Tag Archives: Ems

Robot Econ Primer

By Robin Hanson · May 15, 2013 1:30 am · Comments (71)

A recent burst of econo-blog posts on the subject of a future robot based economy mostly seem to treat the subject as if those few bloggers were the only people ever to consider the subject. But in fact, people have been considering the subject for centuries. I myself have written dozens of posts just here on this blog.

So let me offer a quick robot econ primer, i.e. important points widely known among folks who have long discussed the subject, but often not quickly rediscovered by dilettantes new to the subject:

  • AI takes software, not just hardware. It is tempting to project when artificial intelligence (AI) will arrive by projecting when a million dollars of computer hardware will have a computing power comparable to a human brain. But AI needs both hardware and software. It might be that when the software is available, AI will be possible with today’s computer hardware.
  • AI software progress has been slow. My small informal survey of AI experts finds that they typically estimate that in the last 20 years their specific subfield of AI has gone ~5-10% of the way toward human level abilities, with no noticeable acceleration. At that rate it will take centuries to get human level AI.
  • Emulations might bring AI software sooner. Human brains already have human level software. It should be possible to copy that software into computer hardware, and it seems likely that this will be possible within a century.
  • Emulations would be sudden and human-like. Since having an almost emulation probably isn’t of much use, emulations can make for a sudden transition to a robot economy. Being copies of humans, early emulations are more understandable and predictable than robots more generically, and many humans would empathize deeply with them.
  • Growth rates would be much faster. Our economic growth rates are limited by the rate at which we can grow labor. Whether based on emulations or other AI, a robot economy could grow its substitute for labor much faster, allowing it to grow much faster (as in an AK growth model). A robot economy isn’t just like our economy, but with robots substituted for humans. Things would soon change very fast.
  • There probably won’t be a grand war, or grand deal. The past transitions from foraging to farming and farming to industry were similarly unprecedented, sudden, and disruptive. But there wasn’t a grand war between foragers and farmers, or between farmers and industry, though in particular wars the sides were somewhat correlated. There also wasn’t anything like a grand deal to allow farming or industry by paying off folks doing things the old ways. The change to a robot economy seems too big, broad, and fast to make grand overall wars or deals likely, though there may be local wars or deals.

There’s lots more I could add, but this should be enough for now.

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Cooperate Or Specialize?

By Robin Hanson · May 12, 2013 10:45 am · Comments (17)

Futurists sometimes get excited about new ways to encourage cooperation in Prisoner’s Dilmena like games. For example, future folks might interact via quantum games, future AIs might show each other their source code, or future clans of em copies might super-cooperate with one another. Folks who know just enough economics to be dangerous sometimes say that this “changes everything”, i.e., that future economies will be completely different as a result. In fact, however, not only do we already have lots decent ways to encourage cooperation, such as talking and reputation, we also consistently forgo such ways to better encourage flexibility and specialization.

As I reviewed in my last post, we have strong reasons and abilities to cooperate within family clans, especially when such clans heavily intermarry and live and work closely together over many generations. And our farming era ancestors took big advantage of this. To function and thrive, however, our industry era economy had to suppress such clans, to allow more flexibility and specialization. Industry needs people to frequently change where they live, what kinds of jobs they do, and who they work with, and to play fair within industry-era reimagined firms, cities, and nations. Strong family clans instead encouraged stability and nepotism, and discouraged people from moving to cities and new jobs, and from cooperating fairly with and showing sufficient loyalty to other families within shared firms, cities, and nations.

Our industry era institutions consistently forgo the extra cooperation advantages of strong family clans, to gain more flexibility and specialization. This is now a huge net win. Our descendants are likely to similarly forgo advantages from new ways to cooperate, if those similarly reduce future flexibility and specialization. For example, future societies of brain emulations are likely to be wary of strongly self-cooperating clans of copies of the same original human. While such copy clans have even stronger reasons to cooperate with each other than family clans, copy clans might cause future organizations to suffer even more than do family-based firms, cities, and nations today from clan-based nepotism, and from low quality and inflexible matches of skills to jobs. Ems firms and cities are thus likely to be especially watchful for clan nepotism, and to avoid relying too heavily on any one clan.

