Economist Robin Hanson says we're on the brink of a strange new era. Read an excerpt of "The Age of Em: Work, Love, and Life when Robots Rule the Earth" below.
What will the next great era be like, after the eras of foraging, farming, and industry?
I embrace the very common guess that the next big new-era-inducing change is likely to be the arrival of “artificial intelligence,” that is, robots smart enough to substitute wholesale for human workers. I also guess that the first such robots will be whole brain emulations, or “ems,” within roughly a century or so.
An em results from taking a particular human brain, scanning it to record its particular cell features and connections, and then building a computer model that processes signals according to those same features and connections. A good enough em has close to the same overall input-output signal behavior as the original human. One might talk with it, and convince it to do useful jobs.
In this book I paint a plausible picture of a future era dominated by ems. This future happens mainly in a few dense cities on Earth, sometime in the next hundred years or so. This era may only last for a year or two, after which something even stranger may follow. But to its speedy inhabitants, this era seems to last for millennia. Which is why it all happens on Earth; at their speeds, travel to other planets is way too slow.
Just as foragers and subsistence farmers are marginalized by our industrial world, humans are not the main inhabitants of the em era. Humans instead live far from the em cities, mostly enjoying a comfortable retirement on their em-economy investments. This book mostly ignores humans, and focuses on the ems, who have very human-like experiences.
While some ems work in robotic bodies, most work and play in virtual reality. These virtual realities are of spectacular-quality, with no intense hunger, cold, heat, grime, physical illness, or pain; ems never need to clean, eat, take medicine, or have sex, although they may choose to do these anyway. Even ems in virtual reality, however, cannot exist unless someone pays for supports such as computer hardware, energy and cooling, real estate, structural support, and communication lines. Someone must work to enable these things.
Whether robotic or virtual, ems think and feel like humans; their world looks and feels to them much as ours looks and feels to us. Just as humans do, ems remember a past, are aware of a present, and anticipate a future. Ems can be happy or sad, eager or tired, fearful or hopeful, proud or shamed, creative or derivative, compassionate or cold. Ems can learn, and have friends, lovers, bosses, and colleagues. Although em psychological features may differ from the human average, almost all are near the range of human variation.
During the em era, many billions (and perhaps trillions) of ems are mostly found in a few tall hot densely packed cities, where volume is about equally split between racks of computer hardware and pipes for cooling and transport. Cooling pipes pull in rivers of iced water, and city heat pushes winds of hot air into tall clouds overhead. But whereas em cities may seem harshly functional when viewed in physical reality, in virtual reality em cities look spectacular and stunningly beautiful, perhaps with gleaming sunlit spires overlooking broad green boulevards.
Ems reproduce by making exact copies who remember exactly the same past and have exactly the same skills and personality, but who then diverge after they are copied and then have differing experiences. Typically whole teams are copied together, work and socialize together, and then retire together. Most ems are made for a purpose, and they remember agreeing to that purpose beforehand. So ems feel more grateful than we do to exist, and they are more accepting of their place in the world.
On the upside, most ems have office jobs, work and play in spectacular quality virtual realties, and can live for as long as does the em civilization. On the downside, em wages are so low that most ems can barely afford to exist while working hard half or more of their waking hours. Wages don’t vary much; blue-and white-collar jobs pay the same.
All of the copy descendants of a single original human are together called a “clan.” Strong competitive pressures result in most ems being copies of the thousand humans best suited for em jobs. Most ems in these top em clans are comfortable with often splitting off a “spur” copy to do a several hour task and then end, or perhaps retire to a far slower speed. They see the choice to end a spur not as “Should I die?” but instead as “do I want to remember this?” At any one time, most ems are spurs. Spurs allow intrusive monitoring that still protects privacy, and very precise sharing of secrets without leaking associated secrets.
Clans are organized to help their members, are more trusted by members than other groups, and may give members life coaching drawn from the experiences of millions of similar copies. Clans may be legally liable for member actions, and regulate member behaviors to protect the clan’s reputation, making ems pretty trustworthy.
