The Age of Em review – the horrific future when robots rule the Earth

Robin Hanson's strange, very serious, book predicts what will happen in a Matrix-like world when computers have software emulations of human brains and our bodies are destroyed

In the future, or so some people think, it will become possible to upload your consciousness into a computer. Software emulations of human brains - ems, for short - will then take over the economy and world. This sort of thing happens quite a lot in science fiction, but The Age of Em is a fanatically serious attempt, by an economist and scholar at Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, to use economic and social science to forecast in fine detail how this world (if it is even possible) will actually work. The future it portrays is very strange and, in the end, quite horrific for everyone involved.

It is an eschatological vision worthy of Hieronymus Bosch. Trillions of ems live in tall, liquid-cooled skyscrapers in extremely hot cities. Most of them are "very able focused workaholics", who "respect and trust each other more" than we do.