but that's it. You can't scale it. While we humans, we can start building up a store

about why that land is actually ours and why we really need to do what we do. It's very regretful, but we need to do these horrible things for the good of all. And that coordination is risky. We quite often talk in the discussion about human enhancement, about moral enhancement. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we had more empathy,

more ability to coordinate with each other? And up to a point, that's great. But then you get a really well-coordinated group with really bad values, and it doesn't sound so great anymore. So what you want is probably coordination that is also forgiving enough, that allows for diversity of a problem,

approaches that doesn't naturally break down in really big conflict. And part of that is why trade and law are so useful. It ends up in a courtroom with a lot of people arguing abstruse pieces of code at each other instead of people killing each other. It's much preferable, even though it's kind of slightly boring for most of us. But I'd rather be bored than that most of the time. Yes. Most of the time.

We had Philip Metzger on a few weeks ago, rocket scientists, 30 years at NASA. And we asked him what the collateral damage is of this space race. What's the collateral damage of the human race for space? I think in many cases, some of the space, I think a lot of space race has actually been quite good. But what we can learn from the original space race last century, was, yeah, you can motivate yourself to do amazing technical achievements that then aren't actually linked to any institutional results. We never got a moon base.

We never got a permanent human presence in space from that space race because it was just motivated by the Soviet Union versus the US showing off. That racing didn't actually connect to anything useful. Right now we're seeing a new kind of space race that's actually much more useful because it tries to put up satellites that people actually use for something. We're getting a lot of communication satellites. We get the Earth monitoring. And I think that is in many ways more healthy.

The real problem might be that you accidentally lock in things early on. So I think we are going to renegotiate the space treaties. That's kind of obvious because we're not fit for purpose. But in what mode they get renegotiated, what we end up with is anybody's guess. But whatever we end up with is probably then going to be acting over several decades more. Because typically you don't want to change the platform, whether it's a technical or legal platform you're standing on. And that might have big effect because several decades hence, we might be doing enormous things in space, but we might have rules that date back from the 2030s.

And if the 2030s understanding of space was based on kind of rivalry between China and the US and space, and SpaceX and Blue Origin. And that is the defining idea of how to handle space that it's all about rivalry or some other random factor that came up when negotiating. Then we might end up with that when we're building the big space habitats or starting our Dyson sphere,

it's going to be based on the wrong mode of thinking about things. So ideally you want to be open-ended, you want to be able to adjust and renegotiate things, but you also want a stable platform. So a race means that you end up with maybe that platform a bit earlier than you intended. And the platform might be all wrong. It's a little bit like the email protocol which led to spam. Why?

Well, there is no cost to sending an email. You could have added that when people were inventing email in the early 1970s. If any economists had been in the room at the time, they could have pointed out that you're going to get a lot of unwanted email if you don't add a little, little cost to email. But of course, no economist was ever invited, and they would never have thought about it economically. So it never happened. But you want to get some of these running the thinking in when making the protocol. And if you're racing, you don't have a time to get anybody who's not in the core team in. And races have winners and losers.

Quite often. But sometimes, of course, the race might just be that you end up with a big win for most of people. After all, the dot-com boom was in some sense a race, and then most people or most companies lost, except that a few survived really well. But the rest of the world also benefited because we had added so much broadband. We had developed a lot of infrastructure that actually enabled a much more sensible internet to take shape. The real problem is, of course, if you have a race and it feels like it's a winner take all, that means that now all the rules are going out to win the window because I need to get this. That is why I'm kind of worried about an AI race, because if the important thing is winning, then that means slowing down a little bit in order to get something safe and sane and ethical. Well, that's going to be a drawback.

So let's throw out those soft, fussing things. We're going to fix that safety and sanity later. We do that in version 2.0. Do the idea of nations help us or hurt us in the space race? Could I just on that? Because at the beginning, Anders actually said, you don't want to race with China, America and SpaceX, which I thought, hold on,

he's comparing SpaceX to America and China, but SpaceX is a company. Yeah. But nations and companies, I honestly don't think they're fundamentally different. Of course, this is where a lot of political scientists do you say, wait a minute, that there is an enormous, very profound difference.

But I think we're ending up in a world where I have many kinds of entities that are able to act in the world. And they're interlocking in a different way. Yes, SpaceX is registered in the US. But could SpaceX re-register in Ireland or some other pliable jurisdiction? In principle, yes. In practice, it's not terribly likely. And in practice, probably it's more likely that, no, you send just enough lobbyists to Washington and come up with a way of handling it. But many of the assumptions we see, for example, the United Nations system is the only actors that are relevant are nation states.