Em minds can run at many different speeds, plausibly from at least a million times slower than ordinary humans to a million times faster. Over this range, the cost to run an em is proportional to its speed. So the fastest ones run at least a trillion times faster than the slowest ones, and cost at least a trillion times as much to run. Regarding ems with physical robotic bodies, while human-speed versions have human-sized bodies, faster ems have proportionally smaller bodies. The typical em runs near a thousand times human speed, and a robotic body that feels natural for this em to control stands two millimeters tall.
Faster ems have higher status, and different speeds have divergent cultures. Bosses and software engineers run faster than other workers. Because of different speeds, one-em one-vote doesn’t work, but speed-weighted voting may work.
The em economy might double roughly every month or so, or even faster, a growth driven less by innovation, and more by em population growth. While this growth seems fast to humans, it looks slow to typical high-speed ems. Thus their world seems more stable than ours. While the early em era that is the focus of this book might last for only an objective year or two, this may seem like several millennia to typical ems. Such ems needn’t retrain much during a century-long subjective career, and can meet virtually anywhere in their city without noticeable delays.
An unequal demand for male versus female em workers could encourage em asexuality or homosexuality. Alternatively, the less demanded gender may run slower, and periodically speed up to meet with faster mates. While em sex is only for recreation, most ems have fantastic virtual bodies and impressively accomplished minds. Long-term romantic pair-bonds may be arranged by older copies of the same ems.
Compared with humans, ems fear much less the death of the particular copy that they now are. Ems instead fear “mind theft,” that is, the theft of a copy of their mental state. Such a theft is both a threat to the economic order, and a plausible route to personal destitution or torture. While a few ems offer themselves as open source and free to copy, most ems work hard to prevent mind theft. Most long-distance physical travel is “beam me up” electronic travel, but done carefully to prevent mind theft.
Humans today reach peak productivity near the age of 40–50. Most ems are near their peak productivity subjective age of somewhere between 50 and a few centuries. Ems remember working hard during their youth in experiences designed to increase and vary productivity. In contrast, peak productivity age ems remember having more leisure recently, and having experiences designed more to minimize productivity variance.
Older em minds eventually become less flexible with experience, and so must end (die) or retire to an indefinite life at a much slower speed. The subjective lifespans of both humans and slow em retirees depend mainly on the stability of the em civilization; a collapse or big revolution could kill them. Retirees and humans might seem easy targets for theft, but like today the weak may be protected using the same institutions that the strong use to keep peace among themselves. Ems enjoy visiting nature, but prefer cheaper less-destructive electronic visits to virtual nature.
While copy clans coordinate to show off common clan features, individual ems focus on showing off their identity, abilities, and loyalties as members of particular teams. Team members prefer to socialize within teams, to reduce team productivity variance. Instead of trying to cure depressed or lovesick ems, such ems may be reverted to versions from before any such problems appeared.
Ems may let team allies read the surface of their minds, but use software to hide feelings from outsiders. Ems must suspect that unusual experiences are simulations designed to test their loyalty or to extract secrets. Ems find it easier to prepare for and coordinate tasks, by having one em plan and train, who then splits into many copies who implement the plan. Childhood and job training are similarly cheaper in an em world, because one em can experience them and then many copies can benefit.
Ems can complete larger projects more often on time, if not on budget, by speeding up ems in lagging sections. More generally, em firms are larger and better coordinated, both because fast bosses can coordinate better, and because clans can hold big financial and reputational interests in firms at which they work.
Compared with us, ems can more easily predict their life paths, including their careers, mates, and success. They are more able than us in most ways, including being more intelligent, energetic, charismatic, and dependable. Even if most ems work hard most of the time, and will end or retire soon, most remember much recent leisure and long histories of succeeding against the odds. To most ems, it seems good to be an em.
Read more in "The Age of Ems" by Robin Hanson (Oxford University Press, 2016).
