Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

by Max Tegmark

Thanks to amazing technologies developed by the dictator AI, humanity is free from poverty, disease and other low-tech problems, and all humans enjoy a life of luxurious leisure. They have all their basic needs taken care of, while AI-controlled machines produce all necessary goods and services. Crime is practically eliminated, because the dictator AI is essentially omniscient and efficiently punishes anyone disobeying the rules. Everybody wears the security bracelet from the last chapter (or a more convenient implanted version), capable of real-time surveillance, punishment, sedation and execution. Everybody knows that they live in an AI dictatorship with extreme surveillance and policing, but most people view this as a good thing. The superintelligent AI dictator has as its goal to figure out what human utopia looks like given the evolved preferences encoded in our genes, and to implement it. By clever foresight from the humans who brought the AI into existence, it doesn’t simply try to maximize our self-reported happiness, say by putting everyone on intravenous morphine drip. Instead, the AI uses quite a subtle and complex definition of human flourishing, and has turned Earth into a highly enriched zoo environment that’s really fun for humans to live in. As a result, most people find their lives highly fulfilling and meaningful.