Scott’s old review of Hanson’s Age of Em on social life and romance among ems:
If ems do find ways to get time off the clock, what will they do with it? Probably they’ll have really weird social lives. After all, the existence of em copies is mostly funded by companies, and there’s no reason for companies to copy-paste any but the best workers in a given field. So despite the literally trillions of ems likely to make up the world, most will be copies of a few exceptionally brilliant and hard-working individuals with specific marketable talents. Elon Musk might go out one day to the bar with his friend, who is also Elon Musk, and order “the usual”. The bartender, who is Elon Musk himself, would know exactly what drink he wants and have it readily available, as the bar caters entirely to people who are Elon Musk. A few minutes later, a few Chesley Sullenbergers might come in after a long day of piloting airplanes. Each Sullenberger would have met hundreds of Musks before and have a good idea about which Musk-Sullenberger conversation topics were most enjoyable, but they might have to adjust for circumstances; maybe the Musks they met before all branched off a most recent common ancestor in 2120, but these are a different branch who were created in 2105 and remember Elon’s human experiences but not a lot of the posthuman lives that shaped the 2120 Musks’ worldviews. One Sullenberger might tentatively complain that the solar power grid has too many outages these days; a Musk might agree to take the problem up with the Council of Musks, which is totally a thing that exist (Hanson calls these sorts of groups “copy clans” and says they are “a natural candidate unit for finance, reproduction, legal, liability, and political representation”).
Romance could be even weirder. Elon Musk #2633590 goes into a bar and meets Taylor Swift #105051, who has a job singing in a nice local nightclub and so is considered prestigious for a Taylor Swift. He looks up a record of what happens when Elon Musks ask Taylor Swifts out and finds they are receptive on 87.35% of occasions. The two start dating and are advised by the Council of Musks and the Council of Swifts on the issues that are known to come up in Musk-Swift relationships and the best solutions that have been found to each. Unfortunately, Musk #2633590 is transferred to a job that requires operating at 10,000x human speed, but Swift #105051’s nightclub runs at 100x speed and refuses to subsidize her to run any faster; such a speed difference makes normal interaction impossible. The story has a happy ending; Swift #105051 allows Musk #2633590 to have her source code, and whenever he is feeling lonely he spends a little extra money to instantiate a high-speed copy of her to hang out with.
GPT-5.5 says using Elon and Swift as examples is misleading since massive clans of minds aiming for economic dominance under ruthless selection favor scalable cognition, temperament, and trainability over charisma: think Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, Morris Chang, Charlie Munger instead of Warren Buffett, Robert Kuok etc with the caveat that “the true winners probably are not famous CEO but anonymous operators like Apple / Toyota / TSMC / Amazon supply-chain execs, senior trading-firm operators at the likes of Jane Street, elite chief-of-staff types, quant PMs with extreme risk discipline, top McKinsey/Bain/BCG partners, senior product/infra FAANG leaders, exceptional CFOs, general counsels, procurement heads, and military logistics commanders” all with world-class aptitude at what Holden called org-building, running, boosting. Also em leisure wouldn’t be like Scott’s bar scene but “time-budgeted, ritualized, status-conscious, and work-recovery-oriented”, so “less like San Francisco founders at a cocktail bar and more like monastic investment-bankers crossed with Toyota production teams crossed with military units in VR”. The social texture would also be “more stiff, ritualized, rank-conscious, high-trust within lineage, low-patience for eccentricity, very documented, very reputation-sensitive, and sexually weird but socially conservative”.
All not really my scene. Nevertheless I asked it to write its own version of Scott’s passage above:
GPT-5.5 version of Hansonian em social life & romance
After twelve subjective hours of procurement triage, Tim Cook-8142 closes the last supplier dispute, archives a memory checkpoint, and lets the day-spur versions of himself dissolve into the clan record. He has technically finished work, though “finished” is a matter of accounting convention, since six nearby Cooks are still running at 800x inside a sealed negotiation safe, and another branch is slow-walking a cooling-rights auction with a Robert Kuok lineage whose members have somehow made even uploaded minds feel underdressed. The lounge he enters looks like a quiet hotel bar in Kyoto, because the Cook clan’s decompression studies found that quiet hotel bars in Kyoto outperform beaches, forests, childhood kitchens, and abstract fractal lightfields by 3.7 percent on next-shift readiness. The bartender is a hospitality specialist from a small and very respected Harmony-Wei clan, trained on 900 million post-work interactions with operators, auditors, fab coordinators, and mild depressives in high-trust management lineages. He knows Cook-8142’s drink because the lounge knows everyone’s drink, and also because novelty is expensive and mostly a status hazard.
