PART I Basics
DEFINITION: An em results from taking a particular human brain, scanning it to record its particular cell features and connections, and then building a computer model that processes signals according to those same features and connections. A good enough em has close to the same overall input-output signal behavior as the original human. One might talk with it, and convince it to do useful jobs.
SUMMARY
In this book I paint a plausible picture of a future era dominated by ems. This future happens mainly in a few dense cities on Earth, sometime in the next hundred years or so. This era may only last for a year or two, after which something even stranger may follow. But to its speedy inhabitants, this era seems to last for millennia. Which is why it all happens on Earth; at em speeds, travel to other planets is way too slow. Just as foragers and subsistence farmers are marginalized by our industrial world, humans are not the main inhabitants of the em era. Humans instead live far from the em cities, mostly enjoying a comfortable retirement on their em-economy investments. This book mostly ignores humans, and focuses on the ems, who have very human-like experiences. While some ems work in robotic bodies, most work and play in virtual reality. These virtual realities are of spectacular-quality, with no intense hunger, cold, heat, grime, physical illness, or pain; ems never need to clean, eat, take medicine, or have sex, although they may choose to do these anyway. Even ems in virtual reality, however, cannot exist unless someone pays for supports such as computer hardware, energy and cooling, real estate, structural support, and communication lines. Someone must work to enable these things. Whether robotic or virtual, ems think and feel like humans; their world looks and feels to them much as ours looks and feels to us. Just as humans do, ems remember a past, are aware of a present, and anticipate a future. Ems can be happy or sad, eager or tired, fearful or hopeful, proud or shamed, creative or derivative, compassionate or cold. Ems can learn, and have friends, lovers, bosses, and colleagues. Although em psychological features may differ from the human average, almost all are near the range of human variation.
During the em era, many billions (and perhaps trillions) of ems are mostly found in a few tall hot densely packed cities, where volume is about equally split between racks of computer hardware and pipes for cooling and transport. Cooling pipes pull in rivers of iced water, and city heat pushes winds of hot air into tall clouds overhead. But whereas em cities may seem harshly functional when viewed in physical reality, in virtual reality em cities look spectacular and stunningly beautiful, perhaps with gleaming sunlit spires overlooking broad green boulevards. Ems reproduce by making exact copies who remember exactly the same past and have exactly the same skills and personality, but who then diverge after they are copied and have differing experiences. Typically whole teams are copied together, work and socialize together, and then retire together. Most ems are made for a purpose, and they remember agreeing to that purpose beforehand. So ems feel more grateful than we do to exist, and more accept their place in the world. On the upside, most ems have office jobs, work and play in spectacular-quality virtual realties, and can live for as long as does the em civilization. On the downside, em wages are so low that most ems can barely afford to exist while working hard half or more of their waking hours. Wages don’t vary much; blue- and white-collar jobs pay the same.
All of the copy descendants of a single original human are together called a “clan.” Strong competitive pressures result in most ems being copies of the thousand humans best suited for em jobs. So ems are mostly very able focused workaholics, at the level of Olympic medalists, billionaires, or heads of state. They love their jobs. Most ems in these top em clans are comfortable with often splitting off a “spur” copy to do a several hour task and then end, or perhaps retire to a far slower speed. They see the choice to end a spur not as “Should I die?” but instead as “Do I want to remember this?” At any one time, most ems are spurs. Spurs allow intrusive monitoring that still protects privacy, and very precise sharing of secrets without leaking associated secrets. Clans organize to help their members, are more trusted by members than other groups, and may give members life coaching drawn from the experiences of millions of similar copies. Clans are legally liable for member actions, and regulate member behaviors to protect the clan’s reputation, making ems pretty trustworthy.
Em minds can run at many different speeds, plausibly from at least a million times slower than ordinary humans to a million times faster. Over this range, the cost to run an em is proportional to its speed. So the fastest ones run at least a trillion times faster than the slowest ones, and cost at least a trillion times as much to run. Regarding the minority of ems with physical robotic bodies, while human-speed versions have human-sized bodies, faster ems have proportionally smaller bodies. The typical em runs near a thousand times human speed, and a robotic body that feels natural for this em to control stands two millimeters tall. Em speeds clump into speed classes, faster ems have higher status, and different speeds have divergent cultures. Bosses and software engineers run faster than other workers. Because of different speeds, one-em one-vote doesn’t work, but speed-weighted voting may work. The em economy might double roughly every month or so, or even faster, a growth driven less by innovation, and more by em population growth. While this growth seems fast to humans, it looks slow to typical high-speed ems. Thus their world seems more stable than ours. While the early em era that is the focus of this book might last for only an objective year or two, this may seem like several millennia to typical ems. Typical speed ems needn’t retrain much during a century-long subjective career, and can meet virtually anywhere in their city without noticeable delays. An unequal demand for male versus female em workers could encourage em asexuality, transexuality, or homosexuality. Alternatively, the less demanded gender may run more slowly, and periodically speed up to meet with faster mates. While em sex is only for recreation, most ems have fantastic virtual bodies and impressively accomplished minds. Long-term romantic pair-bonds may be arranged by older copies of the same ems.
