The Age of Em: What If the Future Belongs to Copies of Us?
Reading The Singularity Is Nearer recently reminded me of another book that left a strong impression on me years ago: Robin Hanson’s The Age of Em: Work, Love, and Life when Robots Rule the Earth . Both books imagine intelligence transforming civilisation, but the contrast is not artificial intelligence versus humanity. Hanson’s emulations would also be artificial minds: computational systems designed to reproduce the functional patterns of particular human brains. The real difference is where the intelligence comes from. Kurzweil imagines increasingly capable AI merging with and expanding human intelligence. Hanson asks what might happen if the first machines capable of replacing most human workers are not designed from scratch. They begin as copies of us. That change in origin matters. A civilisation of emulations would not be ruled by incomprehensible alien minds. It would be built from familiar human memories, habits and ambitions made reproducible at industrial scale. ...