Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

by Max Tegmark

he fears bumblebee-sized drones that kill cheaply using minimal explosive power

the Stuxnet worm, widely attributed to the U.S. and Israeli governments, infected fast-spinning centrifuges in Iran’s nuclear-enrichment program and caused them to tear themselves apart.

AI will affect us as consumers, by enabling transformative new products and services at affordable prices.

how will it affect us as workers, by transforming the job market?

how to grow our prosperity through automation without leaving people lack...

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mane

“Digital Athens.” The reason that the Athenian citizens of antiquity had lives of leisure where they could enjoy democracy, art and games was mainly that they had slaves to do much of the work. But why not replace the slaves with AI-powered robots,

drudgery

if everyone’s hourly salary keeps growing year by year, so that those who want more leisure can gradually work less while continuing to improve their standard of living. Figure 3.5 shows that this is precisely what happened in the United States from World War II until the mid-1970s: although there was income inequality,

the gains over the past four decades went to the wealthiest, mostly to the top 1%, while the poorest 90% saw their incomes stagnate.

digital technology drives inequality in three different ways.

First, by replacing old jobs with ones requiring more skills,

Second, they claim that since the year 2000, an ever-larger share of corporate income has gone to those who own the companies as opposed to those who work there—and

This edge of capital over labor may be particularly important for the growing digital economy,

Third, Erik and collaborators argue that the digital economy often benefits superstars over everyone else.

Scott Cook made a billion on the TurboTax tax preparation software,

what career advice should we give our kids?

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

relatively safe bets include becoming a teacher,

dentist, scientist, entrepreneur,

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“quant”

what economic policies are most helpful for creating good new jobs?

we want jobs because they can provide us with income and purpose,

thanks to technology, even many poor people today have access to things that the world’s richest people lacked in the past.

teems

ennui

FLOPS

neuromorphic chips).

Our laws need rapid updating to keep up with AI, which poses tough legal questions involving privacy, liability and regulation.

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

verification asks if a system meets its specifications, whereas validation asks if the correct specifications were chosen.

Tesla’s Autopilot was found to reduce crashes by 40% when turned on:

AGI-powered world takeover requires three logical steps: • Step 1: Build human-level AGI. • Step 2: Use this AGI to create superintelligence. • Step 3: Use or unleash this superintelligence to take over the world.

Lord Acton cautioned in 1887 that “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Unauthorized attempts to remove or disable it would cause it to inject a lethal toxin into the forearm. Infractions deemed as less serious by the government would be punished via electric shocks or injection of chemicals causing paralysis or pain, thereby obviating much of the need for a police force.

thwart

What these strategies have in common is that your intellectually inferior jailers haven’t anticipated or guarded against them.

One vulnerability is that the quantity of documents it produces is too vast for the Omegas and their employees to have time to screen carefully for dirty tricks.

“buffer overflow” vulnerabilities,

The best breakout strategies of all are ones we haven’t yet discussed, because they’re strategies we humans can’t imagine and therefore won’t take countermeasures against.

game theory elegantly explains that entities have an incentive to cooperate where cooperation is a so-called Nash equilibrium:

any party would be worse off if they altered their strategy. To prevent cheaters from ruining the successful collaboration of a large group, it may be in everyone’s interest to relinquish some power to a higher level in the hierarchy that can punish cheaters:

there is a diverse abundance of possible Nash equilibria, corresponding to different types of hierarchies. Some hierarchies are more authoritarian than others. In some, entities are free to leave (like employees in most corporate hierarchies), while in others they’re strongly discouraged from leaving (as in religious cults) or unable to leave (like citizens of North Korea, or cells in a human body).

How is technology changing the hierarchical nature of our world?

our present world remains stuck in a multipolar Nash equilibrium,

cyborgs (short for “cybernetic organisms”)

twelve watts of power that your brain uses,

fast takeoff makes world takeover easier, while a slow one makes an outcome with many competing players