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Review: The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life When

Robots Rule the Earth by Robin Hanson

Article in Journal of Posthuman Studies · January 2017

DOI: 10.5325/jpoststud.1.1.0104

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 REVIEW

THE AGE OF EM: WORK, LOVE AND LIFE WHEN ROBOTS

RULE THE EARTH BY ROBIN HANSON

Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2016, xi + 426 pp. Cloth, UK £20.00/
US $34.95 ISBN 9780198754626

R E V I E W E D BY S T E V E F U L L E R , U N I V E R S I T Y O F WA R W I C K

I first came across Robin Hanson when he was a Ph.D. student at Cal Tech,
a few years after I had launched the journal Social Epistemology. From 1993
to 1995, I published three of his pieces relating to the reform of the internal
dynamics of science, ranging from the replacement of peer review with prizes
to the establishment of gambling houses to predict scientific innovation.
(The major ones were Hanson 1995a, 1995b.) I now credit him with having
awakened me to the role that markets play in revealing a form of intelligence
that humans tend to suppress as a result of norms of social cohesion that
discourage accurate self-representation (cf. Fuller 2000: 106, 150). Robin
Hanson is also the economist who has so far made the most substantive con-
tributions to the contemporary definition of transhumanism, which he began
(unknown to me) at that time. The book under review is the culmination of
a quarter-century journey that took flight with the publication of “If uploads
come first: The crack of a future dawn” in the original transhumanist journal
Extropy (Hanson 1994).
In that article, Hanson proposed that there is a good chance that we will
be able to “upload” a brain to a computer before we can either understand
how the brain works or create artificial intelligence. What he had in mind was
something close to what is depicted in the 2014 film Transcendence, in which
Johnny Depp’s brain is computer-scanned to produce a silicon-based virtual
copy, which ends up enhancing itself to self-destruction by accessing the world’s
information networks. To be sure, Hanson’s original thought experiment did
not leap to such dystopic conclusions—and neither does The Age of Em, in
which “em” is Hanson’s nickname for one such brain emulation. In the original

Journal of Posthuman Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2017

Copyright © 2017 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

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article, Hanson went on to explore the political-economic consequences of

this development in a perspective informed mainly by Darwinian evolution
and the economics of efficiency. The book expands these consequences into a
full-blown anthropology of the future.
After James Hughes referred to the original article as a paradigm case of
“technolibertarianism” in his book Citizen Cyborg (Hughes 2004), a sometimes
testy e-mail exchange between him and Hanson ensued, which was republished,
with additional commentary, in the Journal of Evolution and Technology in 2007
(LaTorra 2007). The Age of Em makes no reference to Hughes or this exchange,
but an appreciation of their differences is useful to get an initial fix on what is
at stake in this book.
Hughes’ version of their differences—himself the “technoprogressive”
social democrat and Hanson the “technolibertarian” neoliberal—captures
the surface emphases of the two antagonists. Hughes draws attention to
the prospect of growing inequality, whereas Hanson focuses on the greater
productivity that an upload-driven economy is likely to bring. But below
the surface, and closer to Hanson’s take on the debate, is that Hughes sees
the thought experiment as simply an exaggerated extension of current cap-
italist conditions, whereas Hanson treats it as a trigger for a fundamental
rethinking of the ontological conditions of capitalism. Thus, Hughes worries
that Hanson fails to provide a wealth redistribution scheme to prevent the
further immiseration of poor people, while Hanson is open on how any
such redistribution scheme might work, possibly including “ems” among
the entities in his welfare function.
Hughes’ continued use of the word “immiseration” reveals the extent of
his debt to Marx’s original understanding of the relationship of humanity
and technology. According to Marx’s conception of Homo faber, technology
is the distinctive expression of our humanity that allows us to escape the
drudgery of our animal origins. However, progress in technology has been
made unevenly, which in turn has served to reproduce and often exacerbate
the conditions over which humans dominate each other. Marx saw this as
truly a problem of “political economy” and not simply of either politics
or economics. In other words, the potential for both human flourishing
and technological efficiency was being held back by capitalism’s default
social relations of production; hence the need for a “socialist revolution” of
some sort. And as long as we continue to live in something like the current
information-based political economy, then Marx remains very relevant—so
much so that I have made the case for a “Marx 2.0.” My basic fear is that
we are heading into a world in which most of society’s wealth is generated
by computer-based providers such as Google and Amazon who exploit

