The Age of Em

Work, Love, and Life When Robots Rule the Earth

By: Robin Hanson

Narrated by: Michael Butler Murray

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.

Some say we can't know the future, especially following such a disruptive new technology, but Professor Robin Hanson sets out to prove them wrong. Applying decades of expertise in physics, computer science, and economics, he uses standard theories to paint a detailed picture of a world dominated by ems.

While human lives don't change greatly in the em era, em lives are as different from ours as our lives are from those of our farmer and forager ancestors. Ems make us question common assumptions of moral progress, because they reject many of the values we hold dear.

Read about em mind speeds, body sizes, job training and career paths, energy use and cooling infrastructure, virtual reality, aging and retirement, death and immortality, security, wealth inequality, religion, teleportation, identity, cities, politics, law, war, status, friendship, and love.

This book shows you just how strange your descendants may be, though ems are no stranger than we would appear to our ancestors. To most ems, it seems good to be an em.

©2016 Robin Hanson (P)2016 Audible, Inc.

Beginning is engaging and worth the time.

Interesting thought experiment and I appreciated the author's careful consideration to justify the scenario he presented. I found the content slightly repetitive, or too "in-the-weeds," at times which lead to a longer duration that caused me to lose interest during the latter two-thirds of the book.

brilliant boring

Just 'cause it's boring doesn't make it's not brilliant. I'm asked to include more words in a review. Here they are.

A must-read for anyone interested in mind uploading

The book is an unusually detailed treatise on societal implications of mind uploading, as if written by an impartial sociologist.

It’s written as a research work, not as a work of science fiction. So, if you expect to be entertained, you’ll be disappointed.

But if you’re interested in futurology or mind uploading as scholarly disciplines, the book is a must-read.

Interesting read

The level of detail of this world and the ramifications on our species are a new way of looking at the world in 2024.

interesting but way too thorough

Great number if assumptions draws upon authors perception of Emulation robot society and behaviours.
Interesting concept, but too intricate in detail to be credible. Got boring in the details of Em societal workings.