Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

by Max Tegmark

Mindful Optimism As I confessed in the opening of this epilogue, I’m feeling more optimistic about the future of life than I have in a long time. I shared my personal story to explain why. My experiences over the past few years have increased my optimism for two separate reasons. First, I’ve witnessed the AI community come together in a remarkable way to constructively take on the challenges ahead, often in collaboration with thinkers from other fields. Elon told me after the Asilomar meeting that he found it amazing how AI safety has gone from a fringe issue to mainstream in only a few years, and I’m just as amazed myself. And now it’s not merely the near-term issues from chapter 3 that are becoming respectable discussion topics, but even superintelligence and existential risk, as in the Asilomar AI Principles. There’s no way that those principles could have been adopted in Puerto Rico two years earlier, where the most scary-sounding word that made it into the open letter was “pitfalls.”