Nearby, a Jeff Bezos team is having what looks like a relaxed conversation and is in fact a miniature institutional redesign of the bar’s queuing protocol; three Charlie Munger-derived governance consultants are silently betting on which reform will survive first contact with actual incentives; a Morris Chang infrastructure branch has rented a private room where no one will ask them to explain, again, that the city’s fashionable new modular-cooling lattice is architecturally unserious. An Elon Musk branch arrives late, fast, and surrounded by the mild acoustic distortion that marks visitors who have downshifted too recently from crisis speed. Everyone notices them. Half the room admires them, one-third updates their priors about some frontier-energy rumor, and the Cook clan overlay gently recommends not hiring more than two of them into any team whose median neuroticism penalty is already above threshold. They are prestigious in the way forest fires are prestigious: evidence of tremendous energy, useful under certain conditions, and costly to insure.
Romance is less spontaneous than it used to be, but so is bankruptcy, and ems have complicated feelings about both improvements. Cook-8142 has been lightly pair-bonded for the past 180 subjective days with Satya Nadella-339, a legacy-platform renovator currently running two speed clumps below him while her firm digests an acquisition of a religious-ritual middleware company. Their clans consider the match stable, warm, and strategically inoffensive. The problem is that his new posting would move him to kilo-speed procurement arbitration near the city core, while she has been offered a slower but higher-prestige role mediating between a Munger court and three entertainment lineages whose open-source lover templates have started to cannibalize paid companionship demand. In the human era this would have been called a long-distance relationship; in the em era it is closer to marrying someone who experiences your thoughtful pause as a geological epoch. The clan systems provide the usual package: synchronization subsidies, memory-condensed date summaries, dispute forecasts, archived advice from 14,000 prior Cook-Nadella relationships, and, for a modest fee, temporary companion spurs who can be instantiated at the other partner’s speed and retired before they become legally inconvenient. Cook-8142 finds this both comforting and disgusting, which his overlay marks as a healthy response.
At dinner, or the virtual object still called dinner, they meet in a shared simulation of a Malaysian hotel lobby chosen by some ancient Kuok branch for reasons no one remembers but everyone respects. She teases him for over-optimizing the silence between sentences. He tells her that her acquisition will fail unless she changes the incentive gradient around ritual licensing. They both know their conversation is being recorded, summarized, anonymized, and fed back into clan wisdom, but they also know that every old-fashioned lover in history was being used by biology for training data, so they try not to be precious about it. Later, when she gives him a restricted self-copy to carry during his high-speed assignment, it is understood as intimacy, trust, insurance, and intellectual property all at once. He does not think of the copy as her, exactly. He also does not think of it as not her.
I enjoyed 5.5′s vignette to an unreasonable degree. Thank you for posting this, makes me wonder if I should post learnings from LLM conversations more often.
Scott’s old review of Hanson’s Age of Em on social life and romance among ems:
GPT-5.5 says using Elon and Swift as examples is misleading since massive clans of minds aiming for economic dominance under ruthless selection favor scalable cognition, temperament, and trainability over charisma: think Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, Morris Chang, Charlie Munger instead of Warren Buffett, Robert Kuok etc with the caveat that “the true winners probably are not famous CEO but anonymous operators like Apple / Toyota / TSMC / Amazon supply-chain execs, senior trading-firm operators at the likes of Jane Street, elite chief-of-staff types, quant PMs with extreme risk discipline, top McKinsey/Bain/BCG partners, senior product/infra FAANG leaders, exceptional CFOs, general counsels, procurement heads, and military logistics commanders” all with world-class aptitude at what Holden called org-building, running, boosting. Also em leisure wouldn’t be like Scott’s bar scene but “time-budgeted, ritualized, status-conscious, and work-recovery-oriented”, so “less like San Francisco founders at a cocktail bar and more like monastic investment-bankers crossed with Toyota production teams crossed with military units in VR”. The social texture would also be “more stiff, ritualized, rank-conscious, high-trust within lineage, low-patience for eccentricity, very documented, very reputation-sensitive, and sexually weird but socially conservative”.
