#136: The Age of Emulation

Tech Policy Podcast

TechFreedom

Technology

4.8 • 45 Ratings

🗓️ 28 October 2016

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A robot-driven world is often a mainstay of science fiction titles like Terminator and I, Robot. While that future may be far off, emulations — computers that scan and reproduce human brains — could be the first step into the age of robotics. Their society could evolve at the pace of software, not hardware or biology — allowing for radical transformations in less time than it takes humans to get their dry cleaning back. So what might an emulation-based society look like? How would emulation technology affect how humans live in the future? Joining Berin to discuss is Professor Robin Hanson of George Mason University, author of The Age of Em: Work, Love, and Life when Robots Rule the Earth. For more, see the book’s website.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to the Tech Policy Podcast. I'm not Evan Swartzraver. I'm Baron Soka. I've fired Evan
0:09.1	finally, and we'll be taking over the podcast, at least for today. Evan might be back for our next
0:13.7	episode. We'll see. I'm recording from lovely Aspen, Colorado here at the Tech Policy Institute's
0:19.8	conference about tech policy. And I have with me
0:22.8	today, Robin Hansen of George Mason University, the author of The Age of M. Robin, welcome to the show.
0:29.9	Age of M, work, love, and life when robots rule the earth. So what's M?
0:35.3	M is short for emulation. It's one of the kinds of artificial intelligence.
0:39.8	So the book is about what happens if the first kind of human level artificial intelligence
0:44.6	comes from brain emulations.
0:47.7	A brain emulation is where you take a particular human brain
0:51.1	and you make a computer model of that brain with the same sort of
0:55.0	connections, the same kind of cells, but now it's a computer model that processes signals the
1:00.2	same way.
1:01.0	So that's a little different from what most people talk about when they talk about the killer
1:04.7	AI or the idea that superintelligence is going to displace humans. You're talking about something
1:09.6	that's more of, shall we say, an adaptive innovation, it looks more like humans? I think people are usually not
1:16.2	entirely clear what they mean. They say something really smart and they're not very specific
1:20.9	about what they have in mind. But the most obvious scenario is to take the kindest software we've
1:25.6	been writing for 70 years and imagine that gets much
1:27.8	better. So that, that makes a more specific scenario. And yes, this is different from that scenario.
1:32.4	This is not code that you write and then you can go look up line 476 and see which characters are there
1:37.3	and edit it. This is, you take a messy brain and you just make a copy and turn it on.
	...

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