He's not an economist, he's a futurist, and not a particularly interesting one.
For an actual economist ahead of his time, I recommend Steve Keen.
Is This Economist Too Far Ahead of His Time?
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Re: Is This Economist Too Far Ahead of His Time?
#12He's not an economist, he's a futurist, and not a particularly interesting one. For an actual economist ahead of his time, I recommend Steve Keen.
Hanson is a professor of economics at GMU http://economics.gmu.edu/people/rhanson
Re: Is This Economist Too Far Ahead of His Time?
#13Yet another person who has read too many of the Culture Series books by Iain M. Banks and thinks we are close to achieving a lot described within those books.
I do think it is achievable, but even the books acknowledge it takes thousands of years to get there.
Re: Is This Economist Too Far Ahead of His Time?
#14Anyone that hasn't yet, check out Black Mirror on Netflix. It has a lot of ideas in it that I am surprised to see in a show in 2016. I love Elon Musk but I think he is solving the wrong problem when it comes to making human beings a space faring species. The fragility of human flesh is the barrier to colonizing space. You can try to solve this problem by wrapping it in a contained atmosphere or wait a thousand years…
I recently discovered Black Mirror.
It's a great and fascinating series. Finally something other then the mind numbing pabulum that is most TV.
I especially loved season 1 / episode 2.
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The way our brain works, all experience, self consciousness and awareness is intricately linked to physical perception. If we were to go the 'brain in a petri dish' route, we would have to fake all those signals a body would send to the brain. If we just start emulating the brain physiology digitally, that is easier of course.
But I would not call the result of either method a 'human being', but something inherently different.
Re: Is This Economist Too Far Ahead of His Time?
#15His book is not available on Kindle, so no
It used to be (see https://www.amazon.com/Age-Em-Work-Robots-Earth-ebook/dp/B01... and http://ageofem.com/). I don't know why it was pulled or who was responsible.
Re: Is This Economist Too Far Ahead of His Time?
#16Hanson's thoughts on the profile: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2016/10/profile.html
Re: Is This Economist Too Far Ahead of His Time?
#17Yet another person who has read too many of the Culture Series books by Iain M. Banks and thinks we are close to achieving a lot described within those books. I do think it is achievable, but even the books acknowledge it takes thousands of years to get there.
I don't think the books do "acknowledge" that? I mean in particular there's that nice short story where the Culture visits Earth. So the books are set in our present and not the future.
Re: Is This Economist Too Far Ahead of His Time?
#18Yet another person who has read too many of the Culture Series books by Iain M. Banks and thinks we are close to achieving a lot described within those books. I do think it is achievable, but even the books acknowledge it takes thousands of years to get there.
Hanson has actually disparaged science fiction in general for purposes of futurism. I don't think he's been influenced by it much.
Re: Is This Economist Too Far Ahead of His Time?
#19If people can be convinced that their simulated virtual self is actually them, overpopulation will be solved by mass suicide. Sorry if that's too dark for you guys, it just has to be said. All these "live inside a computer people" are just a modern Jim Jones cult.
Whether or not simulations are actually the people they're copies of, or people at all, is irrelevant to the question Hanson is looking at, which is "What might we expect ems to do?".
Re: Is This Economist Too Far Ahead of His Time?
#20The book’s premise is that in about a century, it will be possible to scan human brains at "fine enough spatial and chemical resolution," and to combine that with good-enough models of signal-processing functions of brain cells, "to create a cell-by-cell dynamically executable model of the full brain in artificial hardware, a model whose signal input-output behavior is usefully close to that of the original brain."
Like Bostrom and Kurzweil I think this guy is seriously underestimating the difficulty of biology. I don't believe in souls or non-computable woo going on in our brains. I do believe that biology is insanely complicated compared to computing or physics; physicists, engineers, and people from a computing background who've never worked in biology tend to handwave incredibly difficult problems. See also: the long and mostly-unsuccessful history of people who thought that they could replace animal/cell culture drug testing with models in silico.
On top of the sheer audacious difficulty of creating whole brain emulations, there's the problem of competing with boring old "narrow" AI. Surely an economist of all people should recognize the feedback loop that makes narrow AI profitable first, which attracts more investment, which unlocks more capabilities without biological emulation... how many of today's jobs are going to be left un-done by narrow AI a century from now, even if whole brain emulations are finally practical then?