Anders Sandberg is one of the earlier participants in the modern transhumanist movement, perhaps better thought of as a distributed and shifting set of overlapping interest and advocacy groups rather than a movement per se. The core of the transhumanist ideal is the overcoming of limits, the use of technology to expand the choices available within the human condition. The diverse membership of these groups has spread and prospered over the past twenty years, taking influential roles in biotechnology, aging research, cryonics, artificial intelligence, and other related fields. In a sense it is the ideas that matter: the defeat of aging and age-related disease so as to indefinitely extend healthy life; engineering away all of the other causes of pain and suffering; expanding our intelligence; building intelligence; seeking to be far more than we are today. Those of us who propagate these ideas and work towards their realization are in a way water carriers, passing the value along. The more people who do this, the greater the support for transhumanist goals such as achieving effective medical control over aging, the better the prospects become for all of our futures.

Like many of the other futurists who used the early years of the internet to find one another and form a community to talk about the practicality of their visions for a golden future, Anders Sandberg engineered a career from an interest in transcending the limits of the human condition through technological progress. These days he works with the Future of Humanity Institute, itself an outgrowth of a portion of the transhumanist community. This is in large part an advocacy initiative, clothed as academia, seeking to put forward a vision - with supporting evidence - for a far better future to a public that hasn't really given the topic much thought. To the world at large, tomorrow is anticipated to be much the same as today. It is strange that this is the case in a time of such rapid progress in science and technology, but most people expect to live in a future that looks much the same as the present, barring small changes in fashion and culture. The possibilities are so much greater than that, however. For one, we stand on the verge of being able to treat the causes of aging, and many people alive today will as a consequence live for long enough to see aging entirely defeated, rejuvenation robustly achieved, and their lives and healthspans made unlimited in length. That shortly beyond that lies an explosion of intelligence and culture out into the universe, of a size and scope to make our present world seem the smallest mote by comparison, is almost by the by.

Below find a link to the PDF version of a radio essay by Sandberg presented at BBC Radio 3, one portion of a much broader effort to make more people pay attention to what could be done to make the world a better place, and our lives radically different and less limited as a result.

Desperately seeking eternity (PDF)