that we consume. thank you. >> thank you. cspan, where history history unfolds daily. in 1979, cspan was created as a public service by america's public cable television companies. it is brought to you today by your cable or satellite provider >> all right, we will get started. hello and welcome to robin hansen at the literary festival. we appreciate your attendance today. our festival runs through september 30. for the most up-to-date information including a calendar, please visit fall for the books.org. we also touch community throughout the year through other programming such as the riders in schools program, the new leads writer conference and the alumni run just to name a

few. if you haven't 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] >> i'm 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 that's what it's 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 i've been in the habit of talking to people in that field who have been in the field for at least 20 years and i've 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. i'm 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 that's 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 that's 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

input-output 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 input-output 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, i've been around people, talking about this idea for many decades. it's. it's 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 i'm 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 aren't 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 don't 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, it's all bullshit. i'm a professor of economics and i say it's not, we do know things but i want to convince people it is possible to use social science to think about the future. this isn't a matter of academia. all the major fields and how they're connected, their link to each other a lot. what's 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 that's usually a penalty in academia but i'm 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. i'm 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, i'm i'm trying not to be original or creative other than by asking this unusual question. what would happen if you had brain emulation. i'm not trying to tell you what you should like or not like, it's not my job to make you love it or hate it. i'm just going to try to tell you what seems likely to happen if we follow the path of least resistance. i'd be pleased of it sounded more like a history book and less like a comic book or a science fiction movie. i'm in a focus on the robots

because that's where most of the action is although we will talk about human print i'm 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 i'm not to talk about that. i'm going to tell you about this era once they're used to it. you know what this world is like. you're comfortable with it. during the early industrial revolution they didn't 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 there's not much regulation. that's what i mostly, i'm not saying there shouldn't be

regulation this is just our best first tool to start with and we go on from there. finally, i'm 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 person's music and combine it with someone else's christmas memories. you can just turn them on, turn them off, erase them, copy them, run them fast, them fast, run them slow. that's it. otherwise it's just a black box. that means they behave a lot like an original human because that's 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 don't. just because they could be immortal doesn't 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. it's 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. that's not crazy. if it takes a year to get to mars and the economy doubles every month, we will just not bother. it's way too long of a delay. during "the age of em", they won't 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 won't. emulation start out as human. their mental and psychological characteristics are within the human range, but they're 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, that's how you think about your ancestors. a lot of things that vary and correlate with who's 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. there's no point in putting them at a mechanical desk. you might as well let them stay in virtual reality because they're 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. it's a great world except they are hard-working, competitive emulations. some of you when you were young, you may have looked around and thought i seem to be weird. i wonder if i'm from another planet. i wonder if someday i will meet people from my planet and then the be like me and then we'll 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 there's 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 didn't 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 we've 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 you're 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 they're ready for work, they put honest small number of copies. the short-term 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 don't know which version sold will be so it's 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 two-hour 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 doesn't 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 that's not just because of biological aging but it's 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 it's 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, i'm about to die. or you could say to yourself i'm going to continue tomorrow, i just won't remember what i did today. those are both possible attitude you could take. i'm guessing most of you would take the second one but they're both available as possibilities. this is the same structure, and this is for an emulation with a short-term copy that stands in line at the dmv. they could think of themselves as new creature with a short life which they hate and they're going to fight it or they could think of it as a part of themselves that they won't remember. i predict this will be their actual attitude not because it's 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 don't 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, it's 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. what's hard to do is have that celebrity remember you. we can use this however. today the president said we must invade iraq and they say why, we can't tell you. you'll be in trouble. simulations can do the following track.

