The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule the Earth

摘要

I first came across Robin Hanson when he was a Ph.D. student at Cal Tech, a few years after I had launched the journal Social Epistemology. From 1993 to 1995, I published three of his pieces relating to the reform of the internal dynamics of science, ranging from the replacement of peer review with prizes to the establishment of gambling houses to predict scientific innovation. (The major ones were Hanson 1995a, 1995b.) I now credit him with having awakened me to the role that markets play in revealing a form of intelligence that humans tend to suppress as a result of norms of social cohesion that discourage accurate self-representation (cf. Fuller 2000: 106, 150). Robin Hanson is also the economist who has so far made the most substantive contributions to the contemporary definition of transhumanism, which he began (unknown to me) at that time. The book under review is the culmination of a quarter-century journey that took flight with the publication of “If uploads come first: The crack of a future dawn” in the original transhumanist journal Extropy (Hanson 1994).In that article, Hanson proposed that there is a good chance that we will be able to “upload” a brain to a computer before we can either understand how the brain works or create artificial intelligence. What he had in mind was something close to what is depicted in the 2014 film Transcendence, in which Johnny Depp’s brain is computer-scanned to produce a silicon-based virtual copy, which ends up enhancing itself to self-destruction by accessing the world’s information networks. To be sure, Hanson’s original thought experiment did not leap to such dystopic conclusions—and neither does The Age of Em, in which “em” is Hanson’s nickname for one such brain emulation. In the original article, Hanson went on to explore the political-economic consequences of this development in a perspective informed mainly by Darwinian evolution and the economics of efficiency. The book expands these consequences into a full-blown anthropology of the future.After James Hughes referred to the original article as a paradigm case of “technolibertarianism” in his book Citizen Cyborg (Hughes 2004), a sometimes testy e-mail exchange between him and Hanson ensued, which was republished, with additional commentary, in the Journal of Evolution and Technology in 2007 (LaTorra 2007). The Age of Em makes no reference to Hughes or this exchange, but an appreciation of their differences is useful to get an initial fix on what is at stake in this book.Hughes’ version of their differences—himself the “technoprogressive” social democrat and Hanson the “technolibertarian” neoliberal—captures the surface emphases of the two antagonists. Hughes draws attention to the prospect of growing inequality, whereas Hanson focuses on the greater productivity that an upload-driven economy is likely to bring. But below the surface, and closer to Hanson’s take on the debate, is that Hughes sees the thought experiment as simply an exaggerated extension of current capitalist conditions, whereas Hanson treats it as a trigger for a fundamental rethinking of the ontological conditions of capitalism. Thus, Hughes worries that Hanson fails to provide a wealth redistribution scheme to prevent the further immiseration of poor people, while Hanson is open on how any such redistribution scheme might work, possibly including “ems” among the entities in his welfare function.Hughes’ continued use of the word “immiseration” reveals the extent of his debt to Marx’s original understanding of the relationship of humanity and technology. According to Marx’s conception of Homo faber, technology is the distinctive expression of our humanity that allows us to escape the drudgery of our animal origins. However, progress in technology has been made unevenly, which in turn has served to reproduce and often exacerbate the conditions over which humans dominate each other. Marx saw this as truly a problem of “political economy” and not simply of eith