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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  • EliWilliam2020

    I thought you were going to be on Econtalk again 🙁

    Maybe next time

  • http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/ Stephen R. Diamond

    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.

    Does the “next century” mean the present or the following century?

    • Robin Hanson

      It means the next 100 years.

  • V_V

    The three most disruptive transitions in history were the introduction of humans, farming, and industry.

    More disruptive than the introduction of life, photosynthesis, eukaryotes, multicellular organisms, vertebrates, plants, land animals, …?

    • jack_sprat2

      Yeah, it failed for me at “human”. Damn little history without humans. Then again, I’m also averse to any definition of ‘history’ that predates written language. Granted, there’s some overlap between prehistory and history, owing to the (distorted and increasingly attenuated) existence of oral history traditions, but, at a remove of several millennia, I would prefer to categorize these separately as ‘mythology’.

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