Robin Hanson

Hanson received a B.S. in physics from the University of California, Irvine, in 1981 and master’s degrees in physics and the philosophy of science from the University of Chicago in 1984.⁠[1]

From 1984 to 1989 he did machine-learning research at the Lockheed Artificial Intelligence Center, and from 1989 to 1993 he researched Bayesian statistics at NASANASAThe National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is the U.S. federal agency responsible for the civilian space program, aeronautics research and space science. Established by law in 1958 and headquartered in Washington, D.C., it has run programs including Mercury, the Apollo Moon landings, the Space Shuttle, the International Space Station and Artemis.Open the full entry Ames Research Center. His Idea Futures project won the 1995 Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica in the World Wide Web category.⁠[1]

He has worked on prediction markets, also called information markets or idea futures, since 1988, and helped design the Foresight Exchange web market, which has run since 1994.⁠[2]

The Prix Ars Electronica jury said that although Ideas Futures (IF) had not been formally entered, it proposed IF for first prize in the WWW category as a model of self-organizing collective thinking in which scientific claims and artistic projects are traded like futures on an exchange.⁠[3]

After earning a PhD in social science from the California Institute of Technology and completing a two-year postdoc at the University of California, BerkeleyUniversity of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) is a campus of the University of California system; the University of California was founded in 1868 through a merger of two institutions and moved to Berkeley, California, in 1873.Open the full entry, he joined George Mason University’s economics faculty in 1999; his main fields include health policy, regulation and formal political theory.⁠[4]

He recounts that DARPA began funding prediction-market research in 2001; Net Exchange, founded by Caltech professor John Ledyard, won a grant and subcontracted to his team at George Mason University, and the resulting Policy Analysis Market (PAM) was suddenly cancelled amid a media storm in 2003.⁠[5]

PAM would have let people inside and outside government trade on events in the Middle East such as military activity and political stability; it was ended after hypothetical examples on its website, such as the assassination of Yasser Arafat, led two senators to charge that traders could profit from others’ misfortune. Hanson argued that futures markets give informed people a monetary incentive to be honest.⁠[6]

In November 2006 the group blog Overcoming Bias, focused on human rationality, began, with Eliezer YudkowskyEliezer YudkowskyEliezer Yudkowsky is an American AI researcher and writer who in 2000 founded the organization later renamed the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) and is regarded as an early founder of the field of AI alignment; he has long warned that superintelligence could cause human extinction and calls for a worldwide halt to large AI training runs, views that many researchers dispute.Open the full entry and Hanson as its principal contributors.⁠[7]

On September 10, 2007, he published the lead essay “Cut Medicine in Half” in Cato Unbound, drawing on studies such as the RAND health insurance experiment to argue that aggregate variations in medical spending usually show no significant effect on health; David M. Cutler of Harvard, Dana Goldman of RAND and Alan Garber of Stanford wrote responses disputing his conclusions or their policy implications.⁠[8]

In late 2008 he and Yudkowsky held an online debate about the future of artificial intelligence, focused on whether generally intelligent AIs could improve their own capabilities very quickly (“foom”); the Machine Intelligence Research Institute released the debate as an ebook in 2013.⁠[9]

In February 2009 Yudkowsky’s posts became the seed material for the community blog LessWrong, and Overcoming Bias became Hanson’s personal blog.⁠[7]

In 2016 Oxford UniversityUniversity of OxfordThe University of Oxford is a university in Oxford, England, where teaching existed in some form by 1096; it describes itself as the oldest university in the English-speaking world and is organised as a federal system of the university and dozens of self-governing colleges.Open the full entry Press published his The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule the Earth, which imagines that later this century human brains can be scanned and emulated on computers, and projects that the resulting “em” economy would at least double every month, with most emulations living at subsistence level.⁠[10]

In January 2018 Oxford University Press published The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life, which he co-wrote with Kevin Simler.⁠[2]

The book synthesizes a wide range of scholarship to argue that self-deception is rampant and strategic and that people understand far less of their own motives than they pretend, using examples such as seeking medical care.⁠[11]

After a self-described incel killed 10 pedestrians with a van in Toronto in April 2018, Hanson wrote on his blog that one should worry about sexual as well as income inequality and mused about “redistribution,” drawing wide criticism; Jordan Weissmann of SlateSlate AutoSlate Auto is a U.S. electric vehicle company established in 2022 that is developing a customizable all-electric pickup with a starting price of $24,950, to be assembled in Indiana.Open the full entry called him “America’s creepiest economist,” while New York Times columnist Ross Douthat defended him.⁠[12]

On June 27, Hanson replied point by point, saying he had not proposed any right or entitlement for men and was interested in general sex inequality rather than the problems of the self-labeled incel community.⁠[13]

On February 1, 2021, he and Daniel Martin, Calvin McCarter and Jonathan Paulson posted a paper on arXiv explaining humanity’s apparent earliness in the universe through the expansion of “loud” alien civilizations and concluding that “quiet” aliens are also rare; the paper was accepted by the Astrophysical Journal.⁠[14]

On June 9, 2022, then a professor at George Mason University and a researcher at the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, he was the guest on episode #292 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, covering grabby aliens, UFO sightings, conspiracy theories, The Elephant in the Brain, medicine, institutions, artificial intelligence and the simulation hypothesis.⁠[15]

He coined the phrase “the Great Filter” and advocates “futarchy,” a form of governance based on prediction markets.⁠[2]

Personal website: Public link: https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson (opens in a new window)⁠[15]

X: Public account: https://x.com/robinhanson (opens in a new window)⁠[15]

George Mason University: Official website: https://www.gmu.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[4]