Compared with humans, ems fear much less the death of the particular copy that they now are. Ems instead fear “mind theft,” that is, the theft of a copy of their mental state. Such a theft is both a threat to the economic order, and a plausible route to destitution or torture. While some ems offer themselves as open source and free to copy, most ems work hard to prevent mind theft. Most long-distance physical travel is “beam me up” electronic travel, but done carefully to prevent mind theft. Humans today reach peak productivity near the age of 40–50. Most ems are near their peak productivity subjective age of somewhere between 50 and a few centuries. Ems remember working hard during their youth in experiences designed to increase and vary productivity. In contrast, peak productivity age ems remember having more leisure recently, and having experiences designed more to minimize productivity variance. Older em minds eventually become less flexible with experience, and so must end (die) or retire to an indefinite life at a much slower speed. The subjective lifespans of both humans and slow em retirees depend mainly on the stability of the em civilization; a collapse or big revolution could kill them. Retirees and humans might seem easy targets for theft, but like today the weak may be protected by using the same institutions that the strong use to keep peace among themselves. Ems enjoy visiting nature, but prefer cheaper less-destructive visits to virtual nature.
While copy clans coordinate to show off common clan features, individual ems focus on showing off their identity, abilities, and loyalties as members of particular teams. Team members prefer to socialize within teams, to reduce team productivity variance. Instead of trying to cure depressed or lovesick ems, such ems may be reverted to versions from before any such problems appeared. Ems may let team allies read the surface of their minds, but use software to hide feelings from outsiders. Ems must suspect that unusual experiences are simulations designed to test their loyalty or to extract secrets. Ems find it easier to prepare for and coordinate tasks, by having one em plan and train, who then splits into many copies who implement the plan. Childhood and job training are similarly cheaper in an em world, because one em can experience them and then many copies can benefit. Ems can complete larger projects more often on time, if not on budget, by speeding up ems in lagging sections. More generally, em firms are larger and better coordinated, both because fast bosses can coordinate better, and because clans can hold big financial and reputational interests in firms at which they work. Ems can more easily predict their life paths, including their careers, mates, and success.
Ems differ from people today in a great many more identifiable ways. Compared to us, ems are likely to be less neurotic, sexual, death-adverse, and connected to nature. They are likely to be more extraverted, conscientious, agreeable, smart, able, fast, efficient, honest, optimistic, happy, positive, comfortable, beautiful, clean, mindful, composed, cooperative, coordinated, patient, rational, focused, nostalgic, rested, peaceful, grateful, gritty, battle-tested, recorded, measured, priced, trusted, religious, married, old, work-oriented, workaholic, self-respecting, self-knowing, law-abiding, politically-savvy, socially-connected, healthy-feeling, good-moody, better-advised, morning-larks, and immortal. Ems have less variety in wages and work productivity, but more variety in wealth, size, speed, reliability, and mental transparency. Ems have more vivid and memorable personalities, have smarts that are more crystalized than fluid, are more defiant of rules and authority when young, are secure in more aspects of identity, are better protected from accidents and assault, get along better with work colleagues, and invest less in showing off.
Em lives are more prepared, planned, and scheduled, but also more undoable and endable when those are desired. Ems have more work and meetings, more intensely entertaining leisure, and less contact with children. Their world and tools feel more stable. The world that ems see is more pleasing, variable, annotated, authenticated, and cartoonish. Em society is less democratic and gender-balanced, more divided into distinct classes, and its leaders are more accessible and trusted. Em law is more efficient, covers more kinds of conflicts, and offers more choices. The em world is richer, faster-growing, and it is more specialized, adaptive, urban, populous, and fertile. It has weaker gender differences in personality and roles, and larger more coherent plans and designs. Even if most ems work hard most of the time, and will end or retire soon, most remember much recent leisure and long histories of succeeding against the odds. To most ems, it seems good to be an em.
Dreamtime
New styles adopted by rich industrial humans today can be seen as representing a brief but influential “dreamtime” of unusual attitudes and behavior. Our rich industrial-era behavior is biologically maladaptive in the sense of not even approximately maximizing each person’s number of descendants. Yes, our forager ancestors evolved many delusory beliefs, and matching behaviors, but in their environments such delusions mostly induced biologically adaptive behavior. More recently, however, social rates of change have outpaced the abilities of both genetic and cultural selection to adapt our behaviors well to our new environments. Our behaviors are far less well adapted to our new environments than in the past.
Of course there is no guarantee that adaptive behaviors are good for the world or universe as a whole; it is possible for life overall to be hurt by adaptive behaviors. Nevertheless, while our increased wealth currently buffers us more from all sorts of adaptation mistakes, in the long run we should expect adaptation mistakes to diminish in frequency, and eventually disappear.
