Few. If you havent already done so, please turn off or silence your cell phone. Also help us improve the festival for next year by filling out a survey. There are also book sales over here to the right. We can do check and cash or paypal cash. On to the event. Doctor hansen is the author of the book, mordecai went robots rule the earth. Doctor hansen is the associate professor of economics. He has nine Years Experience as a research programmer. Obviously, he has Diverse Research interests including, but not limited to group instruction, product bands and the bioethics of healthcare. You can read more about his work on his book overcoming bias. He is one of the most original thinkers in the world. This fascinating account of our society is like nothing you will read anywhere else. Please help me welcome robin hansen. [applause] im going to give a short talk and we will have lots of time for questions and i know there will be lots of questions. No reading unless. [inaudible] this is all of history on one graph. On the x axis is the logarithm of time to sometime in the future and on the y access is the growth rate of the human economy and other things before. You notice it looks like a staircase. Humans started to million years ago and doubled at a steady rate and then there was a sudden transition when the growth rate jumped up by a factor of more than 50 by having farmers double roughly every 50 years. That happened about 10000 years ago and 200 years ago there was the Industrial Revolution and then the growth rate jumped up to double every 15 years, and thats what its been doing for the past few centuries. If this trend were to continue, then sometime in the next century, there would be a five year time period and during that time there would be a transition to an economy that instead of doubling every 15 years, doubled every month. That would last for a year or two and then Something Else would happen. It would change again. That would be the straightforward projection of previous trends. That sounds pretty crazy. The most dramatic scenario people have given for how the economy and society could change a lot are robots or artificial intelligence, machines as smart as people. I was an ai researcher for ten years from 84 until 93 and ive been in the habit of talking to people in that field who have been in the field for at least 20 years and ive been asking them, how how far has your field come in the past 20 years as a percentage of the distance of human level ability and they usually tell me five or 10 of the distance, no notable a cell ration. At that rate it would take two or four centuries for the median field to reach human level ability. That is short compared to the distance compared to the roman empire but not in your immediate future. Some say we will see much faster progress in the future. Im going to focus on a third scenario by which we might achieve smart robots. The idea is like porting software. Today if you have an old computer thats Running Software you like and you want to have Software Like that on the new computer, one approach is to stare at the old software and try to guess like how it works. Another approach is to write an emulator. This is a program on the new computer that makes the new one look like the old one for the software. If you can do that you can just move it straight over, run it there without understanding it, without knowing how it works, just move it. The idea is to do that same thing, port the software thats in the human brain. To do that we need three technologies to reach levels. We need lots of cheap fast parallel computers. To we need to take individual human brain and scan them and find spatial and chemical details to see what kind of cells are where, connected to what with which parameters, and then we need to have computer models, models of the inputoutput behavior of each kind of cell in the brain to assess how it takes signals in, changes internal space and send signal out, and if you have models for all the kind of cells in the brain and a good enough scan of a particular brain, then you can put together a model of that particular brain with all the chief computers, and if the models are good enough and the scan is good enough then by definition, the entire model should be good enough, it should have the same inputoutput behavior she can hook it up and you could then talk to it and it would talk back, it would act the same as the original in the same situation and if you can do that then you have a brain emulation and then everything could change. Now, ive been around people, talking about this idea for many decades. Its. Its a staple of Science Fiction when the subject comes up, people like to talk about is it even possible, which technology would make it happen, when would it happen. If you could make one, were to be conscious or is it just a machine pretty few could make an emulation of me, is it me, is it me or is it somebody else. Those are all fascinating questions that im going to ignore. I think there is a neglected question that gets set aside in all those conversation. How does the world change . There has been very little of that. Science fiction sometimes deals with but they just arent very listed. Think of three kinds of futurism one way to protect the future is to take trends like decreasing and increasing leisure, decreasing marriage and try to project and see what happens in the future. Another kind is you look for technologies that might disrupt trends when you ask when would that Technology Show up, what form what it take part how expensive would be. A third kind third kind of futurism is where you take one of those imagined Disruptive Technologies and you say how would the world change. A lot of the people who know how to do number two in technologies, they dont thing number three is possible because like me, when i was an undergraduate in physics, they were taught there is no such thing as social science. Nobody knows anything, its all bullshit. Im a professor of economics and i say its not, we do know things but i want to convince people it is possible to use social science to think about the future. This isnt a matter of academia. All the major fields and how theyre connected, their link to each other a lot. Whats relevant for our purposes is i am drawing on all these