Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

by Max Tegmark

before Prometheus, the poorest 50% of Earth’s population had earned only about 4% of the global income, enabling the Omega-controlled companies to win their hearts (and votes) by sharing only a modest fraction of their profits with them.

As time passed, the Alliance increasingly assumed the role of a world government, as national governments saw their power continually erode. National budgets kept shrinking due to tax cuts while the Alliance budget grew to dwarf those of all governments combined. All the traditional roles of national governments became increasingly redundant and irrelevant. The Alliance provided by far the best social services, education and infrastructure. Media had defused international conflict to the point that military spending was largely unnecessary, and growing prosperity had eliminated most roots of old conflicts, which traced back to competition over scarce resources. A few dictators and others had violently resisted this new world order and refused to be bought, but they were all toppled in carefully orchestrated coups or mass uprisings. The Omegas had now completed the most dramatic transition in the history of life on Earth. For the first time ever, our planet was run by a single power, amplified by an intelligence so vast that it could potentially enable life to flourish for billions of years on Earth and throughout our cosmos—but what specifically was their plan?

Since we don’t want to limit our thinking about the future of life to the species we’ve encountered so far, let’s instead define life very broadly, simply as a process that can retain its complexity and replicate.

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.

the synaptic connections that link the neurons in my brain can store about a hundred thousand times more information than the DNA that I was born with. 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.

By installing a software module enabling us to communicate through sophisticated spoken language, we ensured that the most useful information stored in one person’s brain could get copied to other brains, potentially surviving even after the original brain died. By installing a software module enabling us to read and write, we became able to store and share vastly more information than people could memorize. By developing brain software capable of producing technology (i.e., by studying science and engineering), we enabled much of the world’s information to be accessed by many of the world’s humans with just a few clicks.

Life 3.0 is the master of its own destiny, finally fully free from its evolutionary shackles.

“Fearing a rise of killer robots is like worrying about overpopulation on Mars.”

Should we develop lethal autonomous weapons? What would you like to happen with job automation? What career advice would you give today’s kids? Do you prefer new jobs replacing the old ones, or a jobless society where everyone enjoys a life of leisure and machine-produced wealth? Further down the road, would you like us to create Life 3.0 and spread it through our cosmos? Will we control intelligent machines or will they control us? Will intelligent machines replace us, coexist with us or merge with us? What will it mean to be human in the age of artificial intelligence? What would you like it to mean, and how can we make the future be that way?

physicists know that a brain consists of quarks and electrons arranged to act as a powerful computer, and that there’s no law of physics preventing us from building even more intelligent quark blobs.

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

Computers are universal machines, their potential extends uniformly over a boundless expanse of tasks. Human potentials, on the other hand, are strong in areas long important for survival, but weak in things far removed. Imagine a “landscape of human competence,” having lowlands with labels like “arithmetic” and “rote memorization,” foothills like “theorem proving” and “chess playing,” and high mountain peaks labeled “locomotion,” “hand-eye coordination” and “social interaction.” Advancing computer performance is like water slowly flooding the landscape. A half century ago it began to drown the lowlands, driving out human calculators and record clerks, but leaving most of us dry. Now the flood has reached the foothills, and our outposts there are contemplating retreat. We feel safe on our peaks, but, at the present rate, those too will be submerged within another half century. I propose that we build Arks as that day nears, and adopt a seafaring life!2

whereas verification asks “Did I build the system right?,” validation asks “Did I build the right system?”*2

The growing field of positive psychology has identified a number of factors that boost people’s sense of well-being and purpose, and found that some (but not all!) jobs can provide many of them, for example:57 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 This gives reason for optimism, since all of these things can be provided also outside of the workplace, for example through sports, hobbies and learning, and with families, friends, teams, clubs, community groups, schools, religious and humanist organizations, political movements and other institutions.

Career advice for today’s kids: Go into professions that machines are bad at—those involving people, unpredictability and creativity.

aviation industry didn’t start with mechanical birds.

