Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

by Max Tegmark

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

The result has been spectacular, as illustrated in figure 2.4: over the past six decades, computer memory has gotten half as expensive roughly every couple of years. Hard drives have gotten over 100 million times cheaper, and the faster memories useful for computation rather than mere storage have become a whopping 10 trillion times cheaper. If you could get such a “99.99999999999% off” discount on all your shopping, you could buy all real estate in New York City for about 10 cents and all the gold that’s ever been mined for around a dollar.

Differences are even more extreme internationally where, in 2013, the combined wealth of the bottom half of the world’s population (over 3.6 billion people) is the same as that of the world’s eight richest people43

Many people are job optimists, arguing that the automated jobs will be replaced by new ones that are even better. After all, that’s what’s always happened before, ever since Luddites worried about technological unemployment during the Industrial Revolution. Others, however, are job pessimists and argue that this time is different, and that an ever-larger number of people will become not only unemployed, but unemployable.52

“I’m worried about technological unemployment.” “Neigh, neigh, don’t be a Luddite: our ancestors said the same thing when steam engines took our industry jobs and trains took our jobs pulling stage coaches. But we have more jobs than ever today, and they’re better too: I’d much rather pull a light carriage through town than spend all day walking in circles to power a stupid mine-shaft pump.” “But what if this internal combustion engine thing really takes off?” “I’m sure there’ll be new new jobs for horses that we haven’t yet imagined. That’s what’s always happened before, like with the invention of the wheel and the plow.”

Voltaire wrote in 1759 that “work keeps at bay three great evils: boredom, vice and need.”

(rapid progress is being made on so-called neuromorphic chips).

If a machine can think, it might think more intelligently than we do, and then where should we be? Even if we could keep the machines in a subservient position…we should, as a species, feel greatly humbled. Alan Turing, 1951 The first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control. Irving J. Good, 1965

Figure 6.11: Are we alone? The huge uncertainties about how life and intelligence evolved suggest that our nearest neighbor civilization in space could reasonably be anywhere along the horizontal axis above, making it unlikely that it’s in the narrow range between the edge of our Galaxy (about 1021 meters away) and the edge of our Universe (about 1026 meters away). If it were much closer than this range, there should be so many other advanced civilizations in our Galaxy that we’d probably have noticed, which suggests that we’re in fact alone in our Universe.

The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

I’d been arguing for decades that consciousness is the way information feels when being processed in certain complex ways.18 IIT agrees with this and replaces my vague phrase “certain complex ways” by a precise definition: the information processing needs to be integrated, that is, Φ needs to be large.

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