
Is This Economist Too Far Ahead of His Time? - Hooke
http://www.chronicle.com/article/is-this-economist-too-far/238050
======
philipkglass
_The 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?

~~~
SubiculumCode
I attended a primer lecture on tbe immune system. Holy hell. At least 200
different types of T cells. At least 200 other types of immune cells. Then
there are all their interactions, signaling, locating, memory functions. I
honestly dont know if one can ever get a handle on the complexity.

~~~
AstralStorm
It is not complexity, but diversity. The functions those cells perform are
mostly understood as are most mechanisms by which they work. There are many
variants of a similar function and mechanism.

That said, immunology is still quite young too, but compared to it
neuroscience is not even born.

~~~
SubiculumCode
For a large part we understand how two particles can interact. Simple rules.

Put together 200 of those particles, predictions become very difficult and
complex.

------
mentos
Anyone 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 and send humans to Mars
in a different kind of space ship. One made of metal and silicon that can
recharge its batteries so long as it has a line of sight on a distant star..
maybe as the article says: "a robotic body [standing] roughly two millimeters
tall"

The greatest challenge we face is keeping this incubator called Earth alive
long enough for us to develop the technology to abandon our flesh. But I
imagine if that day ever comes what it means to be human will have been
destroyed in the end anyways.

~~~
the_duke
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.

\---

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.

~~~
internaut
Watch Utopia.

[http://www.channel4.com/programmes/utopia](http://www.channel4.com/programmes/utopia)

I judge it better than Black Mirror. Don't google any information about it
because it will sound stupid, just watch it outright.

------
Animats
Living in VR, and the implications thereof, have been written about in SF for
decades. The earliest work is "Simulacron 3", from 1964. It's been done to
death in anime. "Sword Art Online" is probably the best known stuck-in-VR
anime, but "Log Horizon" deals with the philosophical aspects in more depth.
Hanson is not breaking new ground; he's recycling SF as economics.

Read Hanson's list of "wild ideas".[1] "By 2100, the vast majority of "people"
will be immortal computers running brain simulations." (And the rest will be
keeping the server farms going?) "If we keep writing down common sense datums
until 2100, we can make computers as smart as people." (After 30 years of Cyc
trying that, that's probably a no.) "If we allowed complete freedom of
contract, law could be privatized, to our common benefit." (He's at George
Mason University, which is a right-wing think tank, and has to say stuff like
that to get tenure.)

[1]
[http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/wildideas.html](http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/wildideas.html)

~~~
nhaliday
> Hanson is not breaking new ground; he's recycling SF as economics.

World-building for purposes of entertainment generally has little to do with
successful prediction. Hanson has made this point in a few places, eg,
[http://www.overcomingbias.com/2015/11/science-fiction-is-
fan...](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2015/11/science-fiction-is-
fantasy.html). I'm not sure if you've read Age of Em but it didn't feel like
reading scifi, so much as reading an encyclopedia.

RE: the list of "wild ideas." He estimates that maybe a third of them are
true. Quoting a few and acting shocked that that's the case is not a very
epistemically hygienic criticism.

BTW if anyone wants to read a summary that carries some of the tone and
emphasis of the book itself, [https://casparoesterheld.com/2016/08/30/the-age-
of-em-summar...](https://casparoesterheld.com/2016/08/30/the-age-of-em-
summary-of-policy-relevant-information/) is pretty good.

~~~
nitwit005
> World-building for purposes of entertainment generally has little to do with
> successful prediction

Do you have any evidence that that's true? A decent number of ideas portrayed
in science fiction have come true, so clearly successful prediction is going
on.

Ultimately, economist or author are both using imagination and extrapolation.
I don't see any particular reason to expect better results from the economist.

~~~
inimino
> clearly successful prediction is going on.