a citizen makes a copy of themselves and goes into the safe and the president makes a copy and goes in the safe. inside the safe they can explain all of their secret reasons and at the end, the entire safe is erased except for one bit and the one bit is was i persuaded. either i was or was not persuaded by this argument. now you can find out and believe things even though they can't know the actual reason. in your life today, you have three things. you have a youth where you train, a middle life where you're the most productive in retirement "after words". emulations have those same three phases, but they can train a few copies in the make many copies of those training so they can afford put a lot of resources and training. then, if they're not rich when they retire and they're starving to death, they can just retire slow. emulations can run faster slow and the cost of running an emulation is proportional over a wide range. if you run ten times lower, you cost ten times less. emulations can retire at a slow speed. that means as soon as they

retire, the world around them starts beating up, up and they care about civilization at that point. now, this range at which speed is proportional to cost probably goes up at least a million times there's a huge range of speed. they probably clump in two classes of speed so we can interact with each other's. and, faster emulations are high status. they embody more wealth, they host meetings and get in arguments and know things. they are just high. this is a class hierarchy where those of the top do have objective reasons for saying they're better. they are able to just do a lot more because the faster. down at the bottom is mostly retirees and they are like the ghost of our literature. if you recall, in literature, ghosts are creatures that are all around, rarely able to interact with them, sometimes you could, but what's the point

because they don't know much, the can't do much and they aren't really useful allies. there kind of obsessed with the past, their shields are out of date. all you can do is just have a weird conversation. that's what the retirees are like, a whole world of ghost and the ghost have their own goes because there's things even slower than them and that's the weird world of "the age of em". today we clump in, this is valuable but when we double the size of a city, we get 34% more traffic congestion. person which limits having big cities. however for emulations, they can meet with anybody in a city in virtual reality without actually sending themselves of their brain. they can just send the bit that represents the meeting so they have much less transport for travel cost. today, if you are interactive

with anybody on the earth, human see the signal delay and there's less reaction time so you don't actually have to know where they are. when emulations run faster than us, they're running 16 times faster and they need to be within a thousand kilometers so they cannot notice where they are. this puts a limit on how fast they can go. if they go too fast, then then they start having fewer people they can interact with. however, if they run too slow, then the skills they develop early in their career quickly irrelevant because the economy changes to faster there's a sweet spot which is roughly a thousand times human speed. in the one or two years of the immolation era, they would experience thousands of years. there is plenty of time for cultural change in lots of events to happen this is my last slide. many of you i'm quite sure attempted to evaluate this world

and decide whether you like it or not. but think, your ancestors from a thousand years ago would have loved north hated your world depending on the first few things they heard about it because it's so easy to have a reaction. your world is just weird to them and this was weird to you. otherwise, just pause and try to see the world and its full full complexity before you make a quick evaluation. these pluses and minuses will give you some reminders. first remember, in virtual reality, no pain, hunger, disease, beautiful bodies, bodies, they're not afraid of death. they have a vast population, many of you have set i couldn't live in a small town because it's just not enough going on there. there biggest city would be so much bigger than yours and they would say that. a larger economy can afford to develop and pay more fixed costs. the world seems more stable to them. these are all pluses perhaps on

the minus sign, they are living at modest wages. this is how most of your ancestors lived is not a hypotheticals tile. it's a standard scenario in history. they worked long hours, they often make short-term copies. they are perhaps less nature, less space culture, more religion. again, not my job to make you love it or hate it, just telling you roughly what i guess. if you do nothing, you're welcome to change it or try. now, i'm sure you have many questions and comments to discuss. >> you suggested that in this

world humans are the rich class. i guess i don't understand why they would tolerate that state of affairs. >> today and for a long time, we have seen high levels of ownership and equality. it's just been one of the features of the world for a long time. clearly at has existed and been stable for a long time so i think it could continue to exist and be stable. >> these are copies of the most impressive human. >> so there's two kinds of success in this world to think about. mostly, when we think about inequality in and the, we think about some individuals being richer than other individuals. success in this world is that some humans had more descendents than others. each descendent typically has about the same personal income. there's very little variant in the wages that they make. the variation is who has how many descendents. there's also variation on capital but that's the kind of

variation we are ready have now. the emulation starts to have more the capital because we arty know that absentee owners get lower rate return the accommodation and the. [inaudible] they will get higher rates of return on their investment and so slowly they will have a larger fraction of the well. that will take some time. the humans would also lose out because they are so clueless and outside they will just be exploited and mismanaged investments and they will lose their wealth faster. they're still a time where humans use their wealth. we already have lots of rich retirees in our world and we could say to ourselves, what are they doing for a spread let's kill them and take their stuff. it's something we could say, but we don't so that sets a precedent, perhaps for a while that humans could be rich retirements.

