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.

In summary, we can divide the development of life into three stages, distinguished by life’s ability to design itself: • 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

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.

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

So what career advice should we give our kids? I’m encouraging mine to go into professions that machines are currently bad at, and therefore seem unlikely to get automated in the near future. Recent forecasts for when various jobs will get taken over by machines identify several useful questions to ask about a career before deciding to educate oneself for it.48 For example: • Does it require interacting with people and using social intelligence? • Does it involve creativity and coming up with clever solutions? • Does it require working in an unpredictable environment? The more of these questions you can answer with a yes, the better your career choice is likely to be. 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.

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

As Hans Moravec puts it in his 1988 classic Mind Children: “Long life loses much of its point if we are fated to spend it staring stupidly at ultra-intelligent machines as they try to describe their ever more spectacular discoveries in baby-talk that we can understand.”