And that's not true in many domains. I'm very much coming from the world of cyberculture. And there it's for a long time been very clear that it's not just corporations, but even various protocols and NGOs and networks that are just as powerful and important in these domains. saying that only the nation states that with flags and armies are allowed to be at the table is kind of missing that a lot of the key actors are utterly different. And I bet that space might in the long run really undermine the traditional nation states. Part of that is, of course, a nation state is built on the idea that it's a nation and a state. So we have a cultural cohesion, which is kind of a modern idea from the 1800s combined with

They have a state, kind of sovereign power and monopoly and violence. But you could, of course, have states that are not nations. The United States is a beautiful example of a state that actually functions without necessarily assuming that we're culturally identical and coming from the same ethnic origin. You can make all sorts of new things. And I think we should probably experiment with more forms of states. I think that's actually a healthy and good thing. Governance is too important to build a left unstudied. That's a really interesting thing to put a pin in on the idea board.

What does human coordination look like as we move in the future of space and tech and how different that could look? It's the network state, it's the network state, isn't it? What's that guy's name who? Balai? Yeah. I think it was Romer who suggested originally and this idea that you could have these special economic zones,

they kind of have a bit of competition for good governance. And I think that's already a really cool idea. And then Balai is saying, oh, we should have these distributed states. They are of course a classic staple from science fiction. I found it very cool to actually visit Prospera down in Honduras, which is one of these little weird city states and of course very much subscribing to the network in the state view. Can that work?

Can that produce good results? else, well, we need to experiment on it. Probably it's a good idea to do it in small scale rather than a big scale. It's always dangerous when actual governments with a large area of land that you can't easily escape decides to experiment on you. But small startup experiments might be a good idea. And startup states, I think we should actually try to have that. I'm very fond of the idea, but people should be allowed to try to build some sea-standing

site out on the Pacific Ocean and let's see what actually was. works. Sometimes we might hit on some good idea that we then want to copy and scale up. And quite a lot of them are going to turn out to be not so good and maybe it's better to let it sink. You couldn't even get pirate radio in the UK anymore, though I don't see the chances of that happening very much. I don't want to be a party pooper. Do you have that expression of party pooper? I don't want to be a party pooper because they're not even back yet. But does NASA have a future? That's a great question.

So I've always been a little bit on the kind of new space side thinking, oh, yes, that's an old bureaucratic colossus. They're so slow and they're so beholden to a lot of interest in politics. So they have to do programs that make pieces out of every constituency. So all the senators support. But Artemis II is kind of still showing that, yeah, NASA still has its groove on. It can do some things really well. It's just that I think the rapid innovation pace might actually beat them. The problem with NASA is they are so good at do it.

It's a little bit like the elves or dwarves in some fantasy novel. They're handcrafting these magical things, but they're so rare because they're handcrafted by the elven wizard. So you only get one single magical sword or that single magical shield, and it's endlessly expensive. It's really good. But yeah, that crappy eye. Iron sword the humans are making over there.

They're making hundreds of them, and that's enough to actually get the entire fantasy army up and running. So I do think NASA has this cluster effect of having some really bright people. The big problem is, of course, the really bright people in an organization that's also subjected to horrendous political forces. So I don't know how well that's going to last. But then again, the bright people in any company also have the same problem. The skunk works couldn't kind of keep.

upper epic pace forever. They had a golden age and then since then, I think they've been just doing good work. And this goes for many things. One of the funniest things I realized becoming a middle-aged person is, oh yeah, golden age come and go and that's fine. I'm fine with that. I'm just going to try to find the currently interesting cluster, or even better, something I think might become the next golden age or the next cluster,

and then try to make it last as long as possible. But eventually, yeah, it's going to end. I think NASA has amassed so much kind of capital in some sense that it could keep on surfing for a long time. But I think it's good that it gets a fair bit of competition. Yeah, with this big manifesto and is like, all right, I'm out. Who's coming with me? Where do we go? I mean, could we see that?

