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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

by Paul_S 10y ago

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.

andrewflnr 10y ago
Speaking of fiction, it sounds a lot like The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi, more in the "forking your mind repeatedly" respect than the 2mm robots, though the tiny people are there, too. Reading this article shortly after The Quantum Thief was actually a bit uncanny.
freshhawk 10y ago
"...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 10y ago
  >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 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      >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 10y ago
        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.
singold 10y ago
There is this comedian on the radio were I live that says that economics is the science of explaining today why yesterday's predictions were wrong :P I can't believe that he says that his errors are our fault...
Houshalter 10y ago
Well I agree that the specific predictions are weird. Hanson spends a whole chapter at the begging trying to justify them. The main point is that it doesn't matter if all the details are right. Humans are better at seeing a specific image of what a possible future might look at, than trying to sample from the entire probability distribution of possible futures. It's less like trying to forecast the weather in a backyard. And more like painting a picture of that backyard in 20 years. When all the trees and plants grown up, and imagining what they will look like. Imagining what the needs of that older family will be that they have aged. Maybe their kids will grow up and the playground equipment will be gone. Or they will have a ramp instead of steps to accommodate a wheelchair.

by Paul_S 10y ago

andrewflnr 10y ago

Speaking of fiction, it sounds a lot like The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi, more in the "forking your mind repeatedly" respect than the 2mm robots, though the tiny people are there, too. Reading this article shortly after The Quantum Thief was actually a bit uncanny.

freshhawk 10y ago

"...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 10y ago
>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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    >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 10y ago
      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.

singold 10y ago

There is this comedian on the radio were I live that says that economics is the science of explaining today why yesterday's predictions were wrong :P I can't believe that he says that his errors are our fault...

Houshalter 10y ago

Well I agree that the specific predictions are weird. Hanson spends a whole chapter at the begging trying to justify them. The main point is that it doesn't matter if all the details are right. Humans are better at seeing a specific image of what a possible future might look at, than trying to sample from the entire probability distribution of possible futures. It's less like trying to forecast the weather in a backyard. And more like painting a picture of that backyard in 20 years. When all the trees and plants grown up, and imagining what they will look like. Imagining what the needs of that older family will be that they have aged. Maybe their kids will grow up and the playground equipment will be gone. Or they will have a ramp instead of steps to accommodate a wheelchair.