Throwing out all possible wild ideas, some of which happen to come true, isn't
what "prediction" means.

~~~
nitwit005
Given the poor prediction reputation of Economists, their attempts probably
match your description as well.

------
JamesBarney
My favorite writer wrote a great book review of Robin Hanson's seminal work
'Age of Em" here

[http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/28/book-review-age-of-
em/](http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/28/book-review-age-of-em/)

------
emblem21
I once wrote a book in 2005 about the inevitable fusion of central banking
theory, economic psychology, and "good-enough" artificial intelligence. Whole
brain emulations weren't required. Instead, mass expansion of mobile devices
and the consolidation of civil behavior into those devices (purchasing,
voting, socialization, documentation, research, institution interactions,
welfare benefits, etc) allows a sufficiently powerful enough AI to read an NSA
trunk and be able to create a model of the "animal spirits" of the individual
constituents of markets. It couldn't model human behavior accurately, but that
wasn't required. Instead, it could create a chaotic chain of events between
all actor demands and capabilities via small actions that would result in
massive economic policy enforcement.

Instead of invading Iraq, the machine predicts a convoluted path of investment
schemes that ultimately bankrupt the dinar, the ruling party, and the entire
nation. No bullets fired. No soldiers deployed. To economists, it would look
like normal macroeconomic activity.

I never released the book because I realized I was writing a business
proposal.

~~~
dxg732f
That sounds really interesting. I have also thought about how "good-enough" AI
could get a lot more done than many predict. I also like the idea of a Rube
Goldberg equivalent of investment schemes and options to achieve certain
objectives. Write a fun versions of it first, then do the business proposal.
Good luck :)

------
reflexive
> You are beautiful, intelligent, and charismatic, as are your friends, co-
> workers, lovers.

Aren't all of these qualities measured relative to our neighbors? I.e., each
of us is a genius compared to our ape forebearers, but if everyone around you
is beautiful, intelligent, and charming, then no one is.

> You feel no hunger, no cold, no heat, no pain.

Again, isn't discomfort relative to what one is prepared for? Under such
circumstances, wouldn't the slightest dip or peak in subjective well-being
feel like a life-altering crisis?

"Connoisseur" is relevant [https://xkcd.com/915/](https://xkcd.com/915/)

Am I missing something, or is this just another economist who understands
nothing about human desire?

~~~
oldmanjay
You can make a case that charisma only matters in contrast to its lack, and
perhaps beauty is the same although I'm not as certain, but intelligence has
an intrinsic value that ought to be evident by the fact that we built a
technological civilization with it.

~~~
reflexive
That's a good point, I'll just say that no one will _perceive_ themselves or
their friends as intelligent, except relative to their competitors.

------
ikeboy
Hanson's thoughts on the profile:
[http://www.overcomingbias.com/2016/10/profile.html](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2016/10/profile.html)

------
Paul_S
The Age of Em can be read in two ways. One is to treat it like an RPG setting
book. An imaginative world with highly detailed descriptions, complete with
cool potential plots for your campaign. The second way to read it is as a book
trying to predict the future in much the same way as The Flintstones is
recording history. Everything is strange yet it's all mimicking the current
world with superficial differences.

The chapter about computational reversibility was really annoying - good luck
with it if you're not a CS academic. I'm a software engineer and I only have a
vague idea what it is and unless you know already you're out of luck as the
author will not explain anything.

The rest is ridiculously specific descriptions of a future world - a bit like
trying to forecast weather 20 years in advance by trying to get the exact
temperature, rainfall, etc. on a particular Thursday in March, in your back
garden. This is why I'm going with the former way of reading this book. Maybe
someone will write a fiction book based on this setting - could be
interesting.

One last thing: the author mentions that economists often predict the future
correctly but the irrational^H^H^H^H^H^H^H uncoordinated populace fails to
realise the correct prediction (a comment I've read before made by other
economists), implying that the only way he can be wrong about his predictions
in this book is if we all somehow conspire against him, at which point it's
all our fault. AI research must be a traumatising field.

~~~
freshhawk
"...economists often predict the future correctly but the irrational..."

This is the Overcoming Bias/Less Wrong community worldview basically, and I
find your RPG setting reading works well for understanding them as well. From
now on I'll think of them as writers who are predicting the future of an
alternate universe where humans think fundamentally differently than in our
reality.

It's a hell of a lot of fun, if you model homo economicus instead of homo
sapiens it actually is possible to reason about large societies and at least
attempt to predict far future outcomes to some degree. Plenty of ways to hand
wave away the reasons that you can't "predict" historical events or the
present with these models, that's boring anyway, the future has cooler toys.

If you accept that a chaotic soup of memes can, at any time, combine to form
an idea that becomes a popular ideology that prompts a bunch of clever apes to
act anywhere from irrational to completely insane for arbitrary amounts of
time ... well that's impossible to model in any meaningful way.

The aversion to history makes a lot of sense, my own interest in history and
sociology is what showed me the holes in this worldview and now I can't play
this fun game with the same immersion they do.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
>If you accept that a chaotic soup of memes can, at any time, combine to form
an idea that becomes a popular ideology that prompts a bunch of clever apes to
act anywhere from irrational to completely insane for arbitrary amounts of
time ... well that's impossible to model in any meaningful way.

I think it's pretty silly to accept _homo economicus_ as an actual definition
of rational behavior, since nobody really wants to live like such a creature.