Could we see that in the future? Yeah, I totally think that's plausible. After all, we've seen that in other domains, sometimes it happens. accidentally. Silicon Valley was very much started because people got fed up with Shockley and decided, okay, he's just too much. We're moving out and starting our own companies. And that was the start of Silicon Valley. You have Anthropic moving out of open AI because many people there felt like you're all taking safety seriously. We want to take it seriously. Let's build something. And maybe that can happen here too. I haven't heard many cases where

government agencies do that. But then again, NASA is a very weird government agency. I think there is potential for that. There are many really cool and bright people. The really hard part is, of course, the entrepreneurship part. As a lifelong academic, I always admire academic entrepreneurs who just get fed up and go off and start their own university or their own research field. I'm usually the guy following them a little bit later saying, okay, this looks good,

But I couldn't do that. I like to see this kind of entrepreneurship and leadership in action. But of course, quite often it's also misguided. And sometimes we just walk off in the desert. Talk about NASA and the future of NASA. And with everything we talked about today, there are two things. There's coordination. And then there's trust, right?

And establishing trust to be the authority to govern something. How does trust and the building of trust play into how you think about the future? And how could NASA maybe even be the new trust organizer and not the doer of the things, but the entity that everyone looks to for consideration and advice and all of that? So quite often sociologies divide the way you can get. the social status into dominance and prestige. Dominance is the way of a bully. You're strong.

And if others don't do what you want, you beat them up or you're yell at them or scare them. And then you have prestige. You do something really well. You are renowned for being good at that thing. Might not mean that you're in charge of stuff, but everybody goes to you when it's dealing with that domain. And in both are good ways, again.

getting prestige in society. The problem is, of course, when you lose a bit of control, usually the bullies find that suddenly everybody else is going to get back at them. While people generally tend to help the prestige people, oh, no, you're fallen, let's help you. The prestige is important. How do you get prestige as a regulator? How you build trust?

Well, part of it is being impartial. Part of it is being able to do things usefully. Sometimes with flair and style, sometimes just plodding along in a super reliable way that everybody can build on. So this might be something for NASA to think about. In some sense, plodding along might be very boring when others are kind of sending up rocket after rocket after rocket. But sometimes the other rockets blow up. That's kind of a point, Musk will happily say. But on the other hand, that reliability, that boring reliability is also useful.

you might be seen as an impartial arbiter. I think generally trust has a lot to do with legibility. We tend to trust people where we kind of understand the motivations. We can see what they've done in the past. We can see roughly where we're going. The people who are mysterious are intriguing, but you don't really trust them. The people that you cannot tell what we're up to. Yep, interesting, but maybe I'm not going to invest there.

You want that transparency. And this might be where NASA can be quite useful. It's probably like any big government organization needs a lot of reform. I'm very skeptical of big government. I'm a libertarian from Sweden, which is a kind of a contradiction in terms. So by American standards, of course, I'm a social democrat, socialist, but by Swedish standards, I'm raving neoliberal. And generally, I think you want your agencies to be agile,

but they also need to be fit for purpose. And that goes both ways. You want to check your agencies because there are the pathologies that happen in organization. People build a little fiefdom. People get all sort of weird incentives that have nothing to do with the mission. And we should just be on guard against that. And that's kind of a useful liberal critique against it. But at the same time, you want to have these transparent, somewhat neutral systems.

It doesn't have to be a government agency. Sometimes you get things like the Lloyd's Market for Insurance in London. Sometimes you get the Internet Engineering Task Force. But you can sometimes set things up. And if you have a cluster of really competent things and history at the bottom, that's useful. To some extent, that's what Oxford is doing here. We have been surfing here for kind of 800 years of having fancy architecture and enough people learning enough things to occasionally become famous alumni

that give back money. That maintains a structure. That structure can still do stupid things because he wants to maintain itself more than educate or do good research. but you still get something to build on top bottom. And then that can create a fair bit of trust. This is going to be the longest show we've ever done. We'll land the fighter, we'll land the spaceship.

Do you have any thoughts on fusion? We've spent a lot of time in space season talking about space-based solar power. Space-based solar power isn't going to work in interstellar space. Nope. If you want to go outside the inner solar system, you want nuclear. And fission is not going to be particularly fun outside the asteroid belt,

because where do you find the uranium? Well, inside Jupiter, and you're not going to get at it there. So fusion it is. And yeah, we better figure out fusion if we really want to do things in the outer solar system and interstellar space. If we do that, then of course you can probably live like a king out on the Kuper belt objects about the solar system. There is enough deuterium in that ice

that you could run. I calculated that in a typical Cooper Belt object, you have enough energy to survive for 100,000 years if you have a little city state on it using one terawatt of power, which I think is a fairly decent amount

for something city-sized. That's good. But we need to get the fusion to work, of course, which is tricky. But I'm getting more and more bullish on fusion. I'm still kind of feeling plasma seems hard, but now there's enough people that seem to be using different approaches and actually getting investment in a proper manner.

