Tuesday, May 3, 2016. 12:00PM. GHC 6115.
Professor Robin Hanson - The Age of Em: Work, Love, and Life when Robots Rule the Earth
The three most disruptive transitions in history were the introduction of humans, farming, and industry. If a similar 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. Drawing on academic consensus in many disciplines, I outline a baseline scenario set modestly far into a post-em-transition world. I consider computer architecture, energy use, cooling infrastructure, mind speeds, body sizes, security strategies, virtual reality conventions, labor market organization, management focus, job training, career paths, wage competition, identity, retirement, life cycles, reproduction, mating, conversation habits, wealth inequality, city sizes, growth rates, coalition politics, governance, law, and war.
To learn more, see Professor Hanson's forthcoming book The Age of Em.
Speaker Bio
Robin Hanson is Assoc. Prof. of economics at George Mason University, and research associate at Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University. He has a Caltech social science Ph.D., University of Chicago physics M.S and philosophy M.A., 9 years experience as A.I. research programmer, at Lockheed and NASA, 3050 citations, h-index of 25, 60 academic publications, 400 media mentions, 200 invited talks, and 8 million visits to his blog OvercomingBias.com.
Oxford Press publishes his The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule the Earth in June 2016, and The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life, Kevin Simler co-author, in spring 2017. A prediction market pioneer since 1988, he was architect of first internal corporate markets, at Xanadu in 1990, of the Foresight Exchange since 1994, of DARPA's Policy Analysis Market, from 2001 to 2003, and of IARPA's DAGGRE and SCICAST from 2010 to 2015.