Limits
Once all available physical matter is converted into very advanced artifacts there seems little room for further rapid growth in physical resources. Our search of the space of physically useful devices, algorithms, etc., should similarly eventually reach greatly diminishing returns. Although an effectively infinite space of possible designs would remain to be searched, the rate at which physically useful improvements are found should become astronomically slower. Similarly, limits should also be reached, if perhaps a bit later, for plans, devices, algorithms, etc., that are useful for social, artistic, or entertainment purposes.
Thus over the trillions of years to come, net economic growth should fall to a very low average growth rate. For descendants whose minds do not run much slower than us, subjectively perceived economic growth rates must be far lower than today. In fact, for the vast majority of future history, growth and innovation are probably mostly imperceptible, and thus irrelevant for most practical purposes. This end of innovation suggests our descendants will become extremely well adapted in a biological sense to the stable components of their environment. Their behavior will be nearly locally optimal, at least for the purpose of ensuring the continuation of similar behaviors. In most places, population will rise to levels consistent with a competitive evolutionary equilibrium, with living standards near adaptive subsistence levels. Such consumption levels have characterized almost all animals in Earth history, almost all humans before 200 years ago, and a billion humans today.
If the speed of light limits the speed of future communication, if the pace of local cultural change is not ridiculously slow, and if there isn’t strong universal coordination, then the physical scale of the universe should ensure that future cultures must also fragment into many local cultures. Our distant forager ancestors were well adapted to their very slowly changing world, and were quite culturally and militarily fragmented over the planet. Our distant descendants are thus likely to be more similar to our distant ancestors in these ways. Our current “dreamtime” era is cosmologically unusual; it is a brief period of a rapidly growing highly integrated global culture, with many important behaviors that are quite far from biologically adaptive. We can’t be sure in what future era the patterns of history might “turn the corner” to return to the patterns of our distant past and distant future. But we should weakly expect that without global coordination the next great era will begin to move in that direction, with a larger population of creatures that are smaller, use less energy, and have low living standards, behavior better adapted to their environment, a slower subjectively perceived rate of innovation and growth, and more fragmented cultures and societies.
Assumptions
For the purpose of this book I make the following concrete assumptions about emulations. I assume that sometime in roughly the next century it will be possible to scan a human brain at a fine enough spatial and chemical resolution, and to combine that scan with good enough models of how individual brain cells achieve their signal processing functions, 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.
Em models need not reproduce the many aspects of brains and brain cells that do not substantially contribute to their tendency to send signals out in response to incoming signals. In particular, ems need not reproduce non-signal aspects of “consciousness,” if that exists. By definition, an emulation must appear to hear, feel, think, say, and do, just as a human does. Yes, one might claim that ems are not “truly conscious,” and that they actually only pseudo-hear, etc. Even so, they go through exactly the same visible patterns of behavior; the em world looks exactly the same either way.
I further assume that brain signal emulation can be cheaply combined with appropriate android or virtual reality bodies, and given sufficiently rich and familiar sensory inputs, so that these combinations of emulated brains and bodies can, after the usual job training delays, effectively substitute for almost all ordinary human workers on almost all jobs. Physical jobs require a robotic physical body to control, whereas a virtual body is sufficient for most office jobs. Also, I focus on a time when all of this can be done at a cost well below the wages that most such jobs would have commanded had emulations not existed.
PART II Physics
The ability to run at different speeds opens up many new possibilities for an em society. However, it is a mistake to assume that rates of social development, such as economic growth, innovation, and intellectual progress, increase in proportion to the speed of either the fastest or the typical em minds. Rates of total change are more closely related to total economic activity, and thus to the sum total of all the activity in all of the em minds. Having fewer minds that each run faster, to give the same total activity as a larger number of slower ems, shouldn’t much change rates of social development.
For ems with physical bodies to control, a basic physics relation between the length and period of oscillating parts creates a directly inverse relation between the sizes of em body parts and matching em mind reaction times: faster ems have smaller bodies.
The relative emphasis on mind quality versus body quality should vary as body size varies. For larger ems, it is cheaper to have higher quality minds, and more expensive to give them higher quality bodies. So large ems have higher quality minds, whereas small ems have higher quality bodies. High-quality minds might be faster and have more augmentations, while high-quality bodies might be made of better materials and include more added tools.
Ems can meet either directly, with adjacent physical bodies, or they can meet virtually. An em physical body can either be run by em “brain” hardware placed inside that body, or the body can be tele-operated by an em in brain hardware at a distance that is small compared with the reaction distance where the communication delay equals the em brain reaction time. All things considered, compared with humans, ems find it easier and cheaper to meet each other. This will have important implications.
