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[Mind]

Brilliant economist and transhumanist Robin Hanson - of the George Mason University economics department and prolific blogger at overcoming bias - has released a new book "The Age of EM".

 

In this podcast, Professor Hanson discusses the possibility of a future dominated by emulated minds. What will happen to the economy? What will happen to biological humans? Have a listen.

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[caliban]

something must have gone wrong with the 'usual' filestore which we will fix later this month. Meanwhile you can listen to the podcast here: 

 

[ceridwen]

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[caliban]

File Name: LongeCityNow_Hanson2016.mp3

File Submitter: caliban

File Submitted: 05 Jul 2016

File Category: Podcasts

Guest: R. Hanson

Economist and transhumanist Robin Hanson discusses the "Age of EM", a radical future and economy based on emulated minds.

Click here to download this file

[corb]

The idea we could have the technology to "scan" a tissue, hopefully with non invasive techniques, have the precision to detect not only the cellular but molecular structure because as far as we know at the moment genetic and epigenetic variation between brain cells is important - and somehow we are still struggling with disease and death at the same time ... is quite honestly ridiculous. In fact if we could scan a structure molecule by molecule I have to wonder why we would even bother with "digitizing" anything when we could simply replicate in physical form.

 

And why even bother emulating a human mind. Immortalism disregarded, it's a bit silly.

If we have a computer capable of thinking 1000 times faster than a human, why burden it with a human mind?

 

The author thinks these emulated humans would somehow ignore the physical world... aren't these humans supposed to be the smart humans? They'll be working on supposed intellectual problems so you'd think so. They'd be aware their consciousness is still very much enshrined in a physical unit somewhere in the real world. The idea they will ever forget or ignore that fact is also silly. They'll be damn sure to provided a sustainable model of development in the physical world otherwise they would perish very fast.

Why would culture be a viable currency? Since the author thinks these emulated humans would stop giving a damn about the physical world pretty fast and all they'll do is circlejerk in their digital world what benefit would they give to humanity and by extension, who would allow them to exist and waste physical resources when they're basically a zoo for artists?

 

This is neo-retro-futurism. Combining possible future technologies, proposing they will exist much earlier in the line of development of technology than they should and coupled with a good dose of ideas which are quite honestly not well thought out.