“The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life when Robots Rule the Earth” is a 2016 book by economist Robin Hanson, published by Oxford University Press. It explores a specific path to transformative machine intelligence that is different from training larger and larger neural networks. Instead of writing AI from scratch, Hanson imagines that humanity first learns to scan a human brain in enough detail to run it as software - a brain emulation, or “em.” Once one em exists, it can be copied indefinitely and run at different speeds.
Hanson treats this not as science fiction but as a forecasting exercise, applying standard economics, physics, and social science to work out what such a world would look like. Because ems can be copied for the cost of computation and run far faster than biological brains, they would out-compete humans for most paid work. He projects an economy that could double every few weeks rather than every couple of decades, populated by trillions of em copies living mostly in dense virtual cities and working at subsistence-level wages of computing power.
The book’s distinctive move is to resist assuming the future will reflect moral progress. Hanson argues ems would simply adapt to their economic circumstances, as humans adapted from foraging to farming to industry, producing values that may look alien to us even though, he suggests, most ems would find their lives worth living. “The Age of Em” is frequently cited in debates over AI timelines and takeoff because it presents brain emulation as a serious alternative route to superhuman capability, with its own very different economics and risks.