Notes:

• So he's writing a book on em economics? I'm actually a little disappointed - I was hoping for a grand synthesis of all the health care/Near-Far/signaling material on OB. Well, hopefully he'll be able to marshal all sorts of good details and analogies that he has to skim over in a talk (eg. when he talked about the big economy being spatially small, I thought of the Kuznets curve; location made me think of datacenters, which fortunately he did bring up)
• An Apple user. Always kind of thought of him as a PC.
• The transition example is interesting. I didn't realize that there would be several years before world growth hits insane numbers like 100+% annual growth. This undermines some of my ideas about investing for an em scenario: instead of investing now heavily in equities, it may be better to instead wait for world growth to hit 7%+ and then invest as frantically as possible.
• Luxurious virtual environments will be common: this seems trivially false or at least questionable. Just previously, he points out that wages and costs will fall to the level at which another em can be created/copied. Even if a luxurious virtual environment were cheap in some absolute sense, that doesn't say they'll be cheap in a relative sense. Existing virtual environments require specialized hardwired mini-supercomputers (GPUs) to handle rendering environments, much of which is static, and fall far short of 'luxury'. (As nice as any existing video game like Crysis may look, would you not find being imprisoned in it very unpleasant, to say nothing of extremely luxurious?) AAA games are in a well-known death spiral as the gigabytes of artwork and other demands inflate production costs into the hundreds of millions already. I'd find this point much more convincing if he instead took a tack more like 'yes, it will require terabytes of artwork and gigaflops of rendering, but this will only be 1% or less of the most plausible estimates for emulating minds, and so it's quite plausible such environments will yield a +1% productivity improvement' (until selection pressures eliminate the need or desire for luxurious environments because that's 1% that could be spent better, anyway...).
• It was notably light on the issues of values (farmer vs forager) and selection pressure leading to em hell.
• It was much longer and more comprehensive than I thought. It stands as a pretty decent summary of all the em posts on OB.