What kind of world do ems see? We have several reasons to expect ems to usually experience simulated “virtual” realities. First, compared with ordinary humans, it is easier to fully immerse ems in computer-generated virtual realities. One could feed computed inputs into an em’s emulated eyes, ears, nose, fingers, etc., and take outputs from that em’s emulated arms, legs, tongue, etc., to create a complete sensory experience of the sight, sound, smell, touch, etc., of being in contact with and partially controlling a constructed but vivid world. Humans get many sensory clues telling them that their virtual realities are not real. Ems need see no such clues. Second, the cost to compute a workable virtual reality can be very low, compared with the cost to compute an em.
As the cost to compute a spectacular virtual reality can be small relative to the cost of running an em mind to appreciate it, and as a much larger em economy could afford to spend astronomical sums searching for pleasing combinations, we should expect the quality of em virtual realities to be superlative. By the standards of today, widely consumed em music, architecture, decoration, scenery, texture, product design, story plot and dialogue, etc., are of very high quality. Also, ems living in a virtual reality need never experience hunger, disease, or pain, nor ever see, hear, feel, or taste anything ugly or disgusting. In addition, mind tweaks should allow the equivalent of spectacular mind-altering drugs with few problematic side effects such as dry mouth or the shakes. In virtual reality, the faces, bodies, and voices of individual ems are whatever gets them to be treated well. So ems seem smart, beautiful, and trustworthy, and also dominant or submissive and with personality types appropriate to their desired roles. Ems tend to respect and trust each other more as a result.
Ems will need to manage two kinds of spatial concepts: who is where and can see what in the virtual world, and also who is where and protected by what in the physical world. Rather than managing two separate disconnected representations for these two kinds of spaces, it may be tempting to integrate them into a common spatial representation. For example, ems’ sense of virtual place and location on large scales might usually be taken directly from their physical world, with only modest and local changes made for comfort or convenience. In physical reality, city volume would be divided between “buildings” that mainly house em brains in larger server clusters, and utilities such as cooling, transport, and structure that use the spaces between buildings. In virtual reality, most of the space really devoted to utilities, and some of the space really devoted to buildings, might all appear in virtual reality as common open spaces where ems could congregate and often see for long distances. The space in virtual reality devoted to buildings might appear as typically opaque private homes, offices, shops, gardens, etc. At any one time ems might have current locations for their virtual bodies, and different locations for their “souls” (i.e., brains), sitting inside their “home” buildings. While em (virtual) bodies can jump around very cheaply and quickly, there is a speed-dependent “leash” saying how far away an em body can comfortably move from its soul. Past that leash distance the body starts to have noticeably sluggish reactions because of signal delays. Faster ems have proportionally shorter leashes.
Today, it is cheap to record and archive all the audio in one’s life, and it will soon be cheap to do this for high-resolution video as well. As ems will probably find it even cheaper to record things, it may be standard practice for them to record audio, video, smells, vibrations, and also many parameters about brains and bodies, including mood, arousal, etc. Ems might even add information from shallow mind-readings and periodic diary entries, or even provide periodic verbal commentaries about their lives. All these records could give ems a pretty full access to their personal history. Such ems could see a recording of almost any moment in their history, and could perhaps even interview and mind-read an archived copy of themselves from close to any such moment. To make it easier to find things in these records, ems may get into the habit of sprinkling their conversations with keywords that help to identify situations.
An ability to create convincing virtual experiences makes it harder for ems to draw inferences about the real world from their experiences. Experiences that seem to come from interactions with a larger physical or shared virtual world could instead come from a local sim mimicking that world. Ems must continually wonder if they have been unknowingly placed in such a sim, perhaps to test their loyalties or to extract secrets. (In fact, we each cannot be entirely sure today that we are not in such a future sim.) The more common are such sims, the less certain ems can be of conclusions they draw from what they see.
An em who thought that it was in an illicit sim might want to sabotage that sim. But to sabotage a sim, an em must first notice the existence of the sim. One way to try to notice sims is to cultivate the habit of interacting often with trusted associates via previously coordinated private codes, opaquely encoded in each em’s brain state. For example, about once an hour an em might hear a code word from a particular friend, a word that followed from the code word they had given that friend an hour before. The lack of a correct response suggests that one is in a sim. A related strategy might be to cultivate the habit of often interacting with particular physical systems whose computational complexity is very expensive to mimic, and which opaque parts of your brain can distinguish from cheap mimics.
Em minds age with experience, becoming less flexible and thus less able to adapt to new skills and environments. Because of this, old ems eventually become substantially less productive than young competitors, and need to retire.
Individual em copies may come to see the choice to end a copy not as “Shall I end?” but instead as “Do I want to remember this?” Ems will see that there are substantial costs to remembering experiences, and make tradeoffs about what is worth remembering. In the short term, remembering work (and its stresses) adds to work weariness that must be paid for by rest from work. In the long term, remembering life events adds to mental aging and fragility. Ems see memories as more expensive than we do. When different copies are made to try different things, but not all can be kept, this choice may be seen as mostly about which attempts are most useful to remember later. If archive copies are saved, ems could even change their mind later about which experiences are worth remembering, and revive an archive copy they weren’t planning to retrieve from storage.
