I am in Brussels and will see Jean-Eric again.

I have always liked working in hotels. I used the trip to wrote up notes on the other book Jamie gave me, called  “The Age of Em” by Robin Hanson. Em is short for Emulation.

It’s a very interesting book because it gives us a picture of our future might be like.

An emulation is a human brain scanned and implemented as an electronic network. To achieve that you would need the ability to scan a brain in detail, to understand in detail how the brain system works, and to build an electronic network matching the structure of a human brain.

Some people say that is 50 years away, some less, some more. (It is a different path to the one described in my last two posts.)

This book helps us to picture what our world would be like if super-intelligent agents were widely used on our planet.

The speed of a human brain is related to the size of a human body. There is no point in a brain that is faster than the time it takes to activate a body movement. The limbs of larger bodies take more time to respond to signals from the brain. So the brains of larger animals can afford to run at lower speeds. 

If “ems” do not need a body of human size, their brains could run much faster than ours, maybe a hundred times faster.

Ems are therefore likely to be smaller than us. According to Robin Hanson, an em might be a mere 2mm high. Ems operating machinery might be larger and run slower, but most ems will be doing office work just like most humans do now. No need for bodies like ours.

That would be efficient, but the dimensions of their world would be very different from ours. For example, a brain running “16 times faster than an ordinary human  experiences a subjective day in 90 objective minutes” (Hanson). Our planet would feel much, much larger to ems. Physical journeys would be unbearably long, leading to a powerful bias against travel and for virtual meetings.

A concentration of ems in a “city” would not only require insulation against dust and vibration but would generate a lot of heat, needing extensive cooling, perhaps from networks of pipes large and small running through the city like the arteries and veins in a human body, introducing cold water or air, then carrying it away to be vented into the atmosphere from tall towers.

Ems would live and meet in virtual environments. Their super-cooled cities could offer pleasant leafy boulevards and provide virtual entertainment.

An economy run by ems would be massively efficient. Powered by ems operating at super-high speeds, it would also evolve very fast. At super-high economic growth rates every human on the planet could be afforded a subsistence level income. Robin Hanson pictures humans living out in the countryside, enjoying its pleasures far from the em “cities”, which might even be toxic to physical humans.

In Robin Hanson’s vision, ems work hard, enjoy work, “feel” human emotions, have friends. They live in “clans” –  that is a key part of his vision. A clan of ems starts as copies of one or two originals. While the copies diverge as they do different tasks and gain new experiences, they still live, meet, socialise, gossip, mainly within their own clans.

Robin Hanson doesn’t seem concerned about “value loading”, that is ensuring that ems serve the needs of humans.

For reasons of diversity, an em society might see a case for keeping a population of biological humans, just as we, today, create reserves for threatened species.

My guess is that being a human in the prime of life is enjoyable but aging is no fun at all. Humans might choose at some point to be converted into low-speed ems and live in virtual environments of their choosing.