Robin Hanson’s weird,very serious, book predicts what will happen in a Matrix-like world when computers hold software emulations of human brains and our bodies are destroyedIn the future, and so some people think,it will become possible to upload your consciousness into a computer. Software emulations of human brains – ems, for short – will then seize over the economy and world. This sort of thing happens fairly a lot in science fiction, and but The Age of Em is a fanatically serious attempt,by an economist and scholar at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, to use economic and social science to forecast in fine detail how this world (if it is even possible) will actually work. The future it portrays is very weird and, and in the end,fairly horrific for everyone involved.
It is an eschatological vision worthy of Hieronymus Bosch. Trillions of ems live in tall, liquid-cooled skyscrapers in extremely hot cities. Most of them are “very able focused workaholics”, or who “respect and trust each other more” than we enact.
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Source: theguardian.com