The Age of Em: Work, Love, and Life when Robots Rule the Earth 1st Edition

This book analyzes a possible future era when software emulations of humans (ems) dominate the world economy. It is too conservative to tackle longer-term prospects for eras when more unusual intelligent beings may dominate the world.

Hanson repeatedly tackles questions that scare away mainstream academics, and gives relatively ordinary answers (guided as much as possible by relatively standard, but often obscure, parts of the academic literature).

Hanson's scenario relies on a few moderately controversial assumptions. The assumptions which I find most uncertain are related to human-level intelligence being hard to understand (because it requires complex systems), enough so that ems will experience many subjective centuries before artificial intelligence is built from scratch. For similar reasons, ems are opaque enough that it will be quite a while before they can be re-engineered to be dramatically different.

Hanson is willing to allow that ems can be tweaked somewhat quickly to produce moderate enhancements (at most doubling IQ) before reaching diminishing returns. He gives somewhat plausible reasons for believing this will only have small effects on his analysis. But few skeptics will be convinced.

Some will focus on potential trillions of dollars worth of benefits that higher IQs might produce, but that wealth would not much change Hanson's analysis.

Others will prefer an inside view analysis which focuses on the chance that higher IQs will better enable us to handle risks of superintelligent software. Hanson's analysis implies we should treat that as an unlikely scenario, but doesn't say what we should do about modest probabilities of huge risks.

Another way that Hanson's assumptions could be partly wrong is if tweaking the intelligence of emulated Bonobos produces super-human entities. That seems to only require small changes to his assumptions about how tweakable human-like brains are. But such a scenario is likely harder to analyze than Hanson's scenario, and it probably makes more sense to understand Hanson's scenario first.

Wages in this scenario are somewhat close to subsistence levels. Ems have some ability to restrain wage competition, but less than they want. Does that mean wages are 50% above subsistence levels, or 1%? Hanson hints at the former. The difference feels important to me. I'm concerned that sound-bite versions of book will obscure the difference.

Hanson claims that "wealth per em will fall greatly". It would be possible to construct a measure by which ems are less wealthy than humans are today. But I expect it will be at least as plausible to use a measure under which ems are rich compared to humans of today, but have high living expenses. I don't believe there's any objective unit of value that will falsify one of those perspectives [1].

The style is more like a reference book than a story or an attempt to persuade us of one big conclusion. Most chapters (except for a few at the start and end) can be read in any order. If the section on physics causes you to doubt whether the book matters, skip to chapter 12 (labor), and return to the physics section later.

The style is very concise. Hanson rarely repeats a point, so understanding him requires more careful attention than with most authors.

It's odd that the future of democracy gets less than twice as much space as the future of swearing. I'd have preferred that Hanson cut out a few of his less important predictions, to make room for occasional restatements of important ideas.

Many little-known results that are mentioned in the book are relevant to the present, such as: how the pitch of our voice affects how people perceive us, how vacations affect productivity, and how bacteria can affect fluid viscosity.

I was often tempted to say that Hanson sounds overconfident, but he is clearly better than most authors at admitting appropriate degrees of uncertainty. If he devoted much more space to caveats, I'd probably get annoyed at the repetition. So it's hard to say whether he could have done any better.

Even if we should expect a much less than 50% chance of Hanson's scenario becoming real, it seems quite valuable to think about how comfortable we should be with it and how we could improve on it.

[1] - The difference matters only in one paragraph, where Hanson discusses whether ems deserve charity more than do humans living today. Hanson sounds like he's claiming ems deserve our charity because they're poor. Most ems in this scenario are comfortable enough for this to seem wrong.

Hanson might also be hinting that our charity would be effective at increasing the number of happy ems, and that basic utilitarianism says that's preferable to what we can do by donating to today's poor. That argument deserves more respect and more detailed analysis.

I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the future or artificial intelligence. Robin Hanson has a fascinating and unique perspective on AI and society. The book is very well written in an entertaining albeit dry style that makes the logic supporting each statement very clear. Although I couldn't stop reading it, I had to go in spurts to digest the information as it is rather heady and difficult to take in all at once. I was inspired by the ideas in the Age of Em and have incorporated some of them into my personal science fiction project.

Hanson's book poses a challenge to those interested in the future to think as clearly as possible about how different futures might come to pass. It is not an easy or a light read, because this is not a trivial or fluffy book; Hanson combines several different disciplines' insights to justify his visions of a world populated by "people" who are essential scanned copies of previously homo sapien individuals. It is worth reading for anyone who cares about the future(s) of humanity.

Robin the role model. (WWRHD?)

If you want to learn to impressively call out other people on their biases read Daniel Kahneman, and memorize that Scientastic! list of diagnosed delusions. If you personally want to be less biased read Robin Hanson's blog on a weekly basis for a few years.

I've never caught myself mid error like "yo, anchoring bias". But regularly my mind executes some What Would Jesus Do style flinch, like, what would that charmingly nerdy GMU polymath say about this idea of mine?

Nassim Taleb has this influence on people too - his ghost perching atop their shoulder, whispering in their ear - but his fashion of angry contrarianism is less cute worn by his middle brow admirers. Chomsky does this to lefties.

Anyhow, Robin is a stud. Even if you're not into AI read his blog and buy his book to see what it looks like when a mind has the capability and humility to take seriously the best standard theories from an enormous range of disciplines and applies them to problems he loves.

I found the book deeply fascinating and found myself ruminating on its ideas for weeks after reading it. Early on the book, he names a few reasons why people might like it. One of these reasons is "envisioning foreign times can help you to see the distinctive features of your era." It was this perspective from which I found myself enjoying the book most.

Very speculative fantasy thoughts. A long shot at best. Not good for future planning.

Very dry. I'm generally interested in his topics and agree with his thoughts, but I just lost interest based on the presentation.