The age of em

What Hacker News says

1. okasakiDec 2023
   If you liked this you might also like Age of Em by Robin Hanson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Em

   "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."

   Unfortunately it seems both Hanson and qntm have been proven incorrect. Our overlords will be bootstrapped from reddit and wikipedia rather than scanned brains.

   Show morethread
2. networkedApr 2023
   If you liked it, you may like "FAQ on LoadBear's Instrument of Precommitment" (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nRSRWbAqtC48rPv5NG6kzggL...), which is also about mind uploading, and "Basilisk collection" (https://suricrasia.online/unfiction/basilisk/), which is a fictional Wikipedia article about SHA-256. You may also enjoy the book The Age of Em; it is nonfiction futurism, albeit increasingly unlikely.
   thread
3. JachFeb 2023
   If it enables further specialization that can be a good thing, it's often awkward when companies try to wring out some extra utility from people who really aren't well suited for the other task. (Having people do such things occasionally anyway even if poorly, like devs briefly fielding tier 1 support, can be useful for empathy building at least.) The infatuation with combining dev and QE into a combined hybrid role especially comes to mind. (Though I do think it's at least possible there for the majority to be 'good enough' crossing back and forth that it's more or less worked out, and there are enough generalists, but when you see a specialist in one forced to do the other not nearly as well, it feels like a waste.)

   You might enjoy reading The Age of Em. Imagine in 90 years you could literally spin up a copy of the em who wrote the code that's having issues, archived at a time with context full in mind, have them fix the issues or add some new related features, then spin them down again, with most funds probably going to the general clan of related ems.

   Show morethread
4. neovialogisticsJan 2023
   Assuming that you give credence to the idea that brain emulation technology will emerge before AGI you may be interested in the 2016 book The Age of Em. The author has a pretty vivid imagination about the commercial applications of brain emulation technologies in similar forms to that which the OP article and it's links describe but the book seemed to have, at the time I first read it, an unusual sense of optimism about the rule of law prevailing in future labour relations.

   It's still an interesting read a few years later but it definitely needs a follow up.

   Show morethread
5. abecedariusSep 2020
   Whole Brain Emulation Roadmap http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/Reports/2008-3.pdf

   The Age of Em https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0198754620/

   thread
6. srikuSep 2020
   Thumbs up for "The Age of Em". A nice example of how to assume a technology and work out economic consequences. Hanson goes into some good detail and includes physical constraints, emergent properties like relative time elapsed for simulated minds when transferring between locations and such.
   thread