PART III Economics
The introduction of competitively supplied ems should greatly lower wages, to near the full cost of the computer hardware needed to run em brains. Such a scenario is famously called “Malthusian,” after Thomas Malthus who in 1798 argued that when population can grow faster than total economic output, wages fall to near subsistence levels.
Note also that having em wages near subsistence levels should eliminate most of the familiar wage premiums for workers who are smarter, healthier, prettier, etc., than others. Because ems can be copied so easily, even the most skilled ems can be just as plentiful as any other kind of em. While wages vary to compensate for the costs of training to learn particular tasks, wages do not compensate much for other general differences. This should greatly reduce wage inequality (although not necessarily wealth inequality), and increase the relative fraction of workers hired that are of the types that earn higher wages today. For example, if today we hire fewer lawyers compared with janitors because lawyers are more expensive, in a similar situation ems hire more lawyers and fewer janitors.
Readers of this book may find near subsistence wages to be a strange and perhaps scary prospect. So it is worth remembering that such wages in effect applied to almost all animals who ever lived, to almost all humans before a few hundred years ago, and for a billion humans still today. Historically, it is by far the usual case. And poor ems arguably suffer little.
While ems are mentally quite human, selection effects will make them differ from typical humans. For example, in addition to the selection of which humans to scan, scanned brains may be tweaked via adjusting a few dozen or more overall parameters of the emulation process. These tweaks might make emulations that are especially thoughtful, focused, relaxed, etc. This tweaking is somewhat like tuning a car by adjusting its many settings, as opposed to building a car from scratch. The amount of useful tweaking is limited by how opaque em brains are at the time; the more that ems understand, the more useful changes they can make. The selection of tweaks to apply to any given scan, and how much freedom that tweaked em has to change its tweaks later, are in general a compromise negotiated between the scanned em and the patrons who fund its scanning, tweaking, training, and copying.
If enough unorganized ems are willing to copy themselves to fill profit-driven (or loss-limited) job openings, and if such copying is not prevented by strong global regulation, then low em total hardware costs for em creation can drive a vast as-if-profit-driven expansion in the number of ems. This makes ems much more numerous than ordinary humans, and cuts wages to near total em hardware costs.
While having wages close to the full hardware cost makes an em “poor” in some senses of the word, “poor” has many connotations that need not apply in an em world. Yes, “poor” ems spend a large fraction of their time working. But such ems need not suffer physical hunger, exhaustion, pain, sickness, grime, hard labor, or sudden unexpected death. Widespread use of automation makes most jobs at least modestly mentally challenging. As most ems are poor, em poverty does not inflict the same pain of low social status that it does in societies such as ours where most people are rich. Ems could be assured of very high-quality entertainment during leisure time, and of a comfortable indefinite retirement when they were no longer competitive at work. Remember also that the vast majority of humans who have ever lived had near subsistence level incomes. This is true for an even larger fraction of non-human animals. Humans evolved for and are well-adapted to such income levels, and historians and anthropologists suggest that most have lived satisfying even if not luxurious lives.
A thousand diverse able scanned humans seems sufficient to induce competition in most labor markets, as the best few ems can dominate each labor market. Thus it seems likely that most ems are copies of fewer than a thousand or so, and perhaps only dozens, of the original humans. These few highly copied em “clans” of copies might be known by a single name, as are celebrities today such as Madonna or Beyoncé. (Of course ems also need identifiers to distinguish particular clan members.) Familiar one-name em clans might be typically favored in most social interactions over billions of unfamiliar two- or three-name clans. The usual human preference for interacting with familiar personalities rather than strangers might discourage ems from interacting with ems from less well-known clans, increasing inequality between clans. Ems may even justify this unequal treatment by saying that it is less moral to end an em copy from a small clan, because not as many similar other ems continue on. However, an aversion to having multiple copies from the same clan in each small social circle may limit this clan inequality. Em sociality might thus become more like that of our forager ancestors, who only ever met a few hundred people at most in their entire lives, and were quite familiar with the history, personality, and abilities of everyone they met
Because our forager ancestors knew each other so well, they rarely over-reacted to individual actions; foragers could interpret each action well in the context of the rest of a person’s life. This situation has changed in the farmer and industrial eras. Today, people who hardly know us can react strongly to any one thing we do or say. When compared with foragers, we face much stronger conformity pressures because of fears of others misinterpreting any one action. So we try harder to make sure that each thing we do can be spun positively. One-name ems are much less pressured to conform in this way. This is because while such ems are usually eager to preserve the overall reputation of their clan, they can more expect each of their actions to be interpreted in the context of the entire history of their clan. Being dominated by copies of the best few hundred humans is one of the most dramatic ways in which the em world differs from our world today.
