72) Grabby Aliens

02/22/2022

Our continually expanding, 14 billion-year-old universe is riddled with planets that could potentially sustain life; so, where is it? Economist, prolific author, and founder of "The Great Filter," Professor Robin Hanson, offers a possible explanation. In today's episode, we take a deep dive into understand "Grabby Aliens," and the future of humanity.

*Warning: Slight audio quality decrease early on

Shortened Bio: Robin Hanson is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University, and research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University. He has a doctorate in social science from California Institute of Technology, master's degrees in physics and philosophy from the University of Chicago, and nine years experience as a research programmer, at Lockheed and NASA. Professor Hanson has 5173 citations, a citation h-index of 35, and over ninety academic publications. Professor Hanson has pioneered prediction markets, also known as information markets and idea futures, since 1988.

Oxford University Press published his book The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule the Earth, and his book The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life. Professor Hanson has 1100 media mentions, given 400 invited talks, and his blog OvercomingBias.com has had eight million visits.

Robin has diverse research interests, with papers on spatial product competition, health incentive contracts, group insurance, product bans, evolutionary psychology and bioethics of health care, voter information incentives, incentives to fake expertise, Bayesian classification, agreeing to disagree, self-deception in disagreement, probability elicitation, wiretaps, image reconstruction, the history of science prizes, reversible computation, the origin of life, the survival of humanity, very long term economic growth, growth given machine intelligence, and interstellar colonization. He coined the phrase "The Great Filter", and has recently numerically estimated it via a model of "Grabby Aliens".