colored boxes for the purpose of this book. I have a diverse background and thats usually a penalty in academia but im trying to make a virtue out of it by writing a book that you can only write if you know a lot of different fields. This will allow me to take a different approach. Take the low hanging fruit. Going to go area by area looking for easy things to say, straightforward implications of standard results and when it gets hard i go on to the next area. Im to do it serious due everywhere and look for my keys under the lamppost print that is i make simplified assumptions as necessary to get concrete results. I will explain what those assumptions are. This is my last slide before i start tell you about the the age of em. First of all, im im trying not to be original or creative other than by asking this unusual question. What would happen if you had brain emulation. Im not trying to tell you what you should like or not like, its not my job to make you love it or hate it. Im just going to try to tell you what seems likely to happen if we follow the path of least resistance. Id be pleased of it sounded more like a history book and less like a comic book or a Science Fiction movie. Im in a focus on the robots because thats where most of the action is although we will talk about human print im not going to tell you about the entire history of the universe for the next trillion years. My ambition is only to tell you about the next great era after hours that is as different of our era. It may only last a year or two and something will happen and im not to talk about that. Im going to tell you about this era once theyre used to it. You know what this world is like. Youre comfortable with it. During the early Industrial Revolution they didnt know where was going print it was scared knows hard to predict what they were doing when. And in a focus after the transition on more of an equilibrium. As an economist, i will use our standard best first tool which is called supply and demand. Supply and demand assumes that whatever there is sold theres not much regulation. Thats what i mostly, im not saying there shouldnt be regulation this is just our best first tool to start with and we go on from there. Finally, im going to assume that these emulations are opaque and therefore simple. That is you could make the simulation, you could turn it on, but, but you can pick one persons music and combine it with someone elses christmas memories. You can just turn them on, turn them off, erase them, copy them, run them fast, them fast, run them slow. Thats it. Otherwise its just a black box. That means they behave a lot like an original human because thats all you can do with them. Those are my working assumptions now going to tell you about them as best i guess it. Some of my results are true for any world dominated by robots. They can be represented as computer files. Robots can be immortal. Today, houses and cars can be immortal. If you keep repairing them, they can last forever, but we dont. Just because they could be immortal doesnt mean they are. Electronic files can be sent across the world at the speed of light. Therefore robots can travel across the world at the speed of light because they can be represented as a computer file. You are afraid that if you kill nature you will die. Its a reasonable fear. Robots have or know that if they are made in factories and they accidentally kill nature, they do not die. They are therefore less afraid of killing nature. You can make copies of files. This has enormous implications. First of all, wages quickly fall that is the competition from all these copies can be easily made and it pushes wages down to the cost of renting new hardware. We will talk about humans in a moment. Because you can copy so quickly, the economy can grow much faster. In fact, standard economic theory says that if you can make substitutes for human workers in factories just as fast as you can make ordinary things we make today in factories, the economy can double every month. Thats not crazy. If it takes a year to get to mars and the economy doubles every month, we will just not bother. Its way too long of a delay. During the age of em, they wont bother with space or things far away on earth. Now, humans must retire. The animals will be concentrated in a small number of dense cities but the humans can have the rest of the earth, but they be outcompeted for their job by the emulation and so collectively, humans all lose their ability to earn earn wages. However they also earn this entire world so if the economy doubles every month, their wealth doubles every month. Humans get rich very fast collectively so whether anyone individually individual does okay depends on whether they have sufficient asset or sharing arrangement. My prediction is that because that has varied in the past it will vary again. Some will have sufficient and others wont. Emulation start out as human. Their mental and psychological characteristics are within the human range, but theyre not typical humans. The competitive emulation selects the few most productive humans and makes billions of copies of those. This means the typical emulation , they are off on the end. There elite. Probably most emulations are copies of the few hundred most productive humans. That makes emulations as elite as typical billionaires, nobel prize winners, olympic gold medalist. The typical emulation is that good and they know it. They may look back over on humans with nostalgia and gratitude but maybe not so much respect which, thats how you think about your ancestors. A lot of things that vary and correlate with whos more productive so i could just use those things to productive emulation furthermore conscientious, their workaholics, your peak age of productivity, they probably get up in the morning, their married , religious because these are all things that correlate with being more productive in our society. Most jobs in an advanced economy our desktops. Theres no point in putting them at a mechanical desk. You might as well let them stay in Virtual Reality because theyre already at a computer. You can give them a cheap Virtual Reality. They have luxurious environments where most of them work and leisure and they never need hunger, pain, their, their body is always beautiful, always looks