Creating Digital Emulations and the Challenge of Convincing Them

12min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

The speakers discuss the concept of creating a digital emulation that is identical to oneself, exploring the challenge of convincing the emulation that it is not the real person. They also question whether these emulations would have the same motivations as the original person.

Robin Hanson of GMU talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the idea of a technological singularity--a sudden, large increase in the rate of growth due to technological change. Hanson argues that it is plausible that a change in technology could lead to world output doubling every two weeks rather than every 15 years, as it does currently. Hanson suggests a likely route to such a change is to port the human brain into a computer-based emulation. Such a breakthrough in artificial intelligence would lead to an extraordinary increase in productivity creating enormous wealth and radically changing the returns to capital and labor. The conversation looks at the feasibility of the process and the intuition behind the conclusions. Hanson argues for the virtues of such a world.