Category: Podcast

When I think of emulation, I think of retro gaming. My Android phone can easily emulate a Super Nintendo, a gaming console from the 1990s, and it can do that because the phone is much more powerful than the Super Nintendo and because we know exactly how a Super Nintendo works. My guest for this episode, Robin Hanson, argues that we may one day be able to emulate human brains. His book, The Age of Em, provides a detailed analysis of what a society made largely of emulated humans would be like.

Whole brain emulation is unlike my emulated Super Nintendo in many ways. With the brain, we’re trying to emulate something that we couldn’t build ourselves. The challenge is in developing a sufficiently accurate model of each part of the brain that is necessary for it to function. If we knew how each node in the brain worked, if we could model it such that our node would take the same inputs, produce the same change in its internal state, and send the same outputs as biological brain cells, then all that would remain would be to find the precise network of cells in a biological brain. This could be achieved by scanning an actual human brain. The brain could then be emulated by a sufficiently powerful computer. The emulated brain would have precisely the same memories and thought processes as the person who was scanned. Hanson calls these emulated individuals “ems.”

Hanson applies standard theoretical tools to the analysis of this em economy. Here are some of the implications:

1. Ems will be able to operate much faster or much slower than normal human brains.

The cost of running an emulation faster or slower is roughly linear in the speed. That means that for ems working on time-sensitive tasks, a race to develop some new technology first for example, they will likely work many times faster than biological humans, perhaps experiencing weeks or months in the blink of an eye. Ems that work alongside biological humans, for instance those engaged in services, would likely run at the same speed as we do. Ems could also run at slower-than-human speeds, which might be used as a sort of low-cost retirement for ems who have completed their working lives.

2. Most ems will probably live at subsistence.

We live in a world where the supply of human labour is limited by biology. Ems will not be so limited. Once a single em exists, making a copy will only be as costly as the processing power needed to run that copy. This means that the value of em labour will fall to the marginal cost of running an em. The em economy is a Malthusian economy, where the em population can vary instantaneously to keep up with the need for em labour.

However, subsistence might not be as bad for an em as it has been for most humans through history. Ems need not fear starvation or disease. Their consumption goods will all be simulated, and in a world of extremely cheap processing power, simulated luxuries would be cheap as well.

3. An em can work 99 percent of the time and go on vacation for 99 percent of the time, too.

This may seem paradoxical, but it follows from the possibility of creating and deleting copies at will. Suppose you have one em plumber. Each day he can make 99 copies of himself, in order to perform 99 plumbing jobs while he relaxes on a simulated beach, deleting the copies at the end of the day. While 99 percent of his processing power is being used to complete plumbing jobs, each em experiences a life of leisure followed by a single day of work.

4. Biological humans will be a true rentier class.

In a world populated by ems, the value of human labour will fall to near zero. An em brain can do anything a human brain can do, and ems will be produced until their marginal value falls to the cost of processing them. Biological humans won’t be able to count on the value of their labour to sustain them, but they will earn vastly more from the wealth they already own. An em economy will grow very quickly, and thus will be able to give very high returns to the owners of capital.

5. The age of em might only last a few years before the next major change.

Robin compares the development of an em economy to three past changes in our society: The evolution of our latest non-human ancestors into humans, the move from a hunter-gatherer society to a farming society, and the birth of our modern industrial society. He observes that with each transition, the growth rate (measured as the increase in brain size before the evolution of humans and as economic growth thereafter) has increased and the period between transitions has shrunk. As ems will be able to experience far more time than we do, and since an em economy will be capable of extremely high growth, it won’t take long for em society to produce the next radical shift. Perhaps just a year or two.

What will that shift entail? Robin declines to speculate, as there are too many degrees of freedom to predict with any degree of accuracy.

 

Additional links:

Buy The Age of Em on Amazon.

Read Scott Alexander’s review of the book, which I mentioned during the interview.

Read Robin Hanson’s blog, Overcoming Bias.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to Economics Detective Radio on iTunes or Stitcher.

The post The Age of Em, Whole Brain Emulation, and Humanity’s Future with Robin Hanson appeared first on The Economics Detective.