~~~
freshhawk
Really? I think we must have different understandings of the term, it just
means that people decide what they want and then act in the way they think
will get them that.

Also, I'm not sure how the quoted part relates, that was my facetious
description of how Homo Sapiens act, in contrast with Homo Economicus.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
>I think we must have different understandings of the term, it just means that
people decide what they want and then act in the way they think will get them
that.

Quite the opposite, actually. Homo Economicus has two things homo sapiens does
not, and _cannot_ :

* A fixed-a-priori "utility function". Things it wants before it has experienced life at all, with those "things" being linearly convertible into money.

* Model certainty about the transactions it enters: risk is accounted for using probability, but the model structure is, again, known a priori.

When you weaken these two restrictions in econometric and psychological
experiments, you recover useful descriptions of actual human behavior. But
those restrictions were ridiculous and unrealistic in the first place,
_unless_ you pull an economist's typical move and assume that a person
operates like an investment bank with a fixed charter (ie: the fixed goal of
accumulating capital) and a fixed set of actions (ie: available equity
investments).

~~~
freshhawk
Yup, although that seems to be a very specific version of the general Homo
Economicus term.

Do you think I find the idea of Homo Economicus convincing or valid? I was
arguing the opposite.

------
lr4444lr
Is anyone else having a hard time disambiguation which of his models and
predictions he holds genuinely, and which are merely exercises in _reductio ad
absurdum_ attacks on the dysfunction he sees in the establishment? I'm all for
free thinking, but this seems all too convenient to hedge his bets.

------
dxg732f
I like the main point he is trying to make (which I see summed up by the
cliche "think outside the box") but most of the ideas in this article are such
stereotypical notions of turning everything on it's head: Aliens? AI taking
over? Robots taking over? Us living in a simulation? Challenging the concept
of rape? Can we stop pretending these are cutting edge and out there? Can we
stop pretending these ideas don't have very old precedents? He has come up
with unique ideas on these themes, but no he is not "ahead of his time" I
would argue in many ways he is stuck in the past.

------
cmrdporcupine
Let all of these people 'transcend' their minds into computers, I will go the
other way, and go immanently into my body.

"Behind thy thoughts and feelings, my brother, there is a mighty lord, an
unknown sage—it is called Self; it dwelleth in thy body, it is thy body." \--
Nietzsche

[http://www.philosophy-index.com/nietzsche/thus-spake-
zarathu...](http://www.philosophy-index.com/nietzsche/thus-spake-
zarathurstra/iv.php)

Or Deleuze summarizing him: As Nietzsche would say, we stand amazed before
consciousness but the truly suprising thing is the body.

To feel a raindrop on the skin, to look out on a surprising sunrise, to lie on
one's back in the grass at dusk while bats fly overhead. I would not want to
live 1000 years without this. I'd rather the lights go out and have it all end
and gone forever than live only in a simulation, to no longer feel the
randomness, the intricacy, the depth, the richness of what is happening now.

You're welcome to all the virtual you want. But no thanks.

~~~
Houshalter
Your preference is irrelevant. Many people will choose to be uploaded, and
those people will inherit the Earth. As the uploads will be able to think,
work, and multiply much faster than normal humans (among other possible
advantages.)

Hanson imagines that fleshy humans will be left behind by the future, perhaps
continuing to exist by investing in the em economy and living off the
interest, but otherwise not participating in the system at all.

I don't know why you think an upload's experience would be worse than a fleshy
human's experience. With such advanced technology in the far future, virtual
reality and simulations will probably be indistinguishable from the real
world. They will feel rain drops and see sunrises. But also they will probably
be able to experience so much more. As virtual worlds do not have all the
limitations the physical one does. They won't have to age or experience pain
or discomfort, sickness, etc. They can walk on distant planets or swim in deep
oceans, or fly through the air effortlessly, and without mechanical aid.

