The Future Might Not Be AI — It Might Be Copies of Us

Reading The Singularity Is Nearer recently reminded me of another book that left a strong impression on me years ago: The Age of Em: Work, Love, and Life When Robots Rule the Earth.

Both books attempt to grapple with a future in which intelligence transforms the world. But the paths they imagine could hardly be more different.

Kurzweil’s vision centers on artificial intelligence: machines that eventually surpass human intelligence and begin recursively improving themselves. It is the familiar “singularity” narrative—rapid, runaway technological growth driven by minds that are no longer biological.

Robin Hanson, however, proposes something stranger and in some ways more unsettling.

In his world, the dominant intelligence of the future is not artificial at all.

It is us.

Or rather, copies of us.

The Age of Em

Hanson’s central concept is whole brain emulation. Instead of trying to invent artificial intelligence from scratch, we might simply scan a human brain in enough detail to reproduce its structure and activity inside a computer.

If that simulation is sufficiently accurate, the result should behave exactly like the original person. The mind—memories, personality, reasoning ability—would effectively continue running inside software.

Hanson calls these digital minds “ems.”

The implications are enormous. A single human brain could be copied many times. Once a brain has been scanned and emulated successfully, there is nothing preventing the creation of thousands—or millions—of instances of that same mind.

These emulations would not merely exist inside computers. In Hanson’s scenario they would work, earn money, run companies, and participate in society.

And because they are software, they could operate at different speeds. Some might run at biological speed. Others might run ten or even a hundred times faster.

From the perspective of a biological human observer, entire lifetimes of em activity might unfold in what feels like a matter of days.

A Different Path to the Future

What makes Hanson’s scenario particularly striking is that it does not require the creation of artificial general intelligence.

The future could arrive simply by copying human minds.

In Kurzweil’s narrative, the singularity occurs when AI surpasses human intelligence and begins redesigning itself. In Hanson’s model, the transformation of society begins as soon as we can reliably emulate a single human brain.

That threshold alone would trigger massive economic changes.

Imagine that a talented engineer, scientist, or trader could be copied a thousand times. Every copy could work simultaneously. If those copies can also run faster than biological time, their productivity multiplies again.

An economy dominated by em workers would grow extraordinarily fast.

An Economy of Copies

One of the most memorable aspects of Hanson’s book is how seriously it takes the economic consequences of this world.

If workers can be copied freely, the supply of labor becomes effectively unlimited.

In such a system, wages would not be determined by human scarcity anymore. Instead they would fall toward the cost of running the hardware that supports the simulation—electricity, processors, cooling systems.

In other words, the value of labor approaches the cost of computation.

Hanson argues that the resulting society might not resemble a sleek science-fiction utopia. Instead it could look more like a strange hybrid of the digital age and the industrial revolution.

Many ems might live extremely frugal lives in virtual environments optimized for efficiency. Corporations might run massive data centers filled with millions of em workers performing intellectual labor at enormous speeds.

A small number of highly capable human templates—those whose minds are worth copying—could dominate entire industries.

The future, in other words, might be run by the most productive humans ever scanned, replicated endlessly.

It is a vision that feels both plausible and deeply unsettling.

Consciousness Without Understanding

What makes Hanson’s scenario even more provocative is his stance on consciousness.

Many people assume that simulating a mind would require us to first solve the mystery of consciousness itself. But Hanson argues that this may not be necessary at all.

If we can replicate the physical processes of the brain with sufficient fidelity, the resulting system should behave like the original person. Whether we fully understand why consciousness arises may be irrelevant.

This idea pushes us directly into the territory explored by philosophers such as Thomas Nagel in his famous essay What Is It Like to Be a Bat?.

Nagel argued that subjective experience—the feeling of being a particular conscious organism—cannot be fully captured from an external, objective perspective.

Even if we know everything about the physical structure of a bat’s brain, we still cannot know what it feels like to be a bat.

The same problem would apply to emulations.

If a simulated brain behaves exactly like a human mind—talks like us, reasons like us, remembers like us—does that mean it is conscious?

Or is it simply a system that perfectly imitates consciousness?

From the outside, the two might be indistinguishable.

Science Fiction Made Literal

What fascinates me about Hanson’s scenario is how much it resembles ideas that have long appeared in science fiction.

Digital minds, copied personalities, accelerated subjective time—these concepts have been explored for decades in speculative fiction.

But Hanson treats them not as distant fantasy but as economic reality.

What would the labor market look like if minds could be copied?

What happens to inequality when the most productive individuals can be replicated indefinitely?

How does society function when some people experience centuries of subjective time while others live at normal biological speed?

These are not merely philosophical questions. Hanson attempts to answer them using models from economics, demographics, and technological forecasting.

The result is a future that feels strangely grounded.

Two Different Futures

Reading Kurzweil again after thinking about Hanson highlights how many different technological futures are imaginable.

Kurzweil’s vision centers on artificial intelligence surpassing human intelligence. In that world, the future belongs to machines that become increasingly alien to human cognition.

Hanson imagines something quite different.

In his world, the dominant minds of the future are still fundamentally human. They have human motivations, human personalities, human quirks.

They are simply copied and accelerated.

The difference between these futures is profound.

One replaces humanity with new forms of intelligence.

The other multiplies humanity into vast digital populations.

Replicating Ourselves

Both possibilities raise uncomfortable questions.

If an emulation of your mind exists, is it you?

If thousands of copies of the same person are running simultaneously, which one is the original?

What happens to identity when minds become software?

And perhaps the strangest possibility of all is that the most transformative technology in history might not involve inventing entirely new intelligences.

It might simply involve replicating our own minds at scale.

For all the discussion about artificial intelligence, the future might ultimately belong not to machines that think differently from us—but to countless copies of ourselves, thinking faster than we ever could.