Mark Thornton is a Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute. He is the author of many books, including The Economics of Prohibition (which you can access for free here), which is also the topic of this episode.

1. Does drug prohibition help stop poverty and homelessness?

The conventional wisdom on drugs is simple: you see drugs and drug abuse mixed with poverty and homelessness and it makes intuitive sense that drugs play a role in causing poverty. It seems to follow that by criminalizing drugs, you can take them out of the equation and help solve the other problems.

Mark disputes this conventional wisdom. First, the causation doesn’t necessarily go from drugs to poverty. Poverty can cause people to abuse drugs and mental illness can cause both self-medication and poverty. Second, if you legalize drugs, they won’t be sold on the street. Instead, they’ll be sold by legitimate businesses with a particular interest in maintaining their reputation and not harming their customers. Prohibition is what creates the black market, which in turn generates violence, crime, and more potent and dangerous drugs, all of which exacerbate poverty. You can’t clean up the social problems related to drugs by criminalizing them when criminalizing them is what caused many of those problems.

2. The Suburban Heroin Epidemic

Mark recently authored an article called The Legalization Cure for the Heroin Epidemic. In the article, he calls attention to the rising number of overdose deaths in the United States:

The number of drug overdoses in the US is approaching 50,000 per year. Of that number nearly 20,000 are attributed to legal pain killers, such as Oxycontin. More than 10,000 die of heroin overdoses. I believe these figures vastly underestimate the number of deaths that are related to prescription drug use.

The face of drug abuse has changed in recent decades. Rather than the homeless junkie we might picture when we think of addiction, the new addicts are middle-class people who have been over-prescribed legal opiates like such as Oxycontin and Vicodin. Doctors have been routinely prescribing these addictive opiates and many people turn to the black market rather than going cold turkey when their prescriptions expire.

The problem is that Oxycontin and Vicodin are very expensive on the black market, so many of these unintentional addicts turn to heroin as a cheaper substitute. The problem with buying black market heroin is that you don’t know what you’re getting. Different addicts need different doses, and you don’t know what kind of dose you’re getting and what it’s been cut with. All it takes is one particularly strong dose to cause an accidental overdose.

3. American Foreign Policy and the Supply of Opiates

Afghanistan is the largest grower of illicit opium, and the supply has greatly increased since its invasion in 2001. The invasion destroyed the country’s legitimate economy and many farmers turned to opium production. Being a huge and basically lawless country with a perfect climate for growing poppies, the global supply of opium exploded.

4. Political Lies to Support Drug Prohibition

Mark discusses the political circumstances around the prohibition of marijuana in the United States.

Marijuana prohibition went national with the passage of the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937. It too quickly changed from a measure to tax and regulate into an outright prohibition. Even hemp, the non-intoxicating form of cannabis was banned! When propaganda claiming that marijuana was deadly and caused insanity, violence, and criminal behavior was debunked (aka Reefer Madness), the “gateway theory” was born to fill the void. The gateway theory posits that while marijuana might not be addictive or dangerous, it would lead the user to try the hard drugs, such as heroin. This theory became the prevailing view in the second half of the twentieth century.

Commissioner Harry J. Anslinger made up this gateway theory on the spot when arguing for the prohibition of marijuana. Unfortunately, the argument stuck.

Recently, a quote by John Ehrlichman, Richard Nixon’s domestic policy advisor (and Watergate co-conspirator) has resurfaced on the internet:

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

This quote shows how drug prohibition has long be complicit with the politics of bigotry.

5. Progress Against the War on Drugs

Despite the sordid history of drug prohibition in the twentieth century, we’ve made slow progress towards a sane drug policy. Marijuana’s many health benefits cannot be denied, and legislators are starting to take notice. Medical marijuana has been legalized in many places, and some places have even legalized it for recreational use.

Meanwhile, some jurisdictions have switched from treating drugs as a criminal issue to treating them as a medical issue. Portugal legalized all drugs in 2001. Some police chiefs have even unilaterally changed course in how they deal with addicts, offering help rather than incarceration.

We can only hope that complete legalization is just around the corner.

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The post Drugs, Prohibition, and the Suburban Overdose Crisis with Mark Thornton appeared first on The Economics Detective.