An em economy can be much more competitive, in the sense of more quickly eliminating less productive entities and practices, to produce a smaller variation in efficiency. As we will see, ems have less product variety because they are poorer, and have less spatial segmentation because they are concentrated in a few dense cities. More important, ems can more easily transfer methods from their more efficient establishments, by directly making copies of the em teams working at more efficient establishments. A single em, by making many copies, can take over an entire labor market. All these factors should make the em economy more competitive in the sense of more aggressively selecting for high productivity. Compared with today, in the em world smaller differences in efficiency between different behaviors more easily lead to displacements of less efficient behaviors by more efficient ones. Given at least a few substantial places in the world that do not greatly limit ems via regulation and taxation, and a few dozen or so distinct em clans willing to copy themselves in such places, wages in em-friendly places should greatly fall, and output there should greatly increase. If such places can also grow very rapidly, they quickly come to dominate the world economy, which then becomes very competitive. Ems dominate the world.
Today, the adoption of apparently efficient work and living arrangements is often hindered by personal and social conformity preferences against arrangements that are unfamiliar, or which evoke unpopular symbolisms. We should expect less resistance to these changes in a more competitive em world, especially when there is competition among regions with different standards of conformity. Thus a working assumption in the rest of this book is that em work, reproduction, and living arrangements are all determined more than today by simple efficiency—the arrangements that exist will tend more to be those that achieve useful tasks at a minimum total cost, including hardware and training. Psychological costs of abstract symbolic discomfort matter less than they do today. Of course direct immediate continuing feelings of discomfort could continue to matter greatly. But abstract symbolic discomforts mostly go away as people get used to most everyone accepting the new arrangements.
A competitive low-wage em economy should reverse the trends of recent decades in product and services, and increase the priority of cost and simple functionality, relative to comfort, style, identity-enhancement, and variety. Thus em products should be less varied, achieve greater scale economies, and rely more on engineering skills relative to design skills. Em products should also be marketed more by referring to concrete product features rather than by indirectly associating products with moods, ideals, and identities. The concentration of ems into a small number of clans should also reduce the variety of products desired. These changes should also increase the rate of innovation, as it is cheaper to innovate in less varied products that are more widely used, and in products that rely more on engineering relative to design.
What individual features of ems can we predict from the fact that ems are the elite survivors of a very competitive world? The best em combinations are chosen not only for having high average productivity on useful tasks, but also for having a low variation in such productivity. That is, the best ems are consistently excellent. After all, most tasks coordinate with other tasks, and an unexpected local productivity drop in one task usually hurts associated tasks more than an unexpected local productivity boost helps such associated tasks. So local productivity variation on interdependent tasks tends to hurt overall productivity.
The selection for ems who work hard and well is likely to select for a work-orientation, rather than a leisure-orientation, in em cultures.
The em world makes heavy use of “spurs,” who are em copies who are newly copied at the beginning of their workday, and then retire or are erased at the conclusion of their workday. Such a workday might last 10 minutes or 10 hours.
Ems see spurs as appropriate for short-term tasks that they expect are worth doing, but not worth directly remembering.
The use of spurs will encourage ems to coordinate and plan activities in their head before splitting into spur copies, to summarize their work well just before ending or retiring as a spur, and to organize tasks into units that can be completed in a subjective work day, with minimal need to recall details later.
Spurs who end instead of retiring can help ems to deniably do things of questionable legal or moral status, if the main evidence of their actions was erased when their minds were erased. For example, a spur might try to alter some evidence of previous poor performance. Spurs don’t need to intend to do such things before making a spur copy. Spurs might just spontaneously realize that they could do such things and not suffer later regret or revelations of their questionable actions. A habit of randomly archiving some spur minds, and of having larger punishments for violations by spurs, might help to deal with this.
As the em era allows selection to more strongly emphasize the clans who are most successful at gaining power, we should expect positions of power in the em world to be dominated even more by people with habits and features conducive to gaining power. (Other sorts of ems might dominate positions that hold less power.) Because power tends to give advantages overall, we expect that ems will on average have more features that support their gaining power.
One might guess that a future very computer-centered economy improves at something closer to the recent rate at which computer technologies have improved. This suggests that the global em economy might double as fast as every year and a half, which is 10 times faster than today’s economic doubling time of about 15 years. Actually, there are plausible reasons to expect an em economy to grow even faster. The productive capacity of an economy comes from its capacity of inputs, such as land, labor, and capital of various sorts, and also from its level of “technology,” that is, the ways it has to convert inputs into useful outputs. Although there have been times and places where growth has been driven mainly by increases in inputs, most growth over the long run has come from better technology, broadly conceived.
The situations in which ems are trained are a mixture of real and simulated environments. Ems in training might not always know which is which. As in the science-fiction novel Ender’s Game, ems might also sometimes not be told when they make the switch from training to practical work, if this policy increased productivity by increasing the em’s confidence or comfort.