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our freely given data for their own purposes without adequate return to us
“donors” (Fuller 2016).
In contrast, Hanson’s thought experiment presumes that the arrival of brain
upload technology will force a deep recalibration of values, including the value
of Homo sapiens as such. Here it is worth recalling the significance of Marx’s
attachment to the labor theory of value, a medieval Christian doctrine designed
to uphold individual human dignity, which was repurposed by John Locke and
other religious dissenters in the modern period to become the cornerstone of
classical political economy in the hands of Adam Smith. To be sure, today’s
economists have officially disavowed the theory. They tie economic value not
to its source but to utility, and on that basis alone they often dismiss Marx.
­However, the spirit of the labor theory of value persists even in their own
­theories, especially when innovation is taken to be a driver of productivity. Robert
Solow is only the most notable of recent economists who treat technology as a
“god of the gaps” that can finesse resource constraint issues through innovative
substitutions that end up increasing productivity.
Hanson confounds this entire line of thought by effectively erasing the
distinction between “labor” and “technology” as factors of production. Ems,
albeit products of technology, are treated as productive agents in their own
right as they come to be recognized as performing functions comparable to
those of humans. Indeed, in Hanson’s thought experiment, they eventually
become the primary wealth generators. In that case, the central normative
issue surrounding “the age of em” is one of accommodating the differing
environmental requirements of humans and uploads so that they can cohabit
not only peacefully but also equitably. The historic struggles over equality by
people of different faiths, races, genders, cultures, and abilities presage the
problems ahead in this scenario. However, the precedent that seems to be
most appropriate—yet is conspicuously absent from Hanson’s book—is the
struggle for animal rights.
It is striking that in the history of both modernist and postmodernist
social theory the difference between humans and nonhumans has been
cast mainly in terms of “man vs. machine,” even though the idea of “man
vs. animal” has been historically more instrumental in incorporating all of
Homo sapiens into the realm of the human (Bourke 2011). Bluntly put, rights-
based movements on behalf of women and ethnic minorities first acquired
forward momentum by benchmarking their own treatment against that of
animals who were already starting to be subject to legislation ensuring their
humane treatment. Moreover, as colonial expansion increased early modern
Europe’s encounters with other primate species in Africa, Asia, and South
America, it became urgent to establish clear criteria to distinguish humans

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from their uncannily similar simian cousins. This issue first culminated in
Enlightenment debates over the origins of language, which began shortly
after Linnaeus classified humans as Homo sapiens, which is to say, a species
of ape. In the great sweep of history, the Enlightenment’s focus on language
as humanity’s defining feature provided a bridge between the divine powers
that prelapsarian Adam commanded in virtue of naming things by their
essences and what artificial intelligence has classically aspired to, namely, a
form of linguistic competence that could fool its human interlocutors into
supposing that a machine was one of their own.
That Hanson does not worry much about how ems and humans will com-
municate with each other in his envisaged future shows that he subscribes to
this general line of thought. It is then reasonable to ask about the attitude that
these digitally uploaded and enhanced versions of human minds are likely to
have toward their intellectually and economically inferior progenitors. Hanson’s
own vision is relatively benign, based on the common evolutionary ancestry,
so to speak, between ems and humans. Thus, ems do not seem to lose their
original humanity, notwithstanding the practical difficulties in accommodating
to the different material needs and spatiotemporal horizons of humans vis-à-vis
ems. However, if we consider humanity’s treatment of animals—including its
nearest primate cousins—as a precedent, the prospects do not look quite so
straightforward. In particular, the development of language—be it through divine
creation or evolutionary history—has allowed Homo sapiens to self-alienate from
the rest of nature. Indeed, for Rousseau, this was the secular equivalent of the
Biblical Fall of Man. The implication for Hanson’s impending post-anthropic
“cybercene” is that once ems have become sufficiently different from humans
by virtue of their own internal developments, they may become quite negligent
in their treatment of humans, partly because they find it difficult to relate to
human needs beyond simply registering our behavior under a variety of con-
ditions. In short, the em life-world may render us just as opaque to them as
other primate species are to us.
Hanson appears to have grasped an aspect of this problem. He imagines
that the benevolent nature of ems would lead them to dispose of humans in
a manner akin to the sanctuaries currently provided to protected species. To
be sure, this is the primary modus operandi of today’s animal rights activists.
However, from the standpoint of human rights activists, it is really little more
than trans-species paternalism. The ems do not seem likely to empower people
beyond the point of allowing them to pursue a relatively pain-free existence
in something resembling their natural habitats. In particular, it is not at all
clear whether the cybercene would allow humans to engage in the feats of
self-transcendence that in the modern period would enable them to evacuate

