[dropcap]W[/dropcap]e don’t kill off our retirees just because they’re not working anymore, so don’t worry about our future robot overlords killing off us humans when we’re no longer working, either—which we won’t be, since the robots will be doing everything faster and better than us, the way machines have been taking over human jobs since the dawn of the industrial era.
And in fact, in that future, robot-ruled time, we might have the choice to actually become one of the super-bots by donating our brain (thereby “dying”), but then coming back (sort of) as the brain of a computer that’s just like us, down to our likes, dislikes, sense of humor—and maybe even our looks.
That, my friends, was just part of the trippy argument going on downtown a week or so ago at a monthly event called the Soho Forum. This is a free, open-to- the-public debate with the goal of examining issues of particular interest to Libertarians. I’m not quite sure how robots and Libertarians find common cause, but in any event the topic to resolve yea or nay was: “Robots will eventually dominate the world and eliminate human abilities to earn wages.”
Robin Hanson, an associate professor of economics at George Mason University and author of “The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life when Robots Rule the Earth,” briskly insisted that in the future, we will see the ascendance of “Ems”—remarkably human robots that emulate us, because they’re modeled on our own brains. Or at least they’re modeled on the people who would make the very best worker-robots.
That’s not who will choose, said the “Robots will NOT take over” debater, Bryan Caplan, also an author and econ professor at George Mason. When and if we do get around to creating worker robots from human brain scans, he said, we will scan only the most docile, efficient workers to create docile, non-human-killing “Ems.”
And this is where it started getting weird(er). Hanson believes that if and when we do make Ems, CEOs will still want to hire the most brilliant workers, which means they’ll end up cloning (or replicating, or whatever the word is) jerks. “We expect the highest productivity workers will be chosen,” said Hanson. In other words, the Ems will be clones of the people most of us hate—the cutthroats. And, being cutthroats, eventually they’ll cut ours. “Although it may well be that the first five generations of robots will keep humans around because they feel some vestigial warmth toward our species,” Hanson said.
How comforting.
Caplan was having none of it. Why on earth would we clone the cutthroats who want to kill us, he asked. Over the eons, we’ve already had quite a lot of experience breeding new beings to do our bidding: Our pets and farm animals. We’ll do the same with humans—if that’s the route we go—cloning the absolutely sweetest ones who also have a fierce work ethic. “We’ve got 7 billion people to choose from,” Caplan pointed out. “A normal employer has five.”
The moderator, Gene Epstein, economics editor at Barron’s magazine, tried to make peace. “You’ll tweak it,” he nodded to both.
Caplan was not convinced that the day of the Ems will ever come, because who would volunteer to become one? “First thing, you’re actually dead. They have to slice your brain in pieces. Very few people would want their biological death in order to have a computer simulation,” he said.
“Today we can’t conceive of it,” agreed Hanson. But humans in the future, “Once they see a bunch of people do it,” and they see that the Ems talk like “real” people, and look like them and act like them—except they never die—then the prospect might become attractive. Hanson made it sound as normal as wearing glasses, another biological enhancement people eons ago could not have conceived of.
And that was Hanson’s big point: Of course this stuff sounds bizarre to us. But think back a thousand years to the subsistence farmers. If you’d told them that someday we’d be able to talk to someone an ocean away and see them, too, there’s no way they would have understood, much less believed you.
And that’s the world we’re living in today.
Would the Ems own property? Would they eventually fight? Or would the earth become a paradise with Ems doing all our work? Those issues were not resolved. In fact, nothing really was. A before-and-after poll of the audience found that the exact same number had changed their minds from negative to positive, and vice versa.
It was the least strange moment in a very strange night.