young. Its a great world except they are hardworking, competitive emulations. Some of you when you were young, you may have looked around and thought i seem to be weird. I wonder if im from another planet. I wonder if someday i will meet people from my planet and then the be like me and then well get along. For the age of em this is true. Most of them are copy of the most productive humans so for each one you meet theres billions of others that all came from the original human. They have more in common with them than you might have with your identical twin. That has become the new unit of social organization that they can use for lawn politics and finance, and it will help them get more things done. Probably the most dramatic thing that ever happened to the human race so far was the transition from foraging to farmers. They were in rough equilibrium with their environment when they did what felt natural it was usually the right thing to do. When farming became possible, it was only possible because humans have a kind of culture and that culture could change until people that a new kind of attitude was right for them. Farming culture cranked up pressure to create a whole new set of values of the farming world. Farmers have a lot more inequality and lack of travel, more more work, et cetera, all things that forgers didnt like, the farmers get used to them. That cultural pressure that held farming in place weekend as we got rich. The last 200 years, as, as weve gotten rich, it just feels less compelling. In the old farming culture, if a young woman was told, if you have a child out of wedlock, you and your child may starve, that was a credible threat. Today when youre rich, satiety tells you that and you say i would survive, i would be okay. The cultural pressures have changed. We have forger trends in the last few centuries. We have a whole bunch of trends over the last few and the threats that made us and to farmers feel less compelling because were rich. Emulation, however, are not rich. Because they go back and because their culture needs them to act in ways that are not natural to forgers, they could probably go back to farming cell culture in many ways. The humans who are rich capitalists on the, they probably stay in a forger culture. This is your life. Simple. You start and then you end. This is the life of an emulation who every day, when theyre ready for work, they put honest small number of copies. The shortterm copies, they are all work. The mainline copy, they work and then have to pay for leisure to get ready for the next day but these other copies are all work. Even though they have a different disadvantage of not remembering, they are still more productive. So this is very tempting strategy. We will talk more about it in a minute. This is an, they make more copies of versions of themselves and they dont know which version sold will be so its a chaotic tree of life. This is an emulation designer. They conceive of the whole system throughout an Amusement Park and then they break into copy that elaborates the design of that all the way down to details. In this way a single emulation can do a much more integrated design than we can do today. One person designed to and other people implement it. This is an emulation plumber. He remembers for the past 20 years they only ever work two hours a day, a life of leisure. Every day when they were ready for work, they made a thousand copies of this plumber each of whom did a twohour plumbing job and only one of them went on to the next day. Objectively, this plumber is working over 99 of the time. Subjectively, they remember a life of leisure. They can be working very hard but that doesnt mean they remember that way or see it that way. We know of many systems Like Software which has the feature that as they adapt to a particular circumstance they become fragile and harder to re adapt. This applies not just to software but the products and species and to the human race. Human race started out young, able to eat learn many things but not learning much. Knowing a lot harder to learn. Possibly thats not just because of biological aging but its also because of this general feature that we see in software. Because of this the probably agent have a limited career life. They may be able to live forever indefinitely in retirement, but they have to retire after a certain time, perhaps this is an century or two of work life after which they need to be replaced by other copies that are trained in other ways. They see younger and older versions of themselves that live in the same city, do the same job and they have a really good idea of where their future is going and whether its going to work out. They have all these versions. Again, this is you, this could be you if at the beginning of a party you to the drug that said the next day or forever after you would not remember that party. Some people do this voluntarily they tell me. Now ask yourself, near the end of the party, would you say to yourself, im about to die. Or you could say to yourself im going to continue tomorrow, i just wont remember what i did today. Those are both possible attitude you could take. Im guessing most of you would take the second one but theyre both available as possibilities. This is the same structure, and this is for an emulation with a shortterm copy that stands in line at the dmv. They could think of themselves as new creature with a short life which they hate and theyre going to fight it or they could think of it as a part of themselves that they wont remember. I predict this will be their actual attitude not because its the correct view but just because they can encompass many possible views and the culture will greatly reward the second view is this will help in competition. Now, even if you are okay with ending and not remembering what you did, if people around you dont seem to remember what they talk to about that, that that would frustrate them. The simple solution would be to have them Work Together and and or retire together. Today, its hard to meet celebrities. Their time is limited. With emulations, if you want to meet a celebrity is easy. They just make another copy and you meet at celebrity. Whats hard to do is have that celebrity remember you. We can use this however. Today the president said we must invade