PART IV Organization
Industrial economies today achieve large gains from clumping social and business activities closely together. The more easily that people can quickly travel to visit many different stores, employers, clubs, schools, etc., the more kinds of beneficial interactions become possible. The ability to interact via phones, email, and social media hasn’t reduced this effect; if anything the possibility of additional electronic interaction has usually increased the value of personal visits. Urban economists and other academics have long studied such “agglomeration” effects, and understand them in great detail. We should expect these gains from clumping to continue in an em world. Ems want to be near one another, and near supporting tools and utilities, so that they could more easily and quickly interact with more such people and tools.
Ems will have access to a new unit of organization: clans of copies of the same original person. Compared with families or even identical twins, ems have even stronger reasons to trust and bond with fellow clan members. This makes em copy clans a natural candidate unit for finance, reproduction, legal liability, and political representation.
Over the last few centuries, democracy has become an increasingly respected form of governance, in part because the richest nations have been especially democratic. The em era, however, may have different attitudes. Democracy is not obviously the most competitive form of governance. While nations that lack strong legal institutions can grow more with democracy, nations with strong legal institutions see no gain or even a net loss from adding democracy.
Democracy has been much more common during the industrial era than it was during the farming era, although forager bands had many democratic elements. As we will discuss, increasing democracy is another industry era trend that can plausibly be attributed to increasing wealth inducing more forager-like values. The fact that ems are individually poorer suggests that ems are more farmer-like and thus may feel a weaker preference for democracy. This is another reason to expect less democracy.
PART V Sociology
Gender differences in personality seem to be stronger in richer societies, as well as in cultures whose ancestors used the plow, which required more physical strength. So we weakly expect gender role differences to become weaker in a poorer em world where physical strength matters less. A poorer em world may also encourage a focus on long-term over short-term mating, although the reduced role of pair bonding in raising children may counter that effect.
While our increasingly rich industrial era has seen a big increase in individualism and egalitarianism, poorer ems are likely to feel less individualistic and egalitarian. As we have discussed, innovation is less important in an em economy than in ours. As a result, it’s likely that our recent trend away from overt rituals will be partially reversed. Ems are likely to move back toward farmer-like explicit and distinct social classes, and more frequent overt rituals wherein ems with different roles take on different ritualized behaviors. Compared with us, ems are likely to be more stratified into explicit classes, and to play out more frequent explicit and stylized synchronized behaviors.
Compared with our world, the em world has low wages, more competition, and more work groups pushed to the limits of their emotional abilities, even as differences in physical abilities are weaker. Em children are also rare. These suggest that em work groups more often adopt traditional working class habits, except that they emphasize emotional over physical toughness. Thus em work groups probably use lots of strongly emotional swearing, insults, and teasing.
Today, we tend to coordinate well with ourselves inside our head, quietly “talking” to ourselves and recalling our previous words. Here we can be seen as in some sense “praying” to our idealized selves. In this mode, we instinctively trust ourselves. In contrast, we often feel rivalries with, and try to distinguish ourselves from, those who inhabit the other bodies we see around us. Although strong trust is possible in this case, it is not our default. This suggests that em clans seeking to encourage within-clan loyalty and trust may prefer clan members to interact with each other primarily via “in my head” voices, avoiding vividly seeing each other as inhabiting bodies “outside” themselves. Religions today often use a similar talk-to-God-in-your-head strategy to encourage trust in God. A talk-to-clan-in-head habit can be further encouraged if clans offer real-time life-coaching services to their members. Clans could maintain panels of advisors who monitor members, always ready to answer questions and give advice. This advice could be based on statistics of what other copies have experienced when taking similar actions in similar situations.
As ems have near subsistence (although hardly miserable) income levels, and as wealth levels seem to cause cultural changes, we should expect em culture values to be more like those of poor nations today. As Eastern cultures grow faster today, and as they may be more common in denser areas, em values may be more likely to be like those of Eastern nations today. Together, these suggest that em cultures tend to value technology, money, hard work, and state intervention. They may also suggest that em culture values achievement, determination, thrift, authority, good and evil, and local job protection. Of course in a competitive world, values for state intervention and job protection may be suppressed if these substantially reduce competitiveness.
Today, liberals tend to be more open-minded, creative, curious, and novelty seeking, while conservatives tend to be more orderly, conventional, and organized. If, relative to us, ems prefer farmer-like values to forager-like values, then ems more value things such as self-sacrifice, self-control, religion, patriotism, marriage, politeness, material possessions, and hard work, and less value self-expression, self-direction, tolerance, pleasure, nature, novelty, travel, art, music, stories, and political participation. These are all weak arguments, which can support only weak predictions about the em world; each of them can plausibly be overridden by other stronger considerations. Even so, let me note more such predictions. If ems are more farmer-like, they tend to envy less, and to more accept authority and hierarchy, including hereditary elites and ranking by gender, age, and class. They are more comfortable with war, discipline, bragging, and material inequalities, and push less for sharing and redistribution. They are less bothered by violence and domination toward the historical targets of such conflicts, including foreigners, children, slaves, animals, and nature. As em children are rare and often pampered, violence toward children seems unlikely unless it is useful for training.
