Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

by Max Tegmark

let’s instead define life very broadly, simply as a process that can retain its complexity and replicate.

In other words, we can think of life as a self-replicating information-processing system whose information (software) determines both its behavior and the blueprints for its hardware.

Your synapses store all your knowledge and skills as roughly 100 terabytes’ worth of information, while your DNA stores merely about a gigabyte, barely enough to store a single movie download.

Yet despite the most powerful technologies we have today, all life forms we know of remain fundamentally limited by their biological hardware.

All this requires life to undergo a final upgrade, to Life 3.0, which can design not only its software but also its hardware. In other words, Life 3.0 is the master of its own destiny, finally fully free from its evolutionary shackles.

Life 1.0 (biological stage): evolves its hardware and software • Life 2.0 (cultural stage): evolves its hardware, designs much of its software • Life 3.0 (technological stage): designs its hardware and software

Nick Bostrom’s book Superintelligence

The gist of the letter was that the goal of AI should be redefined: the goal should be to create not undirected intelligence, but beneficial intelligence.

two people who only know about each other’s positions from media quotes are likely to think they disagree more than they really do.

Hydrogen…, given enough time, turns into people. Edward Robert Harrison, 1995

So far, the smallest memory device known to be evolved and used in the wild is the genome of the bacterium Candidatus Carsonella ruddii, storing about 40 kilobytes, whereas our human DNA stores about 1.6 gigabytes, comparable to a downloaded movie. As mentioned in the last chapter, our brains store much more information than our genes: in the ballpark of 10 gigabytes electrically (specifying which of your 100 billion neurons are firing at any one time) and 100 terabytes chemically/biologically (specifying how strongly different neurons are linked by synapses).

Such memory systems are called auto-associative, since they recall by association rather than by address.

In short, computation is a pattern in the spacetime arrangement of particles, and it’s not the particles but the pattern that really matters! Matter doesn’t matter. In other words, the hardware is the matter and the software is the pattern. This substrate independence of computation implies that AI is possible: intelligence doesn’t require flesh, blood or carbon atoms.

The ability to learn is arguably the most fascinating aspect of general intelligence.

If we don’t change direction soon, we’ll end up where we’re going. Irwin Corey

Language-processing AI still has a long way to go, though. Although I must confess that I feel a bit deflated when I’m out-translated by an AI, I feel better once I remind myself that, so far, it doesn’t understand what it’s saying in any meaningful sense. From being trained on massive data sets, it discovers patterns and relations involving words without ever relating these words to anything in the real world.

One day, such robojudges may therefore be both more efficient and fairer, by virtue of being unbiased, competent and transparent. Their efficiency makes them fairer still: by speeding up the legal process and making it harder for savvy lawyers to skew the outcome, they could make it dramatically cheaper to get justice through the courts.

Arkhipov,

Scott Cook made a billion on the TurboTax tax preparation software, which, unlike human tax preparers, can be sold as a download.

This means that relatively safe bets include becoming a teacher, nurse, doctor, dentist, scientist, entrepreneur, programmer, engineer, lawyer, social worker, clergy member, artist, hairdresser or massage therapist.

a social network of friends and colleagues a healthy and virtuous lifestyle respect, self-esteem, self-efficacy and a pleasurable sense of “flow” stemming from doing something one is good at a sense of being needed and making a difference a sense of meaning from being part of and serving something larger than oneself

THE BOTTOM LINE: • If we one day succeed in building human-level AGI, this may trigger an intelligence explosion, leaving us far behind. • If a group of humans manage to control an intelligence explosion, they may be able to take over the world in a matter of years. • If humans fail to control an intelligence explosion, the AI itself may take over the world even faster. • Whereas a rapid intelligence explosion is likely to lead to a single world power, a slow one dragging on for years or decades may be more likely to lead to a multipolar scenario with a balance of power between a large number of rather independent entities. • The history of life shows it self-organizing into an ever more complex hierarchy shaped by collaboration, competition and control. Superintelligence is likely to enable coordination on ever-larger cosmic scales, but it’s unclear whether it will ultimately lead to more totalitarian top-down control or more individual empowerment. • Cyborgs and uploads are plausible, but arguably not the fastest route to advanced machine intelligence. • The climax of our current race toward AI may be either the best or the worst thing ever to happen to humanity, with a fascinating spectrum of possible outcomes that we’ll explore in the next chapter. • We need to start thinking hard about which outcome we prefer and how to steer in that direction, because if we don’t know what we want, we’re unlikely to get it. * As Bostrom has explained, the ability to simulate a lead...

Charles Darwin elegantly explained why: since the most efficient copiers outcompete and dominate the others, before long any random life form you look at will be highly optimized for the goal of replication.

that it takes significant human mastery to properly appreciate how skilled they are.

As regards goodness, the so-called Golden Rule (that one should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself) appears in most cultures and religions, and is clearly intended to promote the harmonious continuation of human society (and hence our genes) by fostering collaboration and discouraging unproductive strife.

Utilitarianism: Positive conscious experiences should be maximized and suffering should be minimized. • Diversity: A diverse set of positive experiences is better than many repetitions of the same experience, even if the latter has been identified as the most positive experience possible. • Autonomy: Conscious entities/societies should have the freedom to pursue their own goals unless this conflicts with an overriding principle. • Legacy: Compatibility with scenarios that most humans today would view as happy, incompatibility with scenarios that essentially all humans today would view as terrible.

By definition, intelligence is simply the ability to accomplish complex goals, regardless of what these goals are,

Evidence suggests that of the roughly 107 bits of information that enter our brain each second from our sensory organs, we can be aware only of a tiny fraction, with estimates ranging from 10 to 50 bits.

In summary, your consiousness lives in the past, with Christof Koch estimating that it lags behind the outside world by about a quarter second.

it takes longer for you to analyze images than sounds because it’s more complicated—which is why Olympic races are started with a bang rather than with a visual cue.

Their “consciousness detector” works really well: it determined that patients were conscious when they were awake or dreaming, but unconscious when they were anesthetized or in deep sleep.

In summary, I think that consciousness is a physical phenomenon that feels non-physical because it’s like waves and computations: it has properties independent of its specific physical substrate.

It’s not our Universe giving meaning to conscious beings, but conscious beings giving meaning to our Universe. So the very first goal on our wish list for the future should be retaining (and hopefully expanding) biological and/or artificial consciousness in our cosmos, rather than driving it extinct.

From this perspective, we see that although we’ve focused on the future of intelligence in this book, the future of consciousness is even more important, since that’s what enables meaning.

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom. Isaac Asimov