One candidate for the doomsday device is a huge underground cache of so-called salted nukes, preferably humongous hydrogen bombs surrounded by massive amounts of cobalt. Physicist Leo Szilard argued already in 1950 that this could kill everyone on Earth: the hydrogen bomb explosions would render the cobalt radioactive and blow it into the stratosphere, and its five-year half-life is long enough for it to settle all across Earth (especially if twin doomsday devices were placed in opposite hemispheres), but short enough to cause lethal radiation intensity. Media reports suggest that cobalt bombs are now being built for the first time. Omnicidal opportunities could be bolstered by adding bombs optimized for nuclear winter creation by maximizing long-lived aerosols in the stratosphere.

Digesting a candy bar is merely 0.00000001% efficient, in the sense that it releases a mere ten-trillionth of the energy mc2 that it contains. If your stomach were even 0.001% efficient, then you’d only need to eat a single meal for the rest of your life.

quantum gravity effects make a black hole act like a hot object—the smaller, the hotter—that gives off heat radiation now known as Hawking radiation. This means that the black hole gradually loses energy and evaporates away. In other words, whatever matter you dump into the black hole will eventually come back out again as heat radiation, so by the time the black hole has completely evaporated, you’ve converted your matter to radiation with nearly 100% efficiency.*3 A problem with using black hole evaporation as a power source is that, unless the black hole is much smaller than an atom in size, it’s an excruciatingly slow process that takes longer than the present age of our Universe and radiates less energy than a candle.

suppose a bunch of ants create you to be a recursively self-improving robot, much smarter than them, who shares their goals and helps them build bigger and better anthills, and that you eventually attain the human-level intelligence and understanding that you have now. Do you think you’ll spend the rest of your days just optimizing anthills, or do you think you might develop a taste for more sophisticated questions and pursuits that the ants have no ability to comprehend? If so, do you think you’ll find a way to override the ant-protection urge that your formicine creators endowed you with in much the same way that the real you overrides some of the urges your genes have given you? And in that case, might a superintelligent friendly AI find our current human goals as uninspiring and vapid as you find those of the ants, and evolve new goals different from those it learned and adopted from us?

It’s been fascinating for me to hear and read the ethical views of many thinkers over many years, and the way I see it, most of their preferences can be distilled into four principles: • 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.

the only reason that we humans have any preferences at all may be that we’re the solution to an evolutionary optimization problem. Thus all normative words in our human language, such as “delicious,” “fragrant,” “beautiful,” “comfortable,” “interesting,” “sexy,” “meaningful,” “happy” and “good,” trace their origin to this evolutionary optimization: there is therefore no guarantee that a superintelligent AI would find them rigorously definable.

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.

struck me that many journalists were inadvertently doing the exact opposite of what we were trying to accomplish in Puerto Rico. Whereas we wanted to build community consensus by highlighting the common ground, the media had an incentive to highlight the divisions. The more controversy they could report, the greater their Nielsen ratings and ad revenue. Moreover, whereas we wanted to help people from across the spectrum of opinions to come together, get along and understand each other better, media coverage inadvertently made people across the opinion spectrum upset at one another, fueling misunderstandings by publishing only their most provocative-sounding quotes without context.

one of the best ways for you to improve the future of life is to improve tomorrow. You have power to do so in many ways. Of course you can vote at the ballot box and tell your politicians what you think about education, privacy, lethal autonomous weapons, technological unemployment and other issues. But you also vote every day through what you choose to buy, what news you choose to consume, what you choose to share and what sort of role model you choose to be. Do you want to be someone who interrupts all their conversations by checking their smartphone, or someone who feels empowered by using technology in a planned and deliberate way? Do you want to own your technology or do you want your technology to own you? What do you want it to mean to be human in the age of AI? Please discuss all this with those around you—it’s not only an important conversation, but a fascinating one.

Although I’d obviously been aware that most outlets have their own political agenda, I now realized that they also have a bias away from the center on all issues, even nonpolitical ones.