The Science of Star Wars: The Scientific Facts Behind the Force, Space Travel, and More!

by Mark Brake

This third kind of droid, one not dreamt up in the stories of Star Wars, is the first truly smart terrestrial droid, one that will be based on brain emulations, or ems. Professor Robin Hanson, economist and scholar at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, thinks the droid revolution, when it comes, will be in the form of the Em-Droid. You take the best and brightest two hundred scientists on the planet (ironically this may include Hawking, Gates, and Musk), then you scan their brains and upload their consciousness into a robot. This is the Em-Droid—a robot indistinguishable from the humans upon whom they are based, except a thousand times faster and fitter for the future. Train an Em-Droid to do a job and clone it a million times: an army of droids is at your disposal. When Em-Droids can be made cheaply, they will displace humans in almost every job. In the new Em-Droid economy, the global economic output may double every few weeks, and competition will drive nearly all wages down to subsistence levels. Trillions of Em-Droids will live in tall, liquid-cooled skyscrapers in searingly hot cities. Given the nature of the Em-Droid, they will be very able and focused workaholics, who respect and trust each other more than humans do. Some Em-Droids will have bodies; others will simply live in virtual reality, as Em-Droid white-collar workers won’t need bodies. The Em-Droids will collect in related “clans” and use “decision markets” to make crucial corporate and political decisi...

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