let's take your plumber example. you had a bunch of plumbers working two hours a day and one of them survives. the first question is, how do do you decide which one survives. second, your scenario was train, work, retire. you can't learn everything in a training period. you have to learn on the job. how does that one surviving plumber consolidate the information from the hundred other jobs that they were doing so that he can continue to learn and become a better plumber or whatever. related to that, humans do need some downtime and presumably emulations would need downtime as well. other than numbers, they wouldn't necessarily work all the time. that's why i described them as having a break at the end of the

workday, which i described as being expensive which is why it's tempting to not have all the copies continue onto the next day. there is a trade-off in productivity. compared to somebody who works 12 hours a day and then takes 12 hours to rest, these five copies, they are half as tough. hour. that's a huge temptation. you also don't learn as much from them but that could be worth a factor to as well. you have enough that they know how to do their job well and then you're willing to pay for having these other copies that are much cheaper and so you make the right trade-off between learning as much as you need to do your job well and doing it as cheaply as possible but i'm only making as many learning versions as you need. that's how the economy would make that choice. they would deftly have leisure. in terms of which ones continue, you ask yourself, what would you

do. you are the first copy, you decide what happens the next day. how do you want to go? if you can't manage to do this, than actually when these copies do your job, then you aren't a very good candidate for this world. it's full of people who find a way to do the scenario and find a way that's okay with them and probably the simplest way is random which one goes on to the next day or random enough that all of them think they have a chance and they remember a history where they were the one who was picked. >> why should it be me instead of you. why when that just create, have you ever gone to vegas, why should it be used in some of the else. but i refuse to die. >> what to think would happen in this world of people discovered certain types of past could not be completed by people who only had a couple hours.

>> those jobs will cost more. so, in the world, even today, there some jobs that can be automated and once we find a job that we automate, were willing to do that a lot more because it's a lot cheaper. for jobs that are more expensive, we do them less because they're expensive. which jobs are more expensive in this world changes. in this world, engineers make the same as genders. pretty much all professions make the same wages in this world which is quite different than our world. they choose fewer lawyers than janitors, or more janitors because all the things that are expensive in our world get really cheap in their world. all the highest-paid professions , the people who do them charge a lot, here they are all just as cheap as any other job. >> how is death handled? you just will yourself out of resistance existence. >> just to be clear, there are

two options when a productive cycle is over. one is simply a race and another is retirement. if you retire at 1000 the speed, it only cost 1000's as much. if you're worried about being erased, just retire and it's very cheap. some emulations will be okay with the racing and they will do that. those do that. those were not will retire slow. >> i'm wondering socially, the implication of having one of your spurs murder the predecessor like, because you say it's random, it could be random. >> it doesn't have to be essential choice. each can decide for themselves. you can figure out what works for you in terms of which copies you make, what they do and how you turn it back. if you're not okay of any process you're at a competitive disadvantage. those who figure out some way to manage it, they they continue on

for there could be a diversity of ways they do it. it doesn't have to be all one way. so whatever works for them. i do predict some people will find a way to do it. some people will be okay with that. this world will be full of people like that. just because i already know, you guys are mostly okay with not remembering the party thing. you're willing to see yourself at the party last week, who you don't remember, as you and at the party you're willing to see that future person as units but in much the same structure so i pick some people will be okay with it. other aren't, then they are here. it's just a straight forward selection argument. again it's not my job, it's just my job to tell you what it's like. >> in order to become a candidate for them, does the copy have to be a deceased person or you can just copy anyone's brain. >> so technology will change over time. at the very beginning, most likely the effective scanning technology is destructive.

that is, you would destroy a brain in the process of reading all its details in order to become an emulation. at that early. it's quite a choice. you are choosing between continuing a human life or becoming an emulation. worse, very quickly, quickly, the emulation world will mostly want children so you'd have the large wealthy powers approaching human adults who have promising human children sang could we scan your child so they have a chance to be trained to become a successful emulation. that has a lot of potential for drama and conflict but i predict some of them will do it and their world will be full of descendents of those children, one way or another. [inaudible]

>> i would think of it like we are people who get into cars sometimes but we need to be in cars. when we need a car we get in a car or person driving a car, we don't we get out of the car were not in the car anymore. the emulation as we get into a physical body as appropriate for whatever task is needed and they couldn't switch on a minute by minute basis if they needed to. those doing physical task like managing a factory or driving a truck or whatever it is, they would need a body appropriate for that task, but only while they're doing the task that the body needs. then the body could be any sort of body that was a appropriate for the task. it wouldn't have to look human. rich virtual reality can make their body look anyway they want

>> if you make many copies of the same original brain, will all of those brains have the same feelings and emotions. >> so by definition, an emulation of a brain is capable of all the same processes that the original brain is which includes learning and remembering and changing moods so when you scan an original brain, it has some initial state , but what it had for breakfast, its mood at that moment, what it remembers from the last day, and when you turn on emulation that starts in that state remembering those, but if it has a few days or years experience, and become somebody else. it becomes a new a new creature who has a new set of expensive. by assumption, these have all the same emotions and emotional reactions because they are emulations of the same original. by definition, an emulation of the original does the same thing in the same situation. the reason why an emulation becomes different later is

because it has had a different life and lived in a different world. because of that world to become something different. it's still within the human range of expense pretty can think about what a human would do in these circumstances and that's helpful and thinking about what the emulations would do, if that makes sense. [inaudible] >> i told you the low end of the speed race probably goes down to 1 billion. that's because that's roughly the speed where the cost of running a human speed emulation is basically 1 billion the cost of saving and archive copy. archive copies are actually really cheap. at 1% of the the cost at five minutes experience, you can put off and archive copy every five minutes. they just have a lot of archive copies sitting around, each

archive copy doesn't expect it will ever be revived, it's available to be revived but it doesn't have a good reason to expect it will be so when a copy is made of you, unless you were told to expect something, you just remember being who you were at the time the copy was made. >> most archive copies are static. they're available to be run again, if you want to turn it on and run it. running very slow ends up being, it's like not running at all. the very slow retirees are somewhat in an intermediate state where they can experience the world, but it's going so fast that at least they don't have to be scared there attending, but they do have to worry about whether or not the civilization is stable when the time comes. >> so is there an objective means of deciding who is better than who.

so if i'm competitive and i have legacy copies of myself sitting in these spaces, even though they're running, and my expected, as a legacy to just be okay with being objectively. [inaudible] forever. >> this is not a centralized world. i'm an economist using economics of one basic feature of economics is that we analyze world where nobody's in charge. nobody runs the world. there are lots of separate powers, each of whom run their own part of it and they get to choose how they run it. there's a competition that puts pressure on them to not do things too far away from what is more efficient, but they they can do things in a variety of different ways. inside your clan, you can have whatever rules you want to have about deciding which copies you revive when and when you turn them off and what you do with them. it's up to you, but you are under pressure, like a firm

would be to figure out an efficient way to do this so just like today and affirm, there's a process for deciding who does what job. that process has some people doing more jobs than other. some people get paid more than others and is various ways to decide that but pretty much everyone sorts themselves into some world were those decisions get made somehow. i'm trying to analyze the net consequences of these decisions and not pick exactly who goes what where. >> when they awaken, because trends had already changed so much, what they realize that there already less effective now and would they be able to still do anything. would they be.

>> when you have a range of copies available and archive and you're wondering which one is most of britt for a task, you have a number of considerations. one is whoever was just doing that task a moment ago is probably a good candidate so you're tempted to just keep on with whoever was doing it, but we have other options. if that other one seems to be getting older and frail and fragile, maybe want to replace it with the younger virgin. then there will be a transition cost and maybe they aren't up on the latest skills but their younger more flexible so you're willing to pay that cost of paying for the transition to have somebody else in the role. this is how we do it on jobs today and most firms. some of these doing a job but we don't always have the same person do the same job. sometimes we swap and some of the else to do a job and sometimes that's because we want our younger person to come in