And generally I tend to assume that investors, they might not always know what we're doing, but I think the field is getting somewhere. We've seen advances in permanent magnets, thanks to the rare earth magnet, that are just making things so much better. Not everything has to be a super complicated superconductor, or just a normal magnet.

I think we might be getting there. So Fusion is still kind of an energy of the future, but the number of decades till Fusion has probably shrunk affair bit. A big shout out to Glenn Martin, who is on our show, an awesome guy. In our show, he just off the cuff said, referred to Fusion as an engineering problem.

And the way he said it, and he's got so much heat on the internet because people are saying, What do you mean it's just an engineering problem? It's like quantum computing. It's always 10 years away. It's not going to happen. So you're optimistic that we're...

I don't know if it's just an engineering problem. So I heard a critique from my friend Eric Drexler. He's somewhat famous for nanotechnology and also doing a lot of very cool stuff about AI. But he pointed out that, but getting the first order instabilities of a plasma under control, once you've done that, unfortunately, a second order instability,

that we have even less ideas about that. But then again, engineers are clever. Just an engineering problem usually doesn't mean it's easy. But engineers are amazing. I really admire engineers. I'm a scientist. I do stuff to get knowledge. I'm very bad at actually building stuff.

I admire my brother, who's an actual engineer, whenever I find him in the garage, kind of doing a Frankenstein on an IKEA bookshelf to make it fit into the furniture, you're making things fit and changing the constraints of the world. And the trick that happens, of course, in engineering is that if there is a problem, you engineer around it or you make it to not be a problem. In science, if there is a problem, you're not allowed to say there isn't a problem.

You actually need to solve the darn thing, and quite often that turns out to be harder. The really interesting question is what AI is going to do. So these days, I'm web coding every day. I have little agents writing all sorts of software. all sorts of purposes. But wipe engineering, I bet that we're going to get to that relatively soon. Today we have topological optimization so we can use AI to generate weird parts that we can then hopefully in a 3D print and make use of.

I'm seeing more and more simulations enabling humans to work together with software. And I bet that within a decade or two, we're going to see a lot of web engineering, which might help the development of fusion quite a bit. because, yeah, there are many weird problems that might not even fit our way of thinking, but might really fit whatever the AI systems are doing. So I'm getting rather optimistic about it. It might be just an engineering problem, but we're getting a lot of software engineers in a literal sense.

This is super inspiring and really fun, Anders, to just think big about stuff that, you know, and help people think bigger about stuff. I think we need to do that. One of the problems I have with our current civilization is that we're so afraid of thinking that things could do work differently. We have systems that work pretty well, and then people latch on to that. And to some extent, it's sensible. We need to keep the systems we got to function.

We have been maintaining some of our political and infrastructure systems really badly, and we're reaping the harvest now, unfortunately. But at the same time, just because some system is, pretty good. Doesn't mean it couldn't be much better and maybe scalably, amazingly much bigger. So I think thinking big about the future is also a very healthy exercise to get hopeful about it. Is there anything out there that shouldn't be optimized? I think to some extent, yes. There are things like state monopolies or violence that I'm getting very uneasy about if you could imagine the robot army and the robot.

police force because now there is nobody to say no to the dear leader when he decides to do something stupid. And so there are dangers like that. There is also an argument to be said that maybe we shouldn't be optimizing too strongly for superintelligence right now because we don't know how to control that. Already making use of the current level of intelligence in the AI is going to keep us busy for years. It would be a nice thing if we could actually know that, yeah, we're not getting superintelligence for 10 years, let's work out how to make current system safe and robust

and sane and trustworthy. That would be really useful. The weird part is, of course, what's optimizing for that? Well, that's market forces, that race dynamics, a bit of human nature. It's a lot of stuff that we have very limited control over. And maybe we want to gain that control. But then you have another risk. Now we might lock ourselves in.

So to some extent, the optimization for locking ourselves in or out of possibilities is a very dangerous power. We want to lock ourselves away from some existential risks. We want to close some doors permanently. Wiping out smallpox was a good thing and we should be just keeping on doing that for various horrible diseases. But there might be other things like the nuclear waste. Why store it permanently underground so nobody can get that? Actually, it might be the future generations think that those eyes. isotopes are just what we need for our probe to Pluto or whatever.

