We’ve all heard wild visions of the future. Hearing them from an economist, in a new book from Oxford University Press, makes them seem unusually real.
Robin Hanson predicts in “ The Age of Em ” that we’ll develop cheap technology for emulating brains on computers in the next 100 years.
He expects emulations, or ems, to be like human brains but able to run 1,000 times faster and be copied. He predicts they will quickly put every human out of work and create a radical new civilization, living by the billions or trillions in a few megacities.
Humans who have investments and other protection will do fine in this era, but those who don’t could be screwed.
Hanson is an associate professor of economics at George Mason and research associate at Oxford University with degrees in physics and philosophy from the University of Chicago and a doctorate in social science from CalTech and nine years experience in AI research at Lockheed and NASA.
Tech Insider spoke with him about what’s coming next.
We should have at least several decades before the singularity, when machine intelligence leaves human intelligence in the dust. Enjoy the twilight of the industrial era while it lasts.
Hanson expects the coming years to be relatively predictable and pleasant.
“People have seen consistent trends not only to individual wealth, but also towards more democracy, less slavery, more leisure, more promiscuity, less religion,” Hanson says. In other words, the world is getting better.
“There’ve always been people telling you the world’s getting worse. Objectively, it’s less true today,” Hanson says.
Sure, there are risks, but society is increasingly protected against many of them. Pandemics could kill people by the millions, but our technology for fighting them is getting better. War could break out, but that happens less these days than ever. Climate change could be disastrous, but at least some people are preparing for it. Meanwhile, people will keep losing jobs to machines, but it’s happening slowly enough that society can adapt.
And then suddenly everything will change.
Hanson thinks we’ll figure out whole brain emulation before we figure out human-level artificial intelligence—a view he shares with Google futurist Ray Kurzweil. The idea is that recreating a functionally similar brain computer is easier than creating consciousness through code.
If emulations do come first, then the singularity could sneak up on us. Quiet developments in brain scanning, brain cell models, and signal-processing hardware might suddenly allow us to put a brain on a computer, and within a few years it could be cheap enough for ems to conquer the world.
“There’s a transition phase lasting five years, perhaps, but then once it finally gets going and it’s full mode, then humans retire,” Hanson predicts. “[Ems] basically beat humans at being more cost effective at all jobs.”
Ems, which think about 1000x faster than humans, can do everything a human worker can and more.
“The emulations typically work in virtual reality, because most jobs are office jobs, but some of their jobs are physical jobs, like operating a crane or operating a factory or driving a truck or things like that, and for that they have bodies, real bodies, and the bodies are whatever are appropriate for that task,” Hanson says.
The only remaining jobs for humans would be based on nostalgia for the old era.
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