Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

by Max Tegmark

As we’ll see in this book, many of the safety problems are so hard that they may take decades to solve, so it’s prudent to start researching them now rather than the night before some programmers drinking Red Bull decide to switch on human-level AGI.

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.”

Will life in our Universe fulfill its potential or squander it? This depends to a great extent on what we humans alive today do during our lifetime, and I’m optimistic that we can make the future of life truly awesome if we make the right choices. What

When you pour cold milk into hot coffee, for example, your beverage appears to march irreversibly toward its own personal heat death goal, and before long, it’s all just a uniform lukewarm mixture.

Certainly takes all the magic out of brewing coffee.

In summary, a living organism is an agent of bounded rationality that doesn’t pursue a single goal, but instead follows rules of thumb for what to pursue and avoid. Our human minds perceive these evolved rules of thumb as feelings, which usually (and often without us being aware of it) guide our decision making toward the ultimate goal of replication. 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. Guided by these feelings, our brains can quickly and efficiently decide what to do without having to subject every choice to a tedious analysis of its ultimate implications for how many descendants we’ll produce.

A strategy that’s likely to help with essentially all AI challenges is for us to get our act together and improve our human society before AI fully takes off. We’re better off educating our young to make technology robust and beneficial before ceding great power to it. We’re better off modernizing our laws before technology makes them obsolete. We’re better off resolving international conflicts before they escalate into an arms race in autonomous weapons. We’re better off creating an economy that ensures prosperity for all before AI potentially amplifies inequalities. We’re better off in a society where AI-safety research results get implemented rather than ignored. And looking further ahead, to challenges related to superhuman AGI, we’re better off agreeing on at least some basic ethical standards before we start teaching these standards to powerful machines.

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.