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Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, February 2, 2015 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

Robin Hanson

"Social Implications of Brain Emulation"

ABSTRACT -- Can we foresee the future? Some say that while we can project some social trends, and dimly see outlines of some disruptive future techs, we just can’t foresee social implications of disruptive techs. To show these views wrong, I take an oft-mentioned disruptive future tech and study its social consequences in great breadth and detail. The tech is: artificial intelligence in the form of whole brain emulations, a.k.a. "uploads" or "ems," sometime in the next century. I attempt a broad synthesis of standard academic consensus, including in business and social science, to outline a baseline scenario set modestly far into a post-em-transition world. I consider computer architecture, energy use, cooling infrastructure, mind speeds, body sizes, security strategies, virtual reality conventions, labor market organization, management focus, job training, career paths, wage competition, identity, retirement, life cycles, reproduction, mating, conversation habits, wealth inequality, city sizes, growth rates, coalition politics, governance, law, and war.

SPEAKER -- Robin Hanson is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University, a research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University, and chief scientist at Consensus Point.

After receiving his Ph.D. in social science from the California Institute of Technology in 1997, Robin was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation health policy scholar at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1984, Robin received a masters in physics and a masters in the philosophy of science from the University of Chicago, and afterward spent nine years researching artificial intelligence, Bayesian statistics, and hypertext publishing at Lockheed, NASA, and independently.

His interests and published papers cover spatial product competition, health incentive contracts, group insurance, product bans, evolutionary psychology and bioethics of health care, voter information incentives, incentives to fake expertize, Bayesian classification, agreeing to disagree, self-deception in disagreement, probability elicitation, wiretaps, image reconstruction, the history of science prizes, reversible computation, the origin of life, the survival of humanity, very long term economic growth, growth given machine intelligence, and interstellar colonization.


Engineering Colloquium home page: https://ecolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov