Robin talks about a class system where those running at higher speeds are in a higher social class. But given Robin's assumption that cost for emulation speed will be linear up to 1000000x, I don't see why anyone (except those with physical work, which Robin estimates at 20% of the population) wouldn't want to run at the top end of this range. In his scenario of a boss running at 21x the speed of the workers, why isn't the whole team being run at the higher speed? Does anyone understand his reasoning here?

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.

I used to work on a program that was designed to run binaries compiled for one processor on another. It was only meant to run the binaries compiled for a single minor revision of a GNU/Linux distro on one processor on the same minor revision of the same distro on another processor.

We had access to the source code of the distro -- and got some changes made to make our job easier. We had access to the full chip design of one chip (to which, again, there were changes made for our benefit), and to the published spec of the other.

We managed to get the product out of the door, but every single code change -- even, at times, changes to non-functional lines of code like comments -- would cause major problems (mention the phrase "Java GUI" to me even now, a couple of years later, and I'll start to twitch). We would only support a limited subset of functionality, it would run at a fraction of the speed, and even that took a hell of a lot of work to do at all.

Now, that was just making binaries compiled for a distro for which we had the sources to run on a different human-designed von Neumann-architecture chip.

Given my experience of doing even that, I'd say the amount of time it would take (even assuming continued progress in processor speeds and storage capacity, which is a huge assumption) to get human brain emulation to the point where an emulated brain can match a real one for reliability and speed is in the region of a couple of hundred years, yes.

Instead of the deletion or killing of uploads that want to live but can't cut it economically, why not slow them down? (Perhaps to the point where they are only as "quick" and "clever" as an average human being is today.) Given that the cost of computation keeps decreasing, this should impose a minimal burden on society going forward. This could also be an inducement to find better employment, especially if employers can temporarily grant increased computation resources for the purposes of the job.

Okay, compare it to life now.

Yeah, the reason I asked is that he's been evasive about it before and I wanted to try to pin down an actual answer.

Hang on, yesterday you were telling me that there's very little anyone could do to make a real difference to the outcome. So why tell Stuart that your analysis could be helpful in bringing about a different outcome?

Stuart, it sounds like you think that the life of the typical animal, and of the typical human in history, were not worth living -- you'd prefer that they had never existed.

I'd prefer that their lives were better, rather than there were more of them.

What you'd most want from the future is to stop change enough to ensure that people very much like you continue to dominate.

What I'd most want from the future is change in many directions (more excitement! more freedom! more fun!), but not in the direction of low-individual-choice, death-filled worlds (with possibly a lot of pain). I'd eagerly embrace a world without mathematicians, without males, without academics, without white people (and so on down the list of practically any of my characteristics), without me or any copy of me, in order to avoid the malthusian scenario.

What are humans doing now that we need only ~2% of the workforce to grow food and ~15% to design and make stuff?

ISTM that the major flaw in Hanson's logic is the assumption that uploads won't replace themselves with simpler nonsentients based on their expertise. The real evolutionary pressure wouldn't be to have optimum levels of pain and pleasure, but to replace motivation with automation: it takes less power, computing time, and storage space.