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  • The Age of Em

  • Work, Love, and Life When Robots Rule the Earth
  • By: Robin Hanson
  • Narrated by: Michael Butler Murray
  • Length: 15 hrs and 51 mins
  • 3.0 out of 5 stars (5 ratings)

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The Age of Em

By: Robin Hanson
Narrated by: Michael Butler Murray
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Publisher's Summary

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.

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An ode to the same, in a changed world

Every minute of this book amazes with staggering failures of imagination mixed with far reaching insight.
I presumed being imaginative and unimaginative were different modes of thought. If you think like that, you are in for a surprise. In Robin's world of Ems, people are the same, yet they accept work defining them. They can copy and model minds, but not significantly improve or remodel them.
The juxtaposition of accepting some drastic changes, while simultaneously worshipping at the altar of same is jarring at first , but within minutes it is addictive. By the end of the book, you see the pattern of his perception. Robin's does not paint the future as a blank slate, to be gradually scaped into the artists intentions with deeper and deeper inscriptions, as technology enables such choice.
Rather, he sees the limitations of competition, scarcity, hierarchy and selfishness go from strength to strength, come what may.
The future is modelled here as: the present, stamped with history, painted further forward, deviating only where economic theories suggest. It's deliberate and consistent, but never boring.
He reads slow with an overly repetitive rythmn to his voice, fix this by playing at 2.4x speed, and this becomes an asset, chunking phrases in tones.
Until someone shows me a better treatment of this topic, this is a must read for anyone who cares about morality, possibility, or the future.

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Tedious !!!!!!!!

A dull idea that was obviously laboured over for considerable time that could be distilled down to a "bit of an idea". I couldn't get beyond half way, and I'm someone who rarely gives up on a book !! I wished I could my awareness at hyperspeed to get through it in the nanosecond it deserves.

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