We might actually not want to be too irreversible. So I do think one should be careful about irreversibility. Optimizing for that is dangerous. But then again, if everything is reversible, that also means that nothing quite matters. You might want to be a bit careful about making it too easy to undo things. In some domains, you actually want stuff to matter because that is, also giving you a direction of time. It's giving you a meaning of, okay, this cannot be undone, so I want to make sure I do it right. At the beginning of this, you spoke about using Claude

for your exercise routine. And I wonder if you have been taking Claude advice and doing that exercise routine. And I guess my question is, how are you finding the onset of middle age? Anders, what have you, what's it changed in you? So the coolest part about middle age is that I find my conscientiousness as a big five personality trait has gone up. I actually wash my dishes off to myself. I actually pick up stuff and put it back where it belongs. This is weird. And I imagine my mother can say, yeah, Anders, it just took you 50 years to learn that.

That's kind of really awesome. And generally, I'm kind of enjoying middle age right now because I'm still. feeling pretty fit. I'm still vital. I got my savings and a career position. So this is kind of, yeah, top of the world, except that I want that to last. This is why I think life extension, we better get that going faster. After all, there's nothing as keen on life extension as a transhumanist who started to get gray hairs. But generally, also having been around for a measurable amount of time means that you get a bit of perspective. I find it super fun to talk to younger researchers because sometimes I get to tell them about, yeah, back in my day in the mid-nights, we tried that too. And it failed because of this. Check that we have changed those reasons, so now it can work. And it was interesting when the Ukraine war started.

And a lot of my younger colleagues got very nervous about nuclear war. And I was just whistling various pop hits from the 1980s as I'm walking around the hallways and kind of sketching out on the white border. Yeah, here's a typical nuclear war scenario. This is what we need to think about. Yeah, back to my youth. The coldest part of the cold war. And yeah, let's hope we never get back there.

Interesting on the organization in cleaning up and doing anything. Whenever I cook now, it's a game in my head to actually clean as I go. And by the end of me cooking, everything is clean. Like it's a weird little game I have that does not match who I was a while back. So that resonates with that. That resonates with me quite a bit. So pushing on the extension of life a little bit. And you mentioned something just a second ago about things being reversible, having less value.

I want to extrapolate that out into this idea of if we extend our life longer and you bring the economist in the room that you mentioned. And we talk about scarcity and moments being more scarcity. things more valuable, how do you stir those around in a pot together as you think about longevity? So the one thing that is absolutely not renewable is time. You cannot go back in time. You can sometimes undo changes, but you're still going to be at a later time. And quite a lot of our lives is kind of accumulative. We learn things, we forget things, we change. And that is quite of not quite reversible and it's not practical to reverse it.

So I do think that that is also why we build our identities over time. My middle-aged identity is very different from my teenage identity and the intervening ones. And I can kind of see a progression that generally I think is pretty good. I don't know whether teenage Anders would agree on that. We would probably have an interesting quarrel about politics or something. But the nice part here is not that. time is getting scarcer. It's not like if I suddenly got a thousand years,

I would feel like, oh, no, I lost a lot of value because each moment is less precious. It's rather, yes, now I can finally do some long-term projects. So the economist, his point is, of course, about opportunity costs, really. My choices might matter a lot if I have limited time. But that is also for limited energy. I think one of the biggest problems these days is not time management, but energy management.

Yeah, we all get 24 hours a day, but you also need to sleep for some of those hours. I wish I could sleep less. I'm very much of a coffee drinker, but I'm also quite good at sleeping eight hours. And then I get up in the morning. Those morning hours are, of course, particularly valuable. They're kind of prime real estate because that's where I actually get good thinking and stuff done. After lunch, not so much. But then again, that's where you can start putting in meeting.

that's where you might be doing your reading, you might do office. Now, if I could get more energy because of some life extension treatment, that would add a lot of value. Then, of course, the economists might also snark that, yeah, but you're going to waste that on even more magpie-like side projects. You're going to do even more things that are not relevant. But my answer is, yeah, but there is a long-tail property. I randomly occasionally hit on stuff that matters, and then that gets done.

And if I can do more, generally I should expect to do more useful things. And then I occasionally write the silly little, what if Earth turns into blueberry paper, or get sidetracked by weird questions about the physics of imaginary universes. So be it. What about the boredom though? Dracula, though I always use Dracula as an example. He was 400 years old and he was bored out of his mind.

Now, admittedly, he had no friends and he was, you know, had to sleep during the day. but most people aren't like you. What are people going to do with an extra 300 years, especially when they're not working because AGI has taken all the jobs and changed the market. So what does that, what do people do? Yeah, I think one part of it is your personality. What do you find meaningful in life? And I think life extension always need to be combined with you should determine how long your life should be.

