So, what is the Age of Em?
According to Hanson, AI is really hard and won’t be invented in time to shape the posthuman future. But sometime a century or so from now, scanning technology, neuroscience, and computer hardware will advance enough to allow emulated humans, or “ems”. Take somebody’s brain, scan it on a microscopic level, and use this information to simulate it neuron-by-neuron on a computer. A good enough simulation will map inputs to outputs in exactly the same way as the brain itself, effectively uploading the person to a computer. Uploaded humans will be much the same as biological humans. Given suitable sense-organs, effectuators, virtual avatars, or even robot bodies, they can think, talk, work, play, love, and build in much the same way as their “parent”. But ems have three very important differences from biological humans.
First, they have no natural body. They will never need food or water; they will never get sick or die. They can live entirely in virtual worlds in which any luxuries they want – luxurious penthouses, gluttonous feasts, Ferraris – can be conjured out of nothing. They will have some limited ability to transcend space, talking to other ems’ virtual presences in much the same way two people in different countries can talk on the Internet.
Second, they can run at different speeds. While a normal human brain is stuck running at the speed that physics allow, a computer simulating a brain can simulate it faster or slower depending on preference and hardware availability. With enough parallel hardware, an em could experience a subjective century in an objective week. Alternatively, if an em wanted to save hardware it could process all its mental operations v e r y s l o w l y and experience only a subjective week every objective century.
Third, just like other computer data, ems can be copied, cut, and pasted. One uploaded copy of Robin Hanson, plus enough free hardware, can become a thousand uploaded copies of Robin Hanson, each living in their own virtual world and doing different things. The copies could even converse with each other, check each other’s work, duel to the death, or – yes – have sex with each other. And if having a thousand Robin Hansons proves too much, a quick ctrl-x and you can delete any redundant ems to free up hard disk space for Civilization 6 (coming out this October!)
Would this count as murder? Hanson predicts that ems will have unusually blase attitudes toward copy-deletion. If there are a thousand other copies of me in the world, then going to sleep and not waking up just feels like delegating back to a different version of me. If you’re still not convinced, Hanson’s essay Is Forgotten Party Death? is a typically disquieting analysis of this proposition. But whether it’s true or not is almost irrelevant – at least some ems will think this way, and they will be the ones who tend to volunteer to be copied for short term tasks that require termination of the copy afterwards. If you personally aren’t interested in participating, the economy will leave you behind.
The ability to copy ems as many times as needed fundamentally changes the economy and the idea of economic growth. Imagine Google has a thousand positions for Ruby programmers. Instead of finding a thousand workers, they can find one very smart and very hard-working person and copy her a thousand times. With unlimited available labor supply, wages plummet to subsistence levels. “Subsistence levels” for ems are the bare minimum it takes to rent enough hardware from Amazon Cloud to run an em. The overwhelming majority of ems will exist at such subsistence levels. On the one hand, if you’ve got to exist on a subsistence level, a virtual world where all luxuries can be conjured from thin air is a pretty good place to do it. On the other, such starvation wages might leave ems with little or no leisure time.
Sort of. This gets weird. There’s an urban legend about a “test for psychopaths”. You tell someone a story about a man who attends his mother’s funeral. He met a really pretty girl there and fell in love, but neglected to get her contact details before she disappeared. How might he meet her again? If they answer “kill his father, she’ll probably come to that funeral too”, they’re a psychopath – ordinary people would have a mental block that prevents them from even considering such a drastic solution. And I bring this up because after reading Age of Em I feel like Robin Hanson would be able to come up with some super-solution even the psychopaths can’t think of, some plan that gets the man a threesome with the girl and her even hotter twin sister at the cost of wiping out an entire continent. Everything about labor relations in Age of Em is like this. (...)
There are a lot of similarities between Hanson’s futurology and (my possibly erroneous interpretation of) the futurology of Nick Land. I see Land as saying, like Hanson, that the future will be one of quickly accelerating economic activity that comes to dominate a bigger and bigger portion of our descendents’ lives. But whereas Hanson’s framing focuses on the participants in such economic activity, playing up their resemblances with modern humans, Land takes a bigger picture. He talks about the economy itself acquiring a sort of self-awareness or agency, so that the destiny of civilization is consumed by the imperative of economic growth.
Imagine a company that manufactures batteries for electric cars. The inventor of the batteries might be a scientist who really believes in the power of technology to improve the human race. The workers who help build the batteries might just be trying to earn money to support their families. The CEO might be running the business because he wants to buy a really big yacht. And the whole thing is there to eventually, somewhere down the line, let a suburban mom buy a car to take her kid to soccer practice. Like most companies the battery-making company is primarily a profit-making operation, but the profit-making-ness draws on a lot of not-purely-economic actors and their not-purely-economic subgoals.
Now imagine the company fires all its employees and replaces them with robots. It fires the inventor and replaces him with a genetic algorithm that optimizes battery design. It fires the CEO and replaces him with a superintelligent business-running algorithm. All of these are good decisions, from a profitability perspective. We can absolutely imagine a profit-driven shareholder-value-maximizing company doing all these things. But it reduces the company’s non-masturbatory participation in an economy that points outside itself, limits it to just a tenuous connection with soccer moms and maybe some shareholders who want yachts of their own.
Now take it further. Imagine there are no human shareholders who want yachts, just banks who lend the company money in order to increase their own value. And imagine there are no soccer moms anymore; the company makes batteries for the trucks that ship raw materials from place to place. Every non-economic goal has been stripped away from the company; it’s just an appendage of Global Development.
Now take it even further, and imagine this is what’s happened everywhere. There are no humans left; it isn’t economically efficient to continue having humans. Algorithm-run banks lend money to algorithm-run companies that produce goods for other algorithm-run companies and so on ad infinitum. Such a masturbatory economy would have all the signs of economic growth we have today. It could build itself new mines to create raw materials, construct new roads and railways to transport them, build huge factories to manufacture them into robots, then sell the robots to whatever companies need more robot workers. It might even eventually invent space travel to reach new worlds full of raw materials. Maybe it would develop powerful militaries to conquer alien worlds and steal their technological secrets that could increase efficiency. It would be vast, incredibly efficient, and utterly pointless. The real-life incarnation of those strategy games where you mine Resources to build new Weapons to conquer new Territories from which you mine more Resources and so on forever.
But this seems to me the natural end of the economic system. Right now it needs humans only as laborers, investors, and consumers. But robot laborers are potentially more efficient, companies based around algorithmic trading are already pushing out human investors, and most consumers already aren’t individuals – they’re companies and governments and organizations. At each step you can gain efficiency by eliminating humans, until finally humans aren’t involved anywhere.
True to form, Land doesn’t see this as a dystopia – I think he conflates “maximally efficient economy” with “God”, which is a hell of a thing to conflate – but I do. And I think it provides an important new lens with which to look at the Age of Em.
According to Hanson, AI is really hard and won’t be invented in time to shape the posthuman future. But sometime a century or so from now, scanning technology, neuroscience, and computer hardware will advance enough to allow emulated humans, or “ems”. Take somebody’s brain, scan it on a microscopic level, and use this information to simulate it neuron-by-neuron on a computer. A good enough simulation will map inputs to outputs in exactly the same way as the brain itself, effectively uploading the person to a computer. Uploaded humans will be much the same as biological humans. Given suitable sense-organs, effectuators, virtual avatars, or even robot bodies, they can think, talk, work, play, love, and build in much the same way as their “parent”. But ems have three very important differences from biological humans.
First, they have no natural body. They will never need food or water; they will never get sick or die. They can live entirely in virtual worlds in which any luxuries they want – luxurious penthouses, gluttonous feasts, Ferraris – can be conjured out of nothing. They will have some limited ability to transcend space, talking to other ems’ virtual presences in much the same way two people in different countries can talk on the Internet.
Second, they can run at different speeds. While a normal human brain is stuck running at the speed that physics allow, a computer simulating a brain can simulate it faster or slower depending on preference and hardware availability. With enough parallel hardware, an em could experience a subjective century in an objective week. Alternatively, if an em wanted to save hardware it could process all its mental operations v e r y s l o w l y and experience only a subjective week every objective century.Third, just like other computer data, ems can be copied, cut, and pasted. One uploaded copy of Robin Hanson, plus enough free hardware, can become a thousand uploaded copies of Robin Hanson, each living in their own virtual world and doing different things. The copies could even converse with each other, check each other’s work, duel to the death, or – yes – have sex with each other. And if having a thousand Robin Hansons proves too much, a quick ctrl-x and you can delete any redundant ems to free up hard disk space for Civilization 6 (coming out this October!)
Would this count as murder? Hanson predicts that ems will have unusually blase attitudes toward copy-deletion. If there are a thousand other copies of me in the world, then going to sleep and not waking up just feels like delegating back to a different version of me. If you’re still not convinced, Hanson’s essay Is Forgotten Party Death? is a typically disquieting analysis of this proposition. But whether it’s true or not is almost irrelevant – at least some ems will think this way, and they will be the ones who tend to volunteer to be copied for short term tasks that require termination of the copy afterwards. If you personally aren’t interested in participating, the economy will leave you behind.