Yes game theory captures important truths about human behavior, including about costs we pay from failing to fully cooperate. But prisoner’s dilemma style failures to cooperate in simple games comprises only a tiny fraction of all the important things that can and do go wrong in a modern economy. And we already have many decent ways to encourage cooperation. I thus conclude that future economies are unlikely to be heavily redesigned to take advantage of new possible ways to encourage prisoner’s dilemma style cooperation.

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Estonia Talk Friday

By Robin Hanson · April 29, 2013 9:30 am · Comments (1)

This Friday I’ll speak on Em Econ at TEDx Tallinn 2013, in Estonia. You can apparently see it online if you organize and register a “live simulcast event.” A few talks from prior years are online to watch, but I have no idea if my talk will become one of those.

Added: Slides.

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A City Is A Village Of Villages

By Robin Hanson · April 2, 2013 8:45 am · Comments (32)

There have been three major eras of human history: foraging, farming, and industry. During each era our economy has grown at a roughly steady exponential rate, and I’ve written before about some intriguing patterns in these growth eras: eras encompassed a similar number of doublings (~7-10), transitions between eras were much shorter than prior doubling times, and such transitions encompassed a similar number of growth rate doublings (~6-8). I’ve also noted that transition-induced inequality seems to have fallen over time.

I just noticed another intriguing pattern, this time in community sizes. Today in industrial societies roughly half of the population lives in metropolitan areas with between one hundred thousand and ten million people, with a mid size of about a million. While good data seems hard to find, during the farming era most people seem to have lived in communities (usually centered around a village) of between roughly three hundred and three thousand people, with a mid size of about a thousand. Foragers typically lived in mobile bands of size roughly twenty to fifty, with a best size of about thirty.

So community sizes went roughly from thirty to a thousand to a million. The pattern here is that each new era had a typical community size that was roughly the square of the size during the previous era. That is, a city is roughly a village of villages, and a village is roughly a band of bands. We could extend this patter further if we liked, saying that an extended family group has about four to eight members, with a mid size of six, so that a band is a family of families. (We might even go further and say that a family is a couple of couples, where a couple has two or so members.)

If previous growth patterns were to continue, I’ve written before that a new growth era might appear sometime in roughly the next century, and over a few years the economy would transition to a new growth rate of doubling every week to month. If this newly-noticed community size pattern were to continue, the new era would have communities of size roughly a trillion, perhaps ranging from ten billion to a hundred trillion.

Admittedly, after a year or two of this new era, things might change again, to yet another era. And the growth and community size trends couldn’t both continue to that next era, since a community size of a trillion trillion would require much more than twenty doublings of growth. So these trends clearly have to break down at some point.

I’ve been exploring a particular scenario for this new era: it might be enabled and dominated by brain emulations, or “ems.” Interestingly, I had already estimated an em community size of roughly a trillion based on other considerations. Ems could take up much less physical space than do humans, and since ems could visit each other in virtual reality without moving physically, em community sizes would be less limited by travel congestion costs.

So what should one call a city of cities of a trillion souls? A “world”?

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On Disowning Descendants

By Robin Hanson · March 9, 2013 12:10 pm · Comments (29)

Parents sometimes disown their children, on the grounds that those children have betrayed key parental values. And if parents have the sort of values that kids could deeply betray, then it does make sense for parents to watch out for such betrayal, ready to go to extremes like disowning in response.

But surely parents who feel inclined to disown their kids should be encouraged to study their kids carefully before making such a choice. For example, parents considering whether to disown their child for refusing to fight a war for their nation, or for working for a cigarette manufacturer, should wonder to what extend national patriotism or anti-smoking really are core values, as opposed to being mere revisable opinions they collected at one point in support of other more-core values. Such parents would be wise to study the lives and opinions of their children in some detail before choosing to disown them.

I’d like people to think similarly about my attempts to analyze likely futures. The lives of our descendants in the next great era after this our industry era may be as different from ours’ as ours’ are from farmers’, or farmers’ are from foragers’. When they have lived as neighbors, foragers have often strongly criticized farmer culture, as farmers have often strongly criticized industry culture. Surely many have been tempted to disown any descendants who adopted such despised new ways. And while such disowning might hold them true to core values, if asked we would advise them to consider the lives and views of such descendants carefully, in some detail, before choosing to disown.