who learns new ways and has flexibility to take over. it's the same sort of thing. you have a range of options in your choosing which one seem to be best suited for the role. >> is each one of these living in their own virtual reality and unaware that they are copy. >> no. many of you have seen movies of humans and other creatures in virtual reality and of course there's a favorite story in a virtual reality where somebody is in virtual reality but they don't know it. or they once knew but they don't care anymore because they're in this fantastic created world. emulations could live in fantastic created worlds for them, but who's going to pay for it is the key question. most people need to work most of the time to just exist. they need a spot on the computer hardware. they need to rent a slot in that computer hardware to exist. that means they need to pay for that rental or they need to pay for the hardware, the energy, the cooling, repair, taxes, they needed income to pay for all

that stuff. most of them need to be working most of the time to pay for that. in their free time, when they they have free time, they can do whatever they want but on work and when they're socializing with colleagues and friends, they need to be in the same virtual reality because that's how work and friendship work. most of the time most of them are in shared virtual realities with others which can be beautiful and comfortable but they need to compromise on the details because they can't all be in charge. >> you have to ask yourself, if if this were actually the world, this would be a very expensive simulation. all of you people are just not very useful for doing what this world needs but they're paying for all of you to run your mind here yet what value are they getting credits just not a very plausible scenario to be running you in this situation situation to get these things done. and a big enough world some strange with rich person wants to run something and maybe you're one of those but how many

of those could there be. >> do you think a detailed virtual reality would be less expensive than a sophisticated program because, i don't know if it's a trivial question where there's a virtual reality where people socialize in a manner they find enjoyable would necessarily be a much much easier computer program that a human brain that has opinions. >> i think we could say if you want to simulate a world like we see here in enough detail that even an expert using expert materials and test couldn't tell the difference, that could be very expensive. on the other other hand, we have

seen people function in second life and virtual realities and video games which are vastly less than the cost of running your brain and they seem to function okay to be able to function enjoy themselves in these environments that are enormously less in competing costs. again, we are now not able to run a brain. brains are really expensive yet all of you have video games running on tiny hardware that actually produce okay environment. it looks like it's quite easy. >> because everything is on computers in a virtual world, what a human be able to create a virus or some something that could fundamentally change

others to corrupt what makes them being or change their morality on a fundamental level. >> in economics when we do supply and demand, our usual first assumption is that property rights are preserved and that theft and war doesn't happen, but of of course we are quickly able to move past that model and understand the world were theft in war does happen. in the world we live in now, we have a modest degree of theft and a modest degree of war, and that cost a few percentage points for the economy, but it's a relatively small small correction. the emulation world looks like it's capable of having enough protection of property rights that they could only have to pay a few percentage points of their economy to keep most things safe and to suffer sometimes when things don't. i would say, again, they, they don't care about ending copies when there's other close copies nearby but they care about mine theft. if somebody grabs a copy as it

goes along, they can do things bad to you. they could make this copy compete with you and take away your wealth. stolen copy of you are bad things in this world will dislike stolen copies and they will work much harder to prevent theft of copies of brains so this would be a great moral outrage to them. that is less of an issue than theft. >> what did you change your mind about while you are writing a book. another words what assumptions did you have going in that you didn't have going out. >> i guess i didn't fully appreciate how weird things would be. that is, the world is a very large, basically i tried to

decide an entire civilization. i would've had a book half the size and then half half as long if they were ready for me but i kept working and adding things to it and i added a lot so i kept going over other areas saying what would this area say about this world and then i end up with a lot in total when you look at it, it's just a lot in the sense that the world we live in is accommodated place in your world is just strange. you don't really quite appreciate how strange your world is. it has so many moving parts in so many things that are different because of lots of reasons you understand that they wouldn't get. when i really try to think about a different world in great detail and work out as many details as i can, but there's just a lot of things that can change. the net effect of that is a strange different world. our first reaction when we hear about a strange different world is they need to give readers

clues whether they're supposed to like or hate it because that's what readers are looking for in a novel, but a real strange world, you're trying kind of at a loss because it's just strange. [inaudible] let me talk about this first bullet. what about the 20 billion, 30 billion people who are out there not doing anything? they will still have childbirth which is painful, i have been

