Robin Hanson Looks At Surviving The Future

  Futurism  

If any of our visions of technological revolution come true, then how will humans cope? Economist and futurist Robin Hanson presents his guide.

If any of our visions of technological revolution come true, then how will humans cope? Economist and futurist Robin Hanson presents his guide.

Like many people, economist and futurist Hanson, author of The Future of Work, says he wants to live for as long as he can, but what would be the best way to do this? First, he says you could do all the things that will reduce your chance of dying now -- like wearing seat-belts, avoiding dangerous activity and eating healthy food.

Then there's finding ways to get past the limitations of our bodies and current medicine, which could mean donating one's body or brain to cryogenics. If something like whole brain emulation is possible you could take frozen brains of people, and make another version of that old brain.

Immortality is much harder than it seems. It's not just a matter of finding the ways to potentially live forever, you have to do it in a way that makes it cheap and valuable enough to make it easy for you to stay around. Then there's artificial intelligence. If the AI revolution comes, we can't depend on our ability to earn wages for our survival and prosperity. Practically, we should diversify your assets and own things other than your ability to earn wages, like stocks, real estate, patents, etc. And when there's a world with millions of robots, don't count on being at the center of things.

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Hanson is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University, a research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University, and chief scientist at Consensus Point. After receiving his Ph.D. in social science from the California Institute of Technology in 1997, Hanson was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation health policy scholar at the University of California at Berkeley.

In 1984, he received a masters in physics and a masters in the philosophy of science from the University of Chicago, and afterward spent nine years researching artificial intelligence, Bayesian statistics, and hypertext publishing at Lockheed, NASA, and independently.

Hanson has over 70 publications, including articles in Applied Optics, Business Week, CATO Journal, Communications of the ACM, Economics Letters, Econometrica, Economics of Governance, Extropy, Forbes, Foundations of Physics, IEEE Intelligent Systems, Information Systems Frontiers, Innovations, International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Journal of Evolution and Technology, Journal of Law Economics and Policy, Journal of Political Philosophy, Journal of Prediction Markets, Journal of Public Economics, Medical Hypotheses, Proceedings of the Royal Society, Public Choice, Social Epistemology, Social Philosophy and Policy, Theory and Decision, and Wired.

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