My maternal grandfather, he became 80 years old. And at that point, he had more or less done everything he wanted in his life. He had gone to war. He had seen his kids growing up. He's been successful. And now, yeah, he kind of just stopped. Meanwhile, my paternal grandmother, she became 109 years old because dying would upset her social schedule.

She was having coffee with the other little old ladies on her tiny little town. you find different kinds of meanings. Dracula, I think Dracula's problem was, he was kind of a Transylvania warlord without any wars to fight or anything like that. I can imagine him be very, very bored. But today, maybe it would have fine strategy games, kind of playing Europe, Universalis, for real.

You can imagine the nerdy Dracula, just sitting there on the internet, maybe the swearing eternal vengeance against those people who wronged him on Twitter. There are different ways and also people can reinvent themselves. I think we quite often have an idea who we are and we assume that that is very constant. As the earlier discussion about middle age came up, we have reinvented ourselves and we are kind of okay with modifying ourselves a bit. But actually over long periods of time, we might do much more radically reinventions.

Indeed, some people might say if you live long enough, you become a different person. So actually, there is no way of actually getting proper life extension. I think there is some truth to that, but there might also be core values and core memories that you say, this I want to bring to the far future. There should be a person embodying these in the core part. But if that person then had changed political views or hairstyle or hobbies, that doesn't matter so much to me. You convinced me otherwise of my original thought of if,

if you have more time, that time becomes less valuable because it's less scarce. I think if you have a connection or a communication channel to fire up your curiosity and point it to different things, then you maintain awe, you maintain wonder, you find meaning, you find purpose, like all of those things, you just get more time to do that. Like you get more mornings. I'm a morning guy too. I love the early morning. My brain's the freshest.

My curiosity's heightened. And as the day goes out, I kind of get beat up by the day a little bit. And I try to throw more administrative tasks in later. I think it aligns very well with what you're talking about. But I think you have me convinced on a new perspective there. And I appreciate that. Thanks. Wow, what fun.

What fun. We need to start hosting salons or something over in Albert Oxford with you and, you know, kick around this. Yeah, that would be so fun. I reached out because of Chris Villaz, because I thought I saw that you must know her. your paths must have crossed. We've got a few guests in Oxford. Oh, yeah. That is one of the best things about Oxford.

It's such a good home base because people are passing through. Some stay for a long time, some just briefly visit. And it's usually easy to get people to say, of course I come by. And then I get to play a tour guide giving more or less unreliable narratives about what the different places are. Amazing. You're most welcome. Oh, my gosh.

Amazing. Well, let's, I would love to continue to stir the pot. Hopefully, let's maybe do another episode or dive in in various ways down the road. I do want to, I do want to ask you a question that Kevin Kelly has asked us and we ask all of our guests. And it is this, what do we want humans to be and how does technology help us get there? So what I, my kind of dream for long term post humanity is like a coral reef of post-reaching. human versions. Different to life project. Right now we have this liberal idea from John Stuart Mill about that we should do experiments in living. We should live our own lives and try out things and

only we can really judge how well it going, although it's kind of wise to listen to your neighbors and friends sometimes telling you that no, actually, you're full of it about it. And that diversity of potential is necessary because we are still very small beings, no matter how advanced we become thanks to our technology, we're still smaller than the universe and the bigger community that we're part of. So we are not able to encompass all of the relevant factors. We can't optimize for that. So we need to try things. And then we want to make it safe enough to try things and become new things. And I think technology is good because it gives us both a kind of base plate to stand on. We're solving basic infrastructure. So we have material safety, we have, we have, we have,

enough wealth to play around with stuff even if it doesn't work out very well. And long term, it might enable us to explore more. And I'm already seeing that AI is helping me explore many things, going down rabbit holes. And then the AI comes back and tells me whether it was an interesting rabbit hole, I definitely should be going down into where I say, nah, it's just the usual kind of weirder academic rabbit hole. But here are a few references and cool equations.

So I do think that that diversity, that experiment in, living, both goes for us individually. And that's communities. We should be doing more experiments. And for that, we need technology that allows us both to do the experiments themselves and also handle the consequences sometimes.

Superb. Kevin, we'll be very happy. We'll send him your response to that. Thank you very much. And as it's been wonderful, enlightening. So much fun. Thank you so much. Well, thank you for having me. Until next time. Till next time. Be disruptive. Stay curious. And keep thinking on paper.