Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

by Max Tegmark

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 under control.”

We feel safe on our peaks, but, at the present rate, those too will be submerged within another half century. I propose that we build Arks as that day nears, and adopt a seafaring life!2

information can take on a life of its own, independent of its physical substrate!

A computation is a transformation of one memory state into another. In other words, a computation takes information and transforms it, implementing what mathematicians call a function.

if you’re a conscious superintelligent character in a future computer game, you’d have no way of knowing whether you ran on a Windows desktop, a Mac OS laptop or an Android phone, because you would be substrate-independent.

In short, computation is a pattern in the spacetime arrangement of particles, and it’s not the particles but the pattern that really matters! Matter doesn’t matter.

Nobody knows for sure what the next blockbuster computational substrate will be, but we do know that we’re nowhere near the limits imposed by the laws of physics.

the first computer program that ever beat me at chess never learned from its mistakes, but merely implemented a function that its clever programmer had designed to compute a good next move.

Memory, computation, learning and intelligence have an abstract, intangible and ethereal feel to them because they’re substrate-independent:

Everything we love about civilization is the product of human intelligence, so if we can amplify it with artificial intelligence, we obviously have the potential to make life even better.

research that are dominating the current AI-safety discussion and that are being pursued around the world: verification, validation, security and control.fn1

whereas verification asks “Did I build the system right?,” validation asks “Did I build the right system?”

why not replace the slaves with AI-powered robots, creating a digital utopia that everyone can enjoy?

digital technology drives inequality in three different ways.

combined revenues of Detroit’s “Big 3” (GM, Ford and Chrysler) in 1990 were almost identical to those of Silicon Valley’s “Big 3” (Google, Apple, Facebook) in 2014, the latter had nine times fewer employees and were worth thirty times more on the stock market.47

friend of mine recently joked with me that perhaps the very last profession will be the very first profession: prostitution.

Imagine two horses looking at an early automobile in the year 1900 and pondering their future.

Voltaire wrote in 1759 that “work keeps at bay three great evils: boredom, vice and need.”

“buffer overflow” vulnerabilities,

Read the previous para

Transcendence.

Marshall Brain points out that many of the finest examples of human creativity—from scientific discoveries to creation of literature, art, music and design—were motivated not by a desire for profit but by other human emotions, such as curiosity, an urge to create, or the reward of peer appreciation.

The nineteenth-century U.S. politician John C. Calhoun famously argued that Africans were better off enslaved in America, and in his Politics, Aristotle analogously argued that animals were better off tamed and ruled by men, continuing: “And indeed the use made of slaves and of tame animals is not very different.”

Imagine a group of elephants 100,000 years ago discussing whether those recently evolved humans might one day use their intelligence to kill their entire species. “We don’t threaten humans, so why would they kill us?” they might wonder. Would they ever guess that we would smuggle tusks across Earth and carve them into status symbols for sale, even though functionally superior plastic materials are much cheaper?

a free superintelligence focused on three different levels of Maslow’s pyramid of human needs. Whereas the protector god AI prioritizes meaning and purpose and the benevolent dictator aims for education and fun, the zookeeper limits its attention to the lowest levels: physiological needs, safety and enough habitat enrichment to make the humans interesting to observe.

John Maynard Keynes said: “In the long run we are all dead.”

Freeman Dyson.

Interior view of one of the O’Neill cylinders from the previous figure.

If your stomach were even 0.001% efficient, then you’d only need to eat a single meal for the rest of your life. Compared to eating, the burning of coal and gasoline are merely 3 and 5 times more efficient, respectively.

If eating dinner is 10 billion times worse than the physical limit on energy efficiency, then how efficient are today’s computers? Even worse than that dinner, as we’ll now see.

performing an elementary logical operation in time T requires an average energy of E = h∕4T,

Solar System is simply hydrogen rearranged during 13.8 billion years of cosmic evolution: gravity rearranged hydrogen into stars which rearranged the hydrogen into heavier atoms, after which gravity rearranged such atoms into our planet where chemical and biological processes rearranged them into life.

intelligent entities naturally organize themselves into power hierarchies in Nash equilibrium, where any entity would be worse off if they altered their strategy.

The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.

she’s deliberately choosing the optimal one that gets her to the swimmer as fast as possible. Yet a simple light ray similarly bends when it enters water (see figure 7.1), also minimizing the travel time to its destination! How can this be? This is known in physics as Fermat’s principle,

Nature’s apparent goal to increase entropy

nature appears to have a built-in goal of producing self-organizing systems that are increasingly complex and lifelike,

Feelings of hunger and thirst protect us from starvation and dehydration, feelings of pain protect us from damaging our bodies, feelings of lust make us procreate, feelings of love and compassion make us help other carriers of our genes and those who help them and so on.

while Aristotle emphasized virtues, Immanuel Kant emphasized duties and utilitarians emphasized the greatest happiness for the greatest

we’re the solution to an evolutionary optimization problem.

play before empty benches, not existing for anybody, thus quite properly speaking not existing”?

our core theory of physics will refuse to answer questions about systems that are simultaneously extremely small (requiring quantum mechanics) and extremely heavy (requiring general relativity),

the very first goal on our wish list for the future should be retaining (and hopefully expanding) biological and/or artificial consciousness in our cosmos, rather than driving it extinct.