| In a compelling TED talk, economist Robin Hanson discusses how the future, with artificial intelligence, immortal robots and uploaded human brain emulations will create a fast-moving and very different world. |
Robin Hanson is a Professor of Economics at the George Mason University in the US and a researcher at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University.
In the compelling TED talk above, Hanson, who also spoke at the 2012 Singularity Summit, ventures in to the future where robots, artificial intelligence and human brain emulations dominate the economy. In a brief amount of time, Hanson covers a great amount of detail on how this future vision might play out. The ideas presented in this talk will also be the theme of Hanson's next book, which he is currently finishing.
To go along with this talk, Hanson also offered a Robot Econ Primer, with the following key points:
This last point, of course, varies considerably from the opinion of Hugo de Garis, who predicts the The Artilect War with accompanying 'giga-death.'
AI takes software, not just hardware. It is tempting to project when artificial intelligence (AI) will arrive by projecting when a million dollars of computer hardware will have a computing power comparable to a human brain. But AI needs both hardware and software. It might be that when the software is available, AI will be possible with today’s computer hardware.AI software progress has been slow. [Hanson's] small informal survey of AI experts finds that they typically estimate that in the last 20 years their specific subfield of AI has gone ~5-10% of the way toward human level abilities, with no noticeable acceleration. At that rate it will take centuries to get human level AI.
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Emulations might bring AI software sooner. Human brains already have human level software. It should be possible to copy that software into computer hardware, and it seems likely that this will be possible within a century.
Emulations would be sudden and human-like. Since having an almost emulation probably isn’t of much use, emulations can make for a sudden transition to a robot economy. Being copies of humans, early emulations are more understandable and predictable than robots more generically, and many humans would empathize deeply with them.
Growth rates would be much faster. Our economic growth rates are limited by the rate at which we can grow labor. Whether based on emulations or other AI, a robot economy could grow its substitute for labor much faster, allowing it to grow much faster (as in an AK growth model). A robot economy isn’t just like our economy, but with robots substituted for humans. Things would soon change very fast.
There probably won’t be a grand war, or grand deal. The past transitions from foraging to farming and farming to industry were similarly unprecedented, sudden, and disruptive. But there wasn’t a grand war between foragers and farmers, or between farmers and industry, though in particular wars the sides were somewhat correlated. There also wasn’t anything like a grand deal to allow farming or industry by paying off folks doing things the old ways. The change to a robot economy seems too big, broad, and fast to make grand overall wars or deals likely, though there may be local wars or deals.
Hanson is an expert on prediction markets and the social implications of future technologies, e.g. artificial intelligence and nano-technology and their influence on the economy and society. Much of Hanson's ideas and can be found on his blog, Overcoming Bias.
Politically he supports futarchy -- a society where policy decisions are made based on open prediction markets.
Hanson has a diverse background: he has a Bachelor's and Master's degree in physics but a PhD in social sciences. He has researched the artificial intelligence and Bayesian statistics at NASA and developed a prediction market predicting the political stability, economic growth and military activity of foreign countries for the US Department of Defense.
Hanson's ideas often cause controversial reactions, as the video above might with you, and he wishes to find ways to more effectively decentralize the government's tasks.
SOURCE TEDx Talks
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