Similarly, many who live industry era lives and share industry era values, may be disturbed to see forecasts of descendants with life styles that appear to reject many values they hold dear. Such people may be tempted to reject such outcomes, and to fight to prevent them, perhaps preferring a continuation of our industry era to the arrival of such a very different era, even if that era would contain far more creatures who consider their lives worth living, and be far better able to prevent the extinction of Earth civilization. And such people may be correct that such a rejection and battle holds them true to their core values.

But I advise such people to first try hard to see this new era in some detail from the point of view of its typical residents. See what they enjoy and what fills them with pride, and listen to their criticisms of your era and values. I hope that my future analysis can assist such soul-searching examination. If after studying such detail, you still feel compelled to disown your likely descendants, I cannot confidently say you are wrong. My job, first and foremost, is to help you see them clearly.

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Why don’t futurists try harder to stay alive?

By Robert Wiblin · December 24, 2012 5:12 pm · Comments (62)

A significant share of the broader ‘singularitarian’ community believes that they have a chance to live for hundreds of years, if they can survive until the arrival of an AI singularity, whole brain emulation, or just the point at which medical technology is advancing fast enough to keep extending our health-span by at least a year each year (meaning we hit ‘escape velocity‘ and can live indefinitely). Some are sufficiently hopeful about this to have invested in cryonics plans, hoping to be revived in the future, including Robin Hanson. Many others plan to do this, or think they should. (For what it’s worth, I am not yet convinced cryonics is worth the money – for reasons I am writing up – but I do think it warrants serious consideration.)

But there are much more mundane ways of increasing the chance of making it to this glorious future: exercise regularly, eat a nutritious diet low in refined carbohydrates, don’t smoke or hang around those who do, drink in moderation, avoid some illegal drugs, develop strong social supports to lower suicide and other mental health threats, have a secure high-status job, don’t live in an urban area, don’t ride a motorbike, get married (probably), and so on. While the futurist community isn’t full of seriously unhealthy or reckless people, nor does it seem much better in these regards than non-futurists with the same education and social class. A minority enjoy nutritional number crunching, but I haven’t observed diets being much better overall. None of the other behaviours are noticeably better.

I am fairly confident that the lowest hanging fruit would be raising fitness levels, which may even be lower among us than the general population. In addition to the immediate benefits regular and strenuous exercise has on confidence, happiness and productivity, it makes you live quite a bit longer. One study suggests that just 15 minutes of moderate exercise per day adds three years to your life expectancy (HT XKCD).

Now, maybe you are skeptical that those few years will allow you to live long enough to reach the end of involuntary death. Probably they won’t, but the whole life extension approach is to bank on a low chance of a giant payoff (living for hundreds or thousands of years). Furthermore, as the Singularity Institute has compellingly argued, we should not think we can confidently predict when AGI will be invented, if at all. The same is true to a lesser extent of progress towards whole brain emulation, or ending ageing. Furthermore, cryonics preservation procedures, and the selection of organisations that offer cryonics are gradually improving. Extending your life by five to ten years by doing all the ordinary things right could really make the difference; at least anyone considering gambling on cryonics should surely also find regular jogging worth their time.

I have even heard smart people claim that there is no need to worry about staying healthy because new technology will cure any diseases you get by the time you get them. But uncertainty about how soon such technologies will appear, combined with the high potential reward of living a little longer, would suggest exactly the opposite.

If I had to provide a cynical explanation for this apparently conflicting behaviour, I would suggest people are signing up for cryonics, or engaging in nutritional geekery, to signal their rationality and membership of a particular social clique. Going to the gym, even if it is a better bet for extending your life, doesn’t currently have the same effect. If you fear you’re stuck in that or some similar trap, consider using Stickk or Beeminder to make sure you do the rational thing.

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Em Econ, London Style

By Robin Hanson · December 10, 2012 6:00 am · Comments (33)

Together with the provocative (Skype super-developer) Jaan Tallinn, I’ll speak on em econ next Saturday 2-5pm in London:

In this extended (3 hour) session, Robin Hanson and Jaan Tallinn will revisit and expand the material from their ground-breaking presentations from the Singularity Summit 2012 – presentations that Vernor Vinge, commenting shortly afterwards, described as refutations of the saying that “there is nothing new under the sun”. (more)

Jaan will talk on:

The incredible coincidence that we were born just decades before an imminent technological singularity that threatens to break our model of the evolution of the entire universe.

