The Age of Em: Work, Love, and Life when Robots Rule the Earth

Hanson, Robin

ISBN 10: 0198754620 / ISBN 13: 9780198754626

Published by OUP Oxford, 2016

About this Item

No marks or inscriptions. No creasing to covers or to spine. A very clean very tight copy with unmarked black cloth boards and no bumping to corners. 426pp. The author's thesis on what future generations might be like and how different they might be from ourselves. In particular he explores the creation of robots equipped with brains similar to ours and with the information extracted from our own brains. He calls these creatures 'ems'. We do not use stock photos, the picture displayed is of the actual book for sale. Every one of our books is in stock in the UK ready for immediate delivery. Size: 9.5 x 6.5 inches.

Seller Inventory # 024109

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Age of Em: Work, Love, and Life when Robots Rule the Earth
• Publisher: OUP Oxford
• Publication Date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0198754620
• ISBN 13: 9780198754626
• Binding: Hard Cover
• Edition: First Edition.
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket
• Seller catalogs:
  • Science / Engineering / Maths
  • Temp
  • Psychology

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

Robin Hanson, Associate Professor of Economics, George Mason University

Robin Hanson is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University, and a research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University. Professor Hanson has master's degrees in physics and philosophy from the University of Chicago, nine years experience in artificial intelligence research at Lockheed and N.A.S.A., a doctorate in social science from California Institute of Technology, 2800 citations, and sixty academic publications, in economics, physics, computer science, philosophy, and more. He blogs at OvercomingBias.com, and has pioneered the field of prediction markets since 1988.