Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

by Max Tegmark

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...