Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

by Max Tegmark

But beauty is in the eye of the beholder, not in the laws of physics, so before our Universe awoke, there was no beauty. This makes our cosmic awakening all the more wonderful and worthy of celebrating: it transformed our Universe from a mindless zombie with no self-awareness into a living ecosystem harboring self-reflection, beauty and hope—and the pursuit of goals, meaning and purpose. Had our Universe never awoken, then, as far as I’m concerned, it would have been completely pointless—merely a gigantic waste of space. Should our Universe permanently go back to sleep due to some cosmic calamity or self-inflicted mishap, it will, alas, become meaningless.

As a result, two people who only know about each other’s positions from media quotes are likely to think they disagree more than they really do.

First, by replacing old jobs with ones requiring more skills, technology has rewarded the educated: since the mid-1970s, salaries rose about 25% for those with graduate degrees while the average high school dropout took a 30% pay cut.

If you had been quietly observing Earth around the time when life got started, you would have noticed a dramatic change in goal-oriented behavior. Whereas earlier, the particles seemed as though they were trying to increase average messiness in various ways, these newly ubiquitous self-copying patterns seemed to have a different goal: not dissipation but replication. Charles Darwin elegantly explained why: since the most efficient copiers outcompete and dominate the others, before long any random life form you look at will be highly optimized for the goal of replication.

In other words, one of the best ways for you to improve the future of life is to improve tomorrow. You have power to do so in many ways. Of course you can vote at the ballot box and tell your politicians what you think about education, privacy, lethal autonomous weapons, technological unemployment and other issues. But you also vote every day through what you choose to buy, what news you choose to consume, what you choose to share and what sort of role model you choose to be. Do you want to be someone who interrupts all their conversations by checking their smartphone, or someone who feels empowered by using technology in a planned and deliberate way? Do you want to own your technology or do you want your technology to own you? What do you want it to mean to be human in the age of AI? Please discuss all this with those around you—it’s not only an important conversation, but a fascinating one.