Reddit Reddit reviews The Age of Em: Work, Love, and Life when Robots Rule the Earth

We found 7 Reddit comments about The Age of Em: Work, Love, and Life when Robots Rule the Earth. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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The Age of Em: Work, Love, and Life when Robots Rule the Earth
Oxford University Press
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7 Reddit comments about The Age of Em: Work, Love, and Life when Robots Rule the Earth:

u/taktoa · 2 pointsr/math

The Age of Em by Robin Hanson is pretty good. It's basically the worldbuilding for a science fiction world so hard (as in "hard scifi") that it has regular citations.

u/FeepingCreature · 2 pointsr/transhumanism

I see you've read Age of Em.

u/Shaffness · 2 pointsr/Futurology

You're not wrong, read The Age of Em by Robin Hanson for more info on the topic.

u/roe_ · 2 pointsr/FeMRADebates

This will be the third such large-scale social transition.

The first was from foraging to agriculture - humans had to transition from hunting game/foraging and working relatively few hours to working the soil and working many hours.

Then the industrial transition describe here.

The lives of agricultural and industrial people look utterly alien to foraging people. (Arguably, the story of genesis is an allegory about the transition to agriculture). For example, from Scott Alexander's review of Empire of the Summer Moon:

> So there was a bit of traffic back and forth between America and Comancheria in the 19th century. White people being captured and raised by Comanches. The captives being recaptured years later and taken back into normal white society. Indians being defeated and settled on reservations and taught to adopt white lifestyles. And throughout the book's description of these events, there was one constant:

>All of the white people who joined Indian tribes loved it and refused to go back to white civilization. All the Indians who joined white civilization hated it and did everything they could to go back to their previous tribal lives.

>There was much to like about tribal life. The men had no jobs except to occasionally hunt some buffalo and if they felt courageous to go to war. The women did have jobs like cooking and preparing buffalo, but they still seemed to be getting off easy compared to the white pioneer women or, for that matter, women today. The whole culture was nomadic, basically riding horses wherever they wanted through the vast open plains without any property or buildings or walls. And everyone was amazingly good at what they did; the Comanche men were probably the best archers and horsemen in the history of history, and even women and children had wilderness survival and tracking skills that put even the best white frontiersmen to shame. It sounds like a life of leisure, strong traditions, excellence, and enjoyment of nature, and it doesn't surprise me that people liked it better than the awful white frontier life of backbreaking farming and endless religious sermons.

However idyllic the word "artisan" seems, it's nowhere near as idyllic as the prospect of living like a foraging person is.

Quoth Robin Hanson from the introduction to The Age of Em:

> Like most of your kind, you probably feel superior to your ancestors. Oh, you don't blame them for learning what they were taught. But you'd shudder to hear of many of your distant farmer ancestors' habits and attitudes on sanitation, sex, marriage, gender, religion, slavery, war, bosses, inequality, nature, conformity, and family obligations. And you'd also shudder to hear of many habits and attitudes of your even more ancient forager ancestors. Yes, you admit that lacking your wealth your ancestors couldn't copy some of you habits. Even so, you tend to think that humanity has learned that your ways are better. That is, you believe in social and moral progress.

> The problem is, the future will probably hold new kinds of people. Your descendants' habits and attitudes are likely to differ from yours by as much as yours differ from your ancestors. If you understood just how different your ancestors were, you'd realize that you should expect your descendants to seem quite stranger. Historical fiction misleads you, showing your ancestors as more modern than they were. Science fiction similarly misleads you about your descendants.

(If you want to feel both of these things at once, try reading science fiction written in the '50's)

Point of all this: we can't look to the past as a guide to how we'll be in the future.

u/dr_adder · 2 pointsr/printSF

The Age of Em, no real plot in this one but its more of a thought experiment about a future with high level AI's and what it would be like.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Age-Em-Work-Robots-Earth/dp/0198754620/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1474400774&sr=8-1&keywords=the+age+of+em

u/lsparrish · 1 pointr/todayilearned

Note that Drexler who coined the phrase, doesn't believe in the nanobot-goo scenario any more. He does believe in desktop-scale machines that can replicate themselves, though.

Larger scale self replicating systems are a bit more likely, since they don't depend on nanotech. Instead they are just what happens when you automate the industrial economy from beginning to end (then, optionally, cut out the bits that aren't essential to replicating). Once you get that snake swallowing its tail, you have a self replicating system.

In Robin Hanson's Age of Em he says the duplication time for normal machine shop type machinery is about 1-3 months. Compared to the current doubling rate of robots (about 6 years) that's quite fast. The economy as a whole seems to currently double more slowly still, probably because of the many tasks still done by humans.

In any case, a space based replicating swarm could be a very beneficial thing to humanity, and would work a heck of a lot more efficiently for getting us an off planet foothold than if you manufacture everything on the ground and launch it, even at SpaceX reduced prices. We would want to program very strict safeguards to prevent it from becoming uncontrolled (and hence grey goo), but there are some pretty solid cryptographic approaches to that. We aren't talking about an exact equivalent to protein based viruses and bacteria here, but a digital copying mechanism (which we know can be stabilized with checksums and hashes -- that's what our computers do, particularly when transmitting via the internet).

The main source of material would probably be the asteroids (near-earth ones initially). For some of the high tech components that don't weigh very much, like computer chips, we would (at first) rely on payloads of a few tons at a time launched from earth. Also, shortcomings in the AI could be met by having human teleoperators control the robots directly from earth. This would favor keeping the swarm (or at least, the more complicated parts of it) in near-earth orbits such as LEO, MEO, and GEO, where there are short time delays for communications.

As the AI improves and the swarm grows, and/or as humans form colonies in space, swarms could be deployed to large materials/energy sources further away. It has been suggested that we could use mass from Mercury to form a solar power collection swarm surrounding the entire Sun, for example. (Nearer the sun, power collection apparatus tends to be more efficient, so the bulk of the swarm may end up being positioned at Mercury distance or closer.) The time needed to fully surround the sun would only be a few decades if the doubling rate is a year or less.

So here you can see where people start turning into wild-eyed singularitarians. Once you accept that factories can be fully automated and that industrial processes can be adapted to space, a huge upcoming leap in material processing capacity -- and computational processing as a result -- starts to look kind of inevitable.