Robin Hanson

American economist at George Mason University and a contrarian voice in debates about AI's future. Before graduate study in economics he worked on machine learning at Lockheed and at NASA's Ames Research Center (1984–1993). He pioneered prediction markets and proposed futarchy, government guided by betting markets (2000). On the blog Overcoming Bias, which he started in 2006 and initially shared with Eliezer YudkowskyEliezer Yudkowsky, prop. n.: An American writer and AI theorist who, from around 2000, argued that superhuman AI would likely destroy humanity unless its goals were made safe, and who founded an online community devoted to rational thinking., the two held the 2008 FOOMFOOM, n.: Slang for a sudden, explosive jump in an AI's abilities, the AI going 'foom' and racing from about human level to vastly superhuman in a very short time. debate: Yudkowsky argued that a single AI could rapidly improve itself to dominance, while Hanson expected a gradual, economy-wide transition among many competing systems (see slow takeoffslow takeoff, n.: A scenario in which AI becomes superhuman step by step, over years or decades, as it spreads through the economy, giving society time to spot problems and respond., multipolar scenariomultipolar scenario, n.: A possible future in which many powerful AIs, companies or countries coexist and compete, with none able to dominate the rest.). His book 'The Age of Em' (2016) analyzed a future economy run by brain emulationswhole brain emulation, n.: Copying a particular person's brain into a computer in such detail, down to individual neurons and their connections, that the simulation would think and behave like that person., and his earlier modeling of history as a sequence of ever-faster growth modes anticipated work on explosive growthexplosive growth, n.: A hypothetical jump in the world economy's growth rate to 30% a year or more, about ten times today's pace, which some economists think AI that replaces human workers could cause.. He also proposed the Great Filter (1996) as an explanation for the absence of visible alien civilizations.