------
dschiptsov
Cosplay (role-playing) of intelligence (acute hipsterism) at its best.

------
carsongross
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.

~~~
duckkg5
Hanson is a professor of economics at GMU
[http://economics.gmu.edu/people/rhanson](http://economics.gmu.edu/people/rhanson)

~~~
vannevar
For folks who may not be familiar with future studies. It's a genuine academic
discipline, when we say that Hanson is a futurist, it's not an insult.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futures_studies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futures_studies)

------
rafaelvasco
You can't hope to "scan" a human brain and make a virtual clone of a human
being or any being, because life and conscience is much more than a brain. So
that future he describes , at last functioning the way he thinks is
impossible. Until we understand 100% of what we're made of, no one can even
think of anything like this.

------
davidgerard
JETSON, Bay Area, the future (H Minus) — Scientists, or self-taught
philosophers who’ve heard of science anyway, predict a dazzling future for
humanity — in which our computer-augmented future selves, in a world of
endless plenty, keep being shits to each other.

An advanced computer-managed economy will do all the jobs, building our homes,
3D-printing our iPhones and nano-assembling our food. Wanting for nothing,
people will at last be free to assert their essential humanity and complain
bitterly about everything.

Genetic engineering will give us new bodies and an indefinite lifespan. Whole-
brain emulation will let those who would have died go on as personalities
living in computers. In the future, fuckwits will be with you forever.

We will live in fabulously diverse harmony and break the cycle of every new
technology first being used to murder each other. This will include those
thoroughly deserving of murder, particularly the endless identical instances
of irritating hippie emulations blathering about cosmic oneness.

Cryogenically-preserved humans from the twenty-first century will have their
frozen brains read by nanobots so their personalities can be run as programs.
To avoid future shock, they will be put to work in a computer-simulated office
job, and be reset each morning. For comfort and familiarity, each person-
emulation will be given a helpful companion program, called “Clippy.”

A benevolent artificial superintelligence will run the world, for the good of
all humanity. To maximise utilitarian value across the quantum wave function
of the universe, “Roko’s femilisk” will regrettably have to punish emulations
of those who complained that they found Tumblr social justice warriors’
intolerance of intolerance “triggering.” Please donate to help achieve this.

Given the opportunity for a world of unlimited creative freedom and enjoyment,
we can be certain that humanity will not rest until it has turned this
infinitely bountiful paradise into something even pissier than modern-day
capitalism.

The Singularity will elevate the human condition to nasty, brutish and long.
An emulation of Thomas Hobbes will, however, buy that for a bitcoin.

------
meira
No.

------
wimgz
His book is not available on Kindle, so no

~~~
ikeboy
It used to be (see [https://www.amazon.com/Age-Em-Work-Robots-Earth-
ebook/dp/B01...](https://www.amazon.com/Age-Em-Work-Robots-Earth-
ebook/dp/B01FHNFAVS?ref_=mt_kindle) and
[http://ageofem.com/](http://ageofem.com/)). I don't know why it was pulled or
who was responsible.

------
cynicalBit
If 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.

~~~
Houshalter
A copy of you is you. Literally the atoms that make up 'you' are replaced all
the time, by biology. And the atoms themselves aren't real. Like some models
of physics suggest that physical things are constantly being copied and
deleted already, like how objects in a cellular automaton universe are
"destroyed" every time they move.

But how the universe actually works is irrelevant even. Other people can have
a different definition of 'death'. If the information in my brain is preserved
then that's all that matters to me. If I had to get my neurons replaced, one
at a time, with 'artificial neurons' that would contain all the same
information, then i would do it. Surely you would to. And you wouldn't even
notice any change I bet. It wouldn't change anything observable at all. So how
can it possibly matter?

------
crimsonalucard
Far ahead of his time? No. This overwhelming optimism for technology is a very
mainstream attitude you see among millennials and a lot of HN commenters.

------
buro9
Yet 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.

~~~
OscarCunningham
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.

~~~
wavefunction
"Consider Phlebas" takes place in 1331CE whereas "Surface Detail" takes place
between 2700 and 3000CE, with the other books in the "series" taking place at
different points within that range.