Added 19Dec: Here slides, bad audio from the talk. Here are slides, audio from my talk at the Oxford AGI-Impacts conference talk a few days before.

Added May ’13: Here is video of my Oxford conference talk.

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Dec 7 DC Em Econ Talk

By Robin Hanson · November 16, 2012 10:52 am · Comments (7)

At 8:15p Dec. 7, I’ll give an em econ talk in DC, to the Philosophical Society of Washington, at the Powell Auditorium adjacent to the Cosmos Club, 2170 Florida Avenue NW (Entrance through club gate). It is open to the public, free, informal dress, requires no reservation, and is followed by a social hour. Title & abstract:

Whole Brain Emulation: Envisioning Economies And Societies of Emulated Minds

The three most disruptive transitions in history were the introduction of humans, farming, and industry. If another transition lies ahead, a good guess for its source is artificial intelligence in the form of whole brain emulations, or “ems,” sometime in roughly a century. I apply standard social science to this unusual situation, to outline a relatively-likely reference scenario set modestly far into a post-em-transition world. I consider families, reproduction, life plans, daily activities, inequality, class, work training, property rights, firm management, industrial organization, urban agglomeration, security, politics, and governance.

Added Dec 8: My talk was “among the best attended talks of the year.” Here are slides, audio, video (to appear here).

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Sleep Is To Save Energy

By Robin Hanson · October 6, 2012 11:15 am · Comments (20)

Short sleepers, about 1% to 3% of the population, function well on less than 6 hours of sleep without being tired during the day. They tend to be unusually energetic and outgoing. (more)

What fundamental cost do short sleepers pay for their extra wakeful hours? A recent Science article collects an impressive range of evidence (quoted below) to support the theory that the main function of sleep is just to save energy – sleeping brains use a lot less energy, and wakeful human brains use as much as 25% of body energy. People vary in how much sleep they are programmed to need, and if this theory is correct the main risk short sleepers face is that they’ll more easily starve to death in very lean times.

Of course once we were programmed to regularly sleep to save energy, no doubt other biological and mental processes were adapted to take some small advantages from this arrangement. And once those adaptations are in place, it might become expensive for a body to violate those expectations. One person might need sleep because their bodies expect them to sleep a lot, but another body that isn’t programmed to expect as much sleep needn’t pay much of a cost for that, aside from the higher energy cost to run the energy-expensive brain more.

This has dramatic implications for the em future I’ve been exploring. Ems could be selected from among the 1-3% of humans who need less sleep, and we needn’t expect to pay any systematic cost for this in other parameters, other than due to there being only a finite number of humans to pick from. We might even find the global brain parameters that bodies now use to tell brains when they need sleep, and change their settings to turn ems of humans who need a lot of sleep into ems who need a lot less sleep. Average em sleep hours might then plausibly become six hours a night or less.

Those promised quotes: Continue reading "Sleep Is To Save Energy" »

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3 Em Econ Talks Soon

By Robin Hanson · September 18, 2012 9:00 pm · Comments (7)

Instead of my usual scattershot, these days I’m successfully focusing. My next three talks:

  1. Sept. 26, 6-7:30p, GMU Econ Society, Student Union II (= Hub) front ballroom, GMU, Fairfax, VA (audio, slides)
  2. Oct. 2, 6-7:30p, Pittsburgh Less Wrong, Baker Hall 150, CMU, Pittsburgh, PA (audio, slides)
  3. Oct. 14, 11:00-30a, Singularity Summit, 1111 Calif. St., San Fran., CA. ($100 off code: OVERCOMINGBIAS ) (video; slides)

All three will be on:

Em Econ 101: An Economic Analysis of Brain Emulation

The three most disruptive transitions in history were the introduction of humans, farming, and industry. If another transition lies ahead, a good guess for its source is artificial intelligence in the form of whole brain emulations, or “ems,” sometime in the next century. I apply standard social science to this unusual situation, to identify a relatively-likely reference scenario set modestly far into a post-em-transition world. I consider families, reproduction, life plans, daily activities, inequality, work training, property rights, firm management, industrial organization, urban agglomeration, security, and governance.

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