The Age of Em
- I'm afraid that extrapolating features from the currently most productive humans will in fact tell us too little. Yes, ems will be 10 percent more X, but for the most Xs other changes will modify X by a larger percentage.
2. I'm also not convinced that even pre-selected ems will be uber-rational enough to do things like all those complicated dances with the correct backup timing all the time: flossing has become a habit, but paying bills on time hasn't.
3. Moreover, if a world is mostly populated with lots of copies of only several hundred ems, individual peculiarities are more important than overall trends.
4. If the first ems are created with the destruction of their originals, they probably have some other unusual qualities; however, they probably aren't of great importance in the later society.
5. Would a charity collecting spurs and running them as micros or slower be economically feasible?
6. On the other hand, retirement even at the 1/100th of the overall em world speed seems hard. If I want to have at least ten years, I need the outside world to be stable for its one thousand years. Even leaving existential risks aside, institutions surviving this long are a new challenge.
7. Being able to copy a single great specialist many times may in fact increase opportunities for occupational licensing and certifications (assuming a clan or a single em can reliably forbid making new copies of them).
8. By the way, since piracy almost directly leads to slavery, humanity should become much better at computer security for the healthy em society to arise (or at least a single healthy em society).
9. However, I would expect that the em culture is extremely fragmented (including attitudes to enslaved ems, spurs and death).
10. Continuity and consciousness overall still seem to be the most important questions (is reversing myself to a backup a suicide?).
11. At the very least, ems would be a great boost for experimental social sciences.
I'm very interested in talking to a person who has read The Age of Em before reading any Overcoming Bias posts.
June 14, 2016Report this review