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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Max Tegmark
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December 4, 2024 - August 18, 2025
the CEO’s dream: building general artificial intelligence.
the British mathematician Irving Good back in 1965: “Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus 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
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MTurk, the Amazon Mechanical Turk. After its launch in 2005 as a crowdsourcing internet marketplace,
HITs, “Human Intelligence Tasks.”
if you did them well, nobody would know that you were an AI.
Prometheus’ superhuman hacking abilities to get inside information
ray tracing
strong breakout paranoia that they added boxing in time as well, limiting the life span of untrusted code.
Writing a screenplay that humans found interesting was just as hard as writing a book, requiring a detailed understanding of human society and what humans found entertaining.
glitzy
“green data centers” because they were largely solar-powered, they were in fact mainly focused on computation rather than storage.
A good teacher can help students learn science much faster than they could have discovered it from scratch on their own, and Prometheus surreptitiously did the same with these researchers.
giving priority to new tools that could be quickly understood and built and that were useful for developing more advanced tools.
Phase 1 of their news strategy was gaining people’s trust,
Whenever a country was strongly divided politically and accustomed to partisan news, they would launch one news channel catering to each faction, ostensibly owned by different companies, and gradually gain the trust of that faction.
Omega-controlled channels emerging as the most trusted news sources.
With their viewership dropping, ever more networks decided to sell their news channels—usually to some consortium that later turned out to be controlled by the Omegas.
About two years after Prometheus’ launch, when the trust-gaining phase was largely completed, the Omegas launched phase 2 of their news strategy: persuasion.
phase 2 of their news strategy:...
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lambasting
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.
These first stars generated heat and light by fusing hydrogen into heavier atoms such as carbon, oxygen and silicon.
The question of how to define life is notoriously controversial.
let’s instead define life very broadly, simply as a process that can retain its complexity and replicate. What’s replicated isn’t matter (made of atoms) but information (made of bits) specifying how the atoms are arranged.
define life very broadly, simply as a process that can retain its complexity and replicate. What’s replicated isn’t matter (made of atoms) but information (made of bits) specifying how the atoms are arranged.
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.
I find it helpful to classify life forms into three levels of sophistication: Life 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0.
The most successful ones, which soon outcompeted the rest, were able to react to their environment in some way. Specifically, they were what computer scientists call “intelligent agents”: entities that collect information about their environment from sensors and then process this information to decide how to act back on their environment.
The three stages of life: biological evolution, cultural evolution and technological evolution.
Life 1.0 is unable to redesign either its hardware or its software during its lifetime: both are determined by its DNA, and change only through evolution over many generations.
Life 2.0 can redesign much of its software: humans can learn complex new skills—for example, languages, sports and professions—and can fundame...
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Life 3.0, which doesn’t yet exist on Earth, can dramatically redesign not only its software, but its hardware as well, rather than having to wait for...
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“Life 1.0”: life where both the hardware and software are evolved rather than designed.
“Life 2.0”: life whose hardware is evolved, but whose software is largely designed.
This ability of Life 2.0 to design its software enables it to be much smarter than Life 1.0.
our ultimate intelligence isn’t limited by how much information can be transmitted to us at conception via our DNA, 1.0-style.
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, barel...
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even though the information in our human DNA hasn’t evolved dramatically over the past fifty thousand years, the information collectively stored in our brains, books and computers has exploded.
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.
we ensured that the most useful information stored in one person’s brain could get copied to other brains, potentially surviving...
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By installing a software module enabling us to read and write, we became able to store and share vastly more inform...
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This flexibility has enabled Life 2.0 to dominate Earth.
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.
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,
three distinct schools of thought that all need to be taken seriously,
digital utopians, techno-skeptics and members of the beneficial-AI movement, respectively.
pomposity
scatological
