Big fat DNF. I hated this. I got very frustrated with it very quickly.
The techno-utopians have had their day in the sun, and this book was a relic of those times. However, now I kind of feel like they need to fuck off, and I think for the most part they have.
But the annoyance with this book is actually a little deeper. I like reading books about tech, because as a fan of science-fiction I found these things of this nature tickle my imagination in a big way, and in fact Marc Goodman’s Future Crimes kicked my imagination into writing a handful of short stories (that alas didn’t go anywhere, but oh well).
Age of Em just didn’t have that, because it is very poorly researched. Robin Hanson is a university professor of Economics, and I would hazard a bit he understand economics very well. I don’t want to take away anything from a person I know nothing about. But the big fault I tend to find with all economists is that they seem to think it is the science to end all sciences, and that when applying their knowledge to other fields their relevance will immediately come through. So what has this very likely very intelligent man decide to write about? What the world will look like when we emulate the human brain digitally and Robots are running the show.
His expertise in Economics did not really help.
Weirdly enough, this book reminded me most of the work of Olaf Stapeldon, whose books I as well didn’t like. But Stapeldon wrote and was published as fiction, more specifically science-fiction, and that is how the book was treated. I don’t think anyone took this seriously. But Hanson published this as non-fiction, and it is laughably, laughably dumb. In much of the work of his that I have read, Stapeldom picks up a random thread of potential future history, and we get some interesting tidbits about what a future civilization could look like. Stapledon operate far off enough in the future that the ‘predictions’ could be interesting. We won’t get there, but maybe some other civilization will. Hanson’s prediction, meaning to be closer to home, just plain fucking fail. And they fail mostly because of some of the most puzzling presuppositions I have ever bothered to read.
This is our generations treatise on how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
Failures in Polymathy 