The ability to copy ems as many times as needed fundamentally changes the economy and the idea of economic growth. Imagine Google has a thousand positions for Ruby programmers. Instead of finding a thousand workers, they can find one very smart and very hard-working person and copy her a thousand times. With unlimited available labor supply, wages plummet to subsistence levels. “Subsistence levels” for ems are the bare minimum it takes to rent enough hardware from Amazon Cloud to run an em. The overwhelming majority of ems will exist at such subsistence levels. On the one hand, if you’ve got to exist on a subsistence level, a virtual world where all luxuries can be conjured from thin air is a pretty good place to do it. On the other, such starvation wages might leave ems with little or no leisure time.
Sort of. This gets weird. There’s an urban legend about a “test for psychopaths”. You tell someone a story about a man who attends his mother’s funeral. He met a really pretty girl there and fell in love, but neglected to get her contact details before she disappeared. How might he meet her again? If they answer “kill his father, she’ll probably come to that funeral too”, they’re a psychopath – ordinary people would have a mental block that prevents them from even considering such a drastic solution. And I bring this up because after reading Age of Em I feel like Robin Hanson would be able to come up with some super-solution even the psychopaths can’t think of, some plan that gets the man a threesome with the girl and her even hotter twin sister at the cost of wiping out an entire continent. Everything about labor relations in Age of Em is like this. (...)
There are a lot of similarities between Hanson’s futurology and (my possibly erroneous interpretation of) the futurology of Nick Land. I see Land as saying, like Hanson, that the future will be one of quickly accelerating economic activity that comes to dominate a bigger and bigger portion of our descendents’ lives. But whereas Hanson’s framing focuses on the participants in such economic activity, playing up their resemblances with modern humans, Land takes a bigger picture. He talks about the economy itself acquiring a sort of self-awareness or agency, so that the destiny of civilization is consumed by the imperative of economic growth.
Imagine a company that manufactures batteries for electric cars. The inventor of the batteries might be a scientist who really believes in the power of technology to improve the human race. The workers who help build the batteries might just be trying to earn money to support their families. The CEO might be running the business because he wants to buy a really big yacht. And the whole thing is there to eventually, somewhere down the line, let a suburban mom buy a car to take her kid to soccer practice. Like most companies the battery-making company is primarily a profit-making operation, but the profit-making-ness draws on a lot of not-purely-economic actors and their not-purely-economic subgoals.
Now imagine the company fires all its employees and replaces them with robots. It fires the inventor and replaces him with a genetic algorithm that optimizes battery design. It fires the CEO and replaces him with a superintelligent business-running algorithm. All of these are good decisions, from a profitability perspective. We can absolutely imagine a profit-driven shareholder-value-maximizing company doing all these things. But it reduces the company’s non-masturbatory participation in an economy that points outside itself, limits it to just a tenuous connection with soccer moms and maybe some shareholders who want yachts of their own.
Now take it further. Imagine there are no human shareholders who want yachts, just banks who lend the company money in order to increase their own value. And imagine there are no soccer moms anymore; the company makes batteries for the trucks that ship raw materials from place to place. Every non-economic goal has been stripped away from the company; it’s just an appendage of Global Development.
Now take it even further, and imagine this is what’s happened everywhere. There are no humans left; it isn’t economically efficient to continue having humans. Algorithm-run banks lend money to algorithm-run companies that produce goods for other algorithm-run companies and so on ad infinitum. Such a masturbatory economy would have all the signs of economic growth we have today. It could build itself new mines to create raw materials, construct new roads and railways to transport them, build huge factories to manufacture them into robots, then sell the robots to whatever companies need more robot workers. It might even eventually invent space travel to reach new worlds full of raw materials. Maybe it would develop powerful militaries to conquer alien worlds and steal their technological secrets that could increase efficiency. It would be vast, incredibly efficient, and utterly pointless. The real-life incarnation of those strategy games where you mine Resources to build new Weapons to conquer new Territories from which you mine more Resources and so on forever.
But this seems to me the natural end of the economic system. Right now it needs humans only as laborers, investors, and consumers. But robot laborers are potentially more efficient, companies based around algorithmic trading are already pushing out human investors, and most consumers already aren’t individuals – they’re companies and governments and organizations. At each step you can gain efficiency by eliminating humans, until finally humans aren’t involved anywhere.
True to form, Land doesn’t see this as a dystopia – I think he conflates “maximally efficient economy” with “God”, which is a hell of a thing to conflate – but I do. And I think it provides an important new lens with which to look at the Age of Em.
by Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex | Read more:
Image: Age of Em