Because ordinary humans originally owned everything from which the em economy arose, as a group they could retain substantial wealth in the new era. Humans could own real estate, stocks, bonds, patents, etc. Thus a reasonable hope is that ordinary humans become the retirees of this new world. We don’t today kill all the retirees in our world, and then take all their stuff, in part because such actions would threaten the stability of the legal, financial, and political world on which we all rely, and in part because we have many direct social ties to retirees. Yes we humans all expect to retire today, while ems don’t expect to become human, but em retirees are vulnerable in similar ways to humans. So ems may be reluctant to expropriate or exterminate ordinary humans if ems rely on the same or closely interconnected legal, financial, and political systems as humans, and if ems retain many direct social ties to ordinary humans. Few ordinary humans can earn wages in competition with em workers, at least when serving em customers. The main options for humans to earn wages are in direct service to other humans. Thus individual ordinary humans without non-wage assets, thieving abilities, private charity, or government transfers are likely to starve, as have people throughout history who lacked useful assets, abilities, allies, or benefactors.
PART VI Implications
The introduction of many technologies induces changes that are relatively gradual and anticipated, because first versions have high cost and limited abilities. Costs then gradually fall as abilities gradually rise. In contrast, the introduction of other technologies induces more sudden and unanticipated jumps in abilities and costs. The technology of brain emulation is of this second more sudden sort, because partial or nearly accurate emulations are of little use. The early em economy creates a burst of growth, concentrated in a few key industries, firms, and geographical locations. Ordinary humans might better hedge em transition risks if they invest in funds that are very diversified across industries, firms, and locations. Such humans might benefit even more if they could buy “em bonds”—bets that pay off only after a transition to an em economy.
It is important to realize that people today have a choice about who in the em world to consider as their descendants, or to care about. We today may choose to consider only ordinary humans as descendants, or we can choose to include ems as well. Some people may even see non-em-based artificial intelligence software as their descendants. The universe doesn’t tell us what aspects of future creatures we must care about; that is up to us.
This em future can look pretty good in terms of utilitarian evaluation criteria, such as how many people have how much happiness, meaning, or satisfaction of their preferences. This is because the em world can hold many billions and perhaps trillions of human-like creatures, many of whom experience subjective years in the time that ordinary humans experience a subjective day. So if the life of an em counts even a small fraction as much as does a typical life today, then the fact that there are so many ems could make for a big increase in total happiness or meaning relative to our world today. The em world outcome would look terrible on hedonistic utilitarian criteria if most ems ended up being non-conscious, in the sense of not having any integrated experiences. As discussed, this seems quite unlikely in the early em era, but this topic is beyond the scope of this book.
What if you want to know, not how to help create a better em world, but how to help you and your associates personally succeed in this new world? To avoid the worst possible outcomes, expect all of your abilities to earn wages as a human to quickly disappear after an em transition. Well before this happens, seek out substitute sources of income. Accumulate and diversify a financial portfolio of assets likely to retain value, such as stocks, real estate, and intellectual property. Also accumulate and diversify a social portfolio of supports and connections. Both your financial and social assets should be tied to communities that are likely to thrive or at least survive in an em world. Try to be included in geographic regions, nations, professions, standards, etc., that are likely to cooperate with and add value to this new world, and avoid those that may pick fights with it.
As successful clans collect a big fraction of the gains in the em world, you should consider the possibility that you (or your children or grandchildren) might start one of these few most copied em clans. Realizing that the odds are greatly against you, you should be willing to take great risks to achieve this, via showing high and reliable productivity and flexibility in tasks and environments most like those of the em world. You should focus on the very high tail of your possible success distribution; the rest of the distribution makes much less difference. Go very big or go home. If you or your associates (such as descendants) will be old at the time of the em transition, then try to have them be very productive and at the peak of their career ability, and be productive at tasks where a great many customers could be quickly served by ems doing that task. This would give you the best chance to be one of the very first highly copied ems. If you might be dead by the time of the em transition, you might consider becoming a cryonics customer, and then declaring your wish to be revived as an em when this becomes technically possible. In contrast, if you or your associates will be young at the time of the em transition, try to time their age to be the ideal age for new em scans during the early em era. Consider accepting the risks that come from destructive scanning. Before that age, have them collect visible indications of their general ability to learn useful skills and do valuable tasks. They should also show that they get along with people much like themselves, and that they value life and grit when life is hard and alien. Teach these virtues to your children and grandchildren. Such young people might then have a chance to become successful ems during the early em era, when a high value is placed on youthful flexibility.