Away from Second Life’s 13th birthday celebrations we move into an area that used to be discussed a lot more in the earlier days of Second Life; Transhumanism. Over at The Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET) Giulio Prisco has a published a post : Paradiso and Inferno in Robin Hanson’s ‘The Age of EM’.
The post discusses a book by Robin Hanson, The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life when Robots Rule the Earth. The topic has long been considered controversial, but it’s a discussion area that was once very vibrant in Second Life. I am surprised we have not seen more of a resurgence in this area of discussion within the Virtual Reality hype cycle.
The blurb from the book tells us :
Robots may one day rule the world, but what is a robot-ruled Earth like?
Many think the first truly smart robots will be brain emulations or ems. Scan a human brain, then run a model with the same connections on a fast computer, and you have a robot brain, but recognizably human.
Train an em to do some job and copy it a million times: an army of workers is at your disposal. When they can be made cheaply, within perhaps a century, ems will displace humans in most jobs. In this new economic era, the world economy may double in size every few weeks.
Giulio, in his post, gives us more information regarding the content of the book :
Robin’s future em world is derived from our world with one – and only one – big change: the arrival of operational and cheap mind uploading technology, sometime in this century. Robin’s methodology is to take our world as it, with all the facts and trends that we can see in technology, society, politics, and economics, and add mind uploading technology to scan living people and copy them to “ems” – software emulations running on suitable computing hardware.
This is very Science Fiction and if you’re not familiar with the topics, you may find this all a bit daunting, odd, scary or all three.
What about humans in a scenario like this? Well according to Giulio, Robin doesn’t mention them much in his book, but there are assumptions that they will still be around.
These Ems though, beyond work, what else would they do? Giulio gives us some more information :
We shouldn’t think of the functional virtual realities of 9-to-5 (sorry, 9-to-8:45 the morning after) work time or the spectacular virtual realities of leisure time as too different from the world that we know. According to Robin, the first ems (and the book only deals with the first ems – see below) will retain much of our psychology and preferences. In particular, sex will continue to important, and the lack of a reproductive function of sex could let ems explore a wide space of sexual attitudes and practices. A bored em could take an “open-source lover” who specializes in great sex.
As I said, in the earlier days of Second Life, discussions around subject matter like this used to happen a lot. I don’t see much discussion in this area in Second Life these days, but the discussion does still happen and in this case, it will be happening this Sunday, as Giulio explains :
I hope I haven’t misinterpreted Robin’s thinking too much. But don’t worry: Robin will present the book at the next Turing Church meeting in Second Life on Sunday, June 26. The presentation will be followed by a discussion, and everyone will be able to ask questions.
The meeting will take place at 8:30am SLT.
SLURL : http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Terasem/180/180/31/
Thanks for covering Robin’s presentation! Of course you and all readers are invited.