All not really my scene. Nevertheless I asked it to write its own version of Scott’s passage above:
GPT-5.5 version of Hansonian em social life & romance
After twelve subjective hours of procurement triage, Tim Cook-8142 closes the last supplier dispute, archives a memory checkpoint, and lets the day-spur versions of himself dissolve into the clan record. He has technically finished work, though “finished” is a matter of accounting convention, since six nearby Cooks are still running at 800x inside a sealed negotiation safe, and another branch is slow-walking a cooling-rights auction with a Robert Kuok lineage whose members have somehow made even uploaded minds feel underdressed. The lounge he enters looks like a quiet hotel bar in Kyoto, because the Cook clan’s decompression studies found that quiet hotel bars in Kyoto outperform beaches, forests, childhood kitchens, and abstract fractal lightfields by 3.7 percent on next-shift readiness. The bartender is a hospitality specialist from a small and very respected Harmony-Wei clan, trained on 900 million post-work interactions with operators, auditors, fab coordinators, and mild depressives in high-trust management lineages. He knows Cook-8142’s drink because the lounge knows everyone’s drink, and also because novelty is expensive and mostly a status hazard.
Nearby, a Jeff Bezos team is having what looks like a relaxed conversation and is in fact a miniature institutional redesign of the bar’s queuing protocol; three Charlie Munger-derived governance consultants are silently betting on which reform will survive first contact with actual incentives; a Morris Chang infrastructure branch has rented a private room where no one will ask them to explain, again, that the city’s fashionable new modular-cooling lattice is architecturally unserious. An Elon Musk branch arrives late, fast, and surrounded by the mild acoustic distortion that marks visitors who have downshifted too recently from crisis speed. Everyone notices them. Half the room admires them, one-third updates their priors about some frontier-energy rumor, and the Cook clan overlay gently recommends not hiring more than two of them into any team whose median neuroticism penalty is already above threshold. They are prestigious in the way forest fires are prestigious: evidence of tremendous energy, useful under certain conditions, and costly to insure.
Romance is less spontaneous than it used to be, but so is bankruptcy, and ems have complicated feelings about both improvements. Cook-8142 has been lightly pair-bonded for the past 180 subjective days with Satya Nadella-339, a legacy-platform renovator currently running two speed clumps below him while her firm digests an acquisition of a religious-ritual middleware company. Their clans consider the match stable, warm, and strategically inoffensive. The problem is that his new posting would move him to kilo-speed procurement arbitration near the city core, while she has been offered a slower but higher-prestige role mediating between a Munger court and three entertainment lineages whose open-source lover templates have started to cannibalize paid companionship demand. In the human era this would have been called a long-distance relationship; in the em era it is closer to marrying someone who experiences your thoughtful pause as a geological epoch. The clan systems provide the usual package: synchronization subsidies, memory-condensed date summaries, dispute forecasts, archived advice from 14,000 prior Cook-Nadella relationships, and, for a modest fee, temporary companion spurs who can be instantiated at the other partner’s speed and retired before they become legally inconvenient. Cook-8142 finds this both comforting and disgusting, which his overlay marks as a healthy response.
At dinner, or the virtual object still called dinner, they meet in a shared simulation of a Malaysian hotel lobby chosen by some ancient Kuok branch for reasons no one remembers but everyone respects. She teases him for over-optimizing the silence between sentences. He tells her that her acquisition will fail unless she changes the incentive gradient around ritual licensing. They both know their conversation is being recorded, summarized, anonymized, and fed back into clan wisdom, but they also know that every old-fashioned lover in history was being used by biology for training data, so they try not to be precious about it. Later, when she gives him a restricted self-copy to carry during his high-speed assignment, it is understood as intimacy, trust, insurance, and intellectual property all at once. He does not think of the copy as her, exactly. He also does not think of it as not her.
I enjoyed 5.5′s vignette to an unreasonable degree. Thank you for posting this, makes me wonder if I should post learnings from LLM conversations more often.
Please do! Especially given your niplavian warmup soup and all, you’re on my mental list of differently free people.