Robin Hanson
George Mason University; Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford
Functionalist What matters is the organisation of the processing, not the material
Robin Hanson is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University and a research associate at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute. He holds a doctorate in social science from Caltech, master’s degrees in physics and philosophy from the University of Chicago, and worked nine years as a research programmer for Lockheed and NASA before his academic career. He is also known for prediction markets, the futarchy governance proposal, and the long-running OvercomingBias blog.
His 2016 book The Age of Em: Work, Love, and Life when Robots Rule the Earth (Oxford University Press) applies standard social science to a single assumption, that brain emulations become cheap within about a century. The forecast fills in the consequence in detail, copied minds at near-subsistence wages, clan structures, workday spur copies, week-scale economic doubling, and city-states built around cooling hardware.
This site covers the book in the Age of Em analysis. His position on this site’s scale is assigned for the book’s operating assumption, that an em is a mind, rather than for an argued theory of consciousness. The book brackets the question on purpose, and the bracket is exactly where the substrate debate lives.
Known for. The Age of Em, em economics, prediction markets, the futarchy proposal
Coverage on this site
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Robin Hanson is listed with the other functionalists and computationalists, who hold that what matters is the organisation of the processing, not the material. The theory family behind that position is set out in the index of consciousness theories. Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers.