脳をコンピューターにアップロードしたらどうなる？

Human-level artificial intelligence in the form of brain emulations, or "ems," may be feasible within a century or so. This book applies many disciplines to analyze in detail the world that may result. It considers mind speeds, body sizes, security, management, job training, career paths, wages, identity, retirement, life cycles, reproduction, mating, conversation, wealth inequality, city sizes, growth rates, politics, governance, law and war.

This is the book that most inspired Age of Em. Drexler assumes the existence of an ability to make some things to atomic precision, and then carefully and expertly derives a great many implications about manufacturing devices and the kinds of things they could make. The engineering and physics analyzes are quite expert, and in many ways still unsurpassed. It contains much less useful social analysis, however. 

During the dotcom boom, many said that if you thought old economic rules applied to the new economy, you "just didn’t get it." But Shapiro and Varian showed that long known principles of economics and industrial organization offer many useful insights into new internet and tech based products and services. Age of Em similarly assumes old economic principles will still apply to advanced future robots.

This has been one of the most popular books ever to make a wider public aware of the idea that tech could induce very large social changes in the foreseeable future. The many techs mentioned here are all worth considering, though Kurzweil has tended to forecasts faster change than we've seen. He seems to say that all the cool techs you've ever heard of will achieve their promoter's highest hopes at about the same time, in a few decades.

An experienced and expert social scientist synthesizes many areas of expertise to generate an integrated forecast of the world in 2052. While Randers assumes that no big tech-based disruptions disturb prior social trends, this is a useful baseline to consider, even if you think such disruptions are likely.

This recent book convinced many to be much more concerned about a quite extreme scenario: a single artificially intelligent system that almost overnight goes from being much less capable than most humans to so powerful that it in effect takes over the world. The book, however, focuses on what to do about this problem, rather than what is likely to happen if we do the least to avoid it.