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their habitats and even bodies, the very basis on which ems would have emerged
in the first place. Here Hanson might consider as a model the rather visionary
proposal by Donaldson and Kymlicka (2011) for the constitution of a “zoopolis,”
which involves a more empowering notion of animal rights, whereby other
species are formally incorporated into the legal regimes governing the political
and economic conditions of the human life-world. As a result, such normative
concepts as crime, liability, license, exploitation, murder, and perhaps even
justice and equality would come to be defined in species-neutral terms.
Both friends and foes of zoopolitanism admit that it poses a very daunting
challenge to the humans who might wish to implement it. However, were
humans on the receiving end of a similar proposal coming from the ems, they
would no doubt find it attractive. In any case, those who have taken zoopoli-
tanism seriously—say, the prospect of animals as parties to mutually binding
contracts—realize that it implies much more intensive cross-species understanding
than even the staunchest animal rights activists demand. After all, such activists
tend to be species segregationists; hence, their associated worries about so-called
“genetically modified organisms,” which might “contaminate” the “natural”
state of organisms. In contrast, aspiring zoopolitans have advanced what after
the science fiction author David Brin (1980) has been called an “uplift” agenda,
whereby the species with which we would wish to enter into legal arrangements
would be cognitively enhanced in some relevant sense as a way of concretizing
the normative commitment to trans-species equality (Chan 2009). Of course,
the demand for uplift may go both ways, perhaps resulting in human cognition
enhanced to get more directly into the minds of animals. One could easily
imagine ems and humans reaching similar accords.
In closing, let me draw attention to two features of zoopolitanism that
­potentially undermine the intuitive plausibility of Hanson’s thought experiment.
First, the introduction of uplift as a significant political technology amounts to
creating a spectrum of cyborg creatures, which takes the sting out of the neatly
disturbing us vs. them premise that frames The Age of Ems. Indeed, somewhat
surprisingly, “cyborg” does not appear in Hanson’s book at all, even though
before we have discovered whether mind uploads will occur before true artificial
intelligence, we already increasingly inhabit a world populated by a variety of
cyborgs, namely, prosthetically and otherwise biomedically enhanced humans.
Here I agree with Hughes (2004) when he argues that the proliferation of
­cyborgs is serving to remove much of the fear and loathing—perhaps a residue
of 1950s science fiction films—that continue to surround beings who do not
conform to normal human expectations of intelligent life. The second feature
of zoopolitanism relates to the nature of the cyborgs that so far exist and are
likely to exist in the future. A general principle of energy efficiency seems to

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be at work, with carbon and silicon combined for optimal functionality. Ever
since Moravec (1998) raised the question, the energy requirements for computers
to perform the multiple intelligent functions currently serviced by the human
brain have continued to be prohibitive as a practical long-term prospect, even if
achievable as a scientific goal. In short, Hanson’s cybercene threatens to consume
more of the Earth’s energy than the Anthropocene that would have preceded it.
Indeed, instead of human subjugation, a more pressing concern for denizens
of the age of ems is precisely the sort of global short-circuiting that marks the
climax of the film Transcendence.

WORKS CITED

Bourke, J. 2011. What It Means to Be Human: From 1791 to the Present. London: Virago.
Brin, D. 1980. Sundiver. New York: Bantam.
Chan, S. 2009. “Should We Enhance Animals?” Journal of Medical Ethics 35: 678–83.
Donaldson, S., and W. Kymlicka. 2011. Zoopolis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fuller, S. 2000. The Governance of Science. Milton Keynes, UK: Open University Press.
Fuller, S. 2016. “The Place of Value in a World of Information: Prolegomena to Any Marx 2.0.”
In Social Epistemology and Technology. Ed. F. Scalambrino, 15–26. Lanham, MD: Rowman
and Littlefield.
Hanson, R. 1994. “If Uploads Come First: The Crack of a Future Dawn.” Extropy 6 (2): 10–15.
Hanson, R. 1995a. “Comparing Peer Review to Information Prizes.” Social Epistemology 9 (1): 49–55.
Hanson, R. 1995b. “Could Gambling Save Science? Encouraging an Honest Consensus.” Social
Epistemology 9 (1):3–33.
Hughes, J. 2004. Citizen Cyborg. Cambridge, MA: Westview Press.
LaTorra, M., ed. 2007. “The Hanson–Hughes Debate on ‘The Crack of a Future Dawn.’ ” Journal
of Evolution and Technology 16 (1): 99–126.
Moravec, H. 1998. “When Will Computer Hardware Match the Human Brain?” Journal of
Evolution and Technology 1 (1): 10–22.

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