Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

by Max Tegmark

“the sixth extinction”

inscrutable

When the intelligence differential is large enough, you get not a battle but a slaughter.

In the movie The Matrix, Agent Smith (an AI) articulates this sentiment: “Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague and we are the cure.”

artificial stupidity

Hans Moravec’s book Mind Children.

viewing the AI as our descendants rather than our conquerors.

It’s generally hard for two entities thinking at dramatically different speeds and with extremely disparate capabilities to have meaningful communication as equals.

Whereas past totalitarian states generally proved unstable and collapsed, novel surveillance technology offers unprecedented hope to would-be autocrats.

we humans are well on our way to building the required infrastructure for the ultimate dictatorship—so

collective suicide, also known as omnicide,

the best-selling copyrighted book of all time is The Guinness Book of World Records.

there is reason to suspect that ambition is a rather generic trait of advanced life.

baryonic matter,

Dyson Spheres

Freeman Dyson.

chowing

scoffed at

Statites

once the Sun has consumed about a tenth of its hydrogen fuel, it will end its lifetime as a normal star, expand into a red giant, and begin to die.

sphalerons,

In his book A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking proposed a black hole power plant.*2

Hawking famously calculated that quantum gravity effects make a black hole act like a hot object—the smaller, the hotter—that gives off heat radiation now known as Hawking radiation.

In other words, whatever matter you dump into the black hole will eventually come back out again as heat radiation, so by the time the black hole has completely evaporated, you’ve converted your matter to radiation with nearly 100% efficiency.*3

The power produced decreases with the square of the size of the hole,

quantum gravity

the Blandford-Znajek mechanism.

the sphaleron process. It can destroy quarks and turn them into leptons: electrons, their heavier cousins the muon and tau particles, neutrinos or their antiparticles.

gluon

Seth Lloyd

arguing that our entire Universe is a quantum computer.

In a famous 2000 paper, he showed that computing speed is limited by energy: performing an elementary logical operation in time T requires an average energy of E = h∕4T, where h is the fundamental physics quantity known as Planck’s constant.

about 98% of our Universe is “see but not touch,” in the sense that we can see it but never reach it even if we travel at the speed of light forever.

nothing can travel faster than the speed of light through space, but space is free to expand as fast as it wants.

ramjet:

laser sailing.

statites

By beaming a huge solar-powered laser at a vast ultralight sail attached to a spacecraft, we can use the energy of our own Sun to accelerate the rocket to great speeds.

adding AI-invented technology, intergalactic settlement suddenly appears rather straightforward.

bastions

A wormhole is a shortcut through spacetime that lets you travel from A to B without going through the intervening space.

unless intelligence intervenes, solar systems and galaxies gradually get destroyed,

watched-pot effect of quantum mechanics,

cosmocalypse

five main suspects for our upcoming cosmic apocalypse, or cosmocalypse,

the Big Chill, the Big Crunch, the Big Rip, the Big Snap and Death Bubbles.

ripple

If death bubbles are possible, they would probably expand at the speed of light,

A rubber band looks nice and continuous, just like space, but if you stretch it too much, it snaps. Why? Because it’s made of atoms, and with enough stretching, this granular atomic nature of the rubber becomes important.

Quantum gravity research suggests that it doesn’t make sense to talk about traditional three-dimensional space on scales smaller than about 10-34 meters.