told, they will still age, though still die, volga alzheimer's, whatever. i don't really understand. >> this is about emulations so if you're evaluating this world, basically when this world shows up, for the year or two, the number of humans doesn't change much. it can't change much. basically of a snapshot of the human world and suddenly they all retire in the get rich but pretty much no other changes. they can have very many babies, they can't do very many things because there's just not enough time. for humans, it's really much of the same. now using what if we add on, what i think of so that's what you might be evaluating. basically humans, there are some changes, they lose their jobs and if they share, they they can be comfortable rich, but that's

pretty much all there is to say because there's not enough time for things to happen to them. the human should be worried about what happens next, of course. if you were human, you should be worried about what happens next. i'm not telling you what happens next and that's just the way goes. that's a basic feature of the world changing fact. the faster the future changes, the more you should expect that rapidly changing future to intrude on your life and make you on able to tell what's going to happen. change does that. >> that will only happen if people share or insure themselves properly. what are the rules that we have to write to share properly. is that minimum basic income and should be right those rules now, is it possible to predict when "the age of em" will happen. >> as with insurance of all sorts, if you think a problem might happen, just iv insurance and try not to predict exactly

when it's can happen. it's better just to buy the insurance ahead of time. this problem is not plausibly going to happen soon, but when it does happen it will happen fast and i don't recommend you wait until you see clear signs because then it might be too late. insurance can happen at all possible scales. you could have a global treaty with the whole world who make some agreement. that seems unlikely. you and your family, you and your siblings and your spouse, you can can also share at a very local level. you can do things by choosing your investments differently. there is a wide range of options you have available to yourself to acquire insurance or sharing arrangements. pursue them all and figure out

which ones look most effective and do them all. i don't have any strong argument about why he should do one thing. i don't think you should fixate on any one option as the option. i think you should look at whatever you can do. surely if you can convince the government to do something great. don't count on that. if you can do something yourself, maybe you should do that to and protect yourself and your family if you can, rather than relying on other people to protect you. that seems the most straightforward thing to do. most of you probably can and you should. >> technically for them, there is no reason to be religious. >> we have a standard story and social science about why religion arose. religion is different than spirituality. forgers had spirituality but it took farmers to have religion. religion has the powerful

central, a lot of rules and dislike for people breaking the rules in this sort of traditional religion was effective at getting farmers to follow the new cultural norm that the farming world had read there's correlations between places where they started farming and their attitude toward religion and things like that. looks like religion has the story, rituals are part of the binding, ritual is a thing religion uses. they use many other ways to make people feel bound to their group to follow the norm, et cetera. "the age of em" has need of these. as i'm pointing out, they have a lot of behaviors that are appropriate in this world that don't come natural to forgers. they would have to act in new ways religion and other sorts of pressures are available to get them to do that. even today, there's a correlation, people who are more

religious tend to earn more today. it's a straightforward correlation and it looks like even today, religions are helpful in adding people to be more productive. >> the first one may be really expensive or there's not a lot of processing power. what you think of the first job they'll face. you think there are any jobs that would be suitable for them? >> the second one is more easy. if you are rich human and you want a real human service to serve you dinner, you may be willing to pay because you are rich enough and you want it so clearly when there is a demand for the human to do the job, if somebody wants to be sure, then humans could do those jobs. that's when you be a pretty limited range of jobs because they really can do anything a

human can accept be a real human now, from the very beginning, the first emulation, you spent billions of dollars making this first one, you've got some hardware but you can run it, what you looking for. you're looking for people at the top of their profession today who the world is willing to pay a lot for. you want to scan somebody for whom there's a lot of demand, the scan is not so expensive. ceos for example are often paid a lot. if the scan is cheap but the emulation is not, maybe maybe you'll take the best ceos make thousands of copies of those. it's still a pretty small job market. if you want lawyers, there's a lot more more of those. you could take the best software engineer in the best lawyer and make some awesome copies of those and make a lot of money. the very beginning you are the people who are in the best the very quickly the world changes so you want younger people were more flexible and able to adapt in which case they look for