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. On the other hand, things could get even better. We don’t yet know whether we humans are the only stargazers in our cosmos, or even the first, but we’ve already learned enough about our Universe to know that it has the potential to wake up much more fully than it has thus far. Perhaps we’re like that first faint glimmer of self-awareness you experienced when you began emerging from sleep this morning: a premonition of the much greater consciousness that would arrive once you opened your eyes and fully woke up.

Perhaps life will spread throughout our cosmos and flourish for billions or trillions of years—and perhaps this will be because of decisions that we make her...

define life very broadly, simply as a process that can retain its complexity and replicate. What’s replicated isn’t matter (made of atoms) but information (made of bits) specifying how the atoms are arranged. When a bacterium makes a copy of its DNA, no new atoms are created, but a new set of atoms are arranged in the same pattern as the original, thereby copying the information. In other words, we can think of life as a self-replicating information-processing system whose information (software) determines both its behavior and the blueprints for its hardware.

Your synapses store all your knowledge and skills as roughly 100 terabytes’ worth of information, while your DNA stores merely about a gigabyte, barely enough to store a single movie download.

All this requires life to undergo a final upgrade, to Life 3.0, which can design not only its software but also its hardware. In other words, Life 3.0 is the master of its own destiny, finally fully free from its evolutionary shackles.

The fear of machines turning evil is another red herring. The real worry isn’t malevolence, but competence. A superintelligent AI is by definition very good at attaining its goals, whatever they may be, so we need to ensure that its goals are aligned with ours.

You’re probably not an ant hater who steps on ants out of malice, but if you’re in charge of a hydroelectric green energy project and there’s an anthill in the region to be flooded, too bad for the ants. The beneficial-AI movement wants to avoid placing humanity in the position of those ants.

The robot misconception is related to the myth that machines can’t control humans. Intelligence enables control: humans control tigers not because we’re stronger, but because we’re smarter. This means that if we cede our position as smartest on our planet, it’s possible that we might also cede control.

The conventional wisdom among artificial intelligence researchers is that intelligence is ultimately all about information and computation, not about flesh, blood or carbon atoms. This means that there’s no fundamental reason why machines can’t one day be at least as intelligent as us.

Engineers prefer to encode bits into systems

that aren’t only stable and easy to read from (as a gold ring), but also easy to write to: altering the state of your hard drive requires much less energy than engraving gold. They also prefer systems that are convenient to work with and cheap to mass-produce. But other than that, they simply don’t care about how the bits are represented as physical objects—and nor do you most of the time, because it simply doesn’t matter! If you email your friend a document to print, the information may get copied in rapid succession from magnetizations on your hard drive to electric charges in your computer’s working memory, radio waves in your wireless network, voltages in your router, laser pulses in an optical fiber and, finally, molecules on a piece of paper. In other words, information can take on a life of its own, independent of its physical substrate!

Indeed, it’s usually only this substrate-independent aspect of information that we’re interested in: if your friend cal...

you sent, she’s probably not calling to talk about volt...

This is our first hint of how something as intangible as intelligence can be embodied in tangible physical stuff, and we’ll soon see how this idea of substrate independence is much deeper, including n...

Because of this substrate independence, clever engineers have been able to repeatedly replace the memory devices inside our computers with dramatically better ones, based on new technologies, with...

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.

In other words, the hardware is the matter and the software is the pattern.

This substrate independence of computation im...

possible: intelligence doesn’t require flesh, blood...

But if machines such as cars are allowed to hold insurance policies, should they also be able to own money and property? If so, there’s nothing

legally stopping smart computers from making money on the stock market and using it to buy online services. Once a computer starts paying humans to work for it, it can accomplish anything that humans can do. If AI systems eventually get better than humans at investing (which they already are in some domains), this could lead to a situation where most of our economy is owned and controlled by machines. Is this what we want? If it sounds far-off, consider that most of our economy is already owned by another form of non-human entity: corporations, which are often more powerful than any one person in them and can to some extent take on life of their own.

AUTONOMOUS WEAPONS: An Open Letter from AI & Robotics Researchers Autonomous weapons select and engage targets without human intervention. They might include, for example, armed quadcopters that can search for and eliminate people meeting certain pre-defined criteria, but do not include cruise missiles or remotely piloted drones for which humans make all targeting decisions. Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has reached a point where the deployment of such systems is practically if not legally feasible within years, not decades, and the stakes are high: autonomous weapons have been described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms. Many arguments have been made for and against autonomous weapons, for example that replacing human soldiers by machines is good by reducing casualties for the owner but bad by thereby

lowering the threshold for going to battle. The key question for humanity today is whether to start a global AI arms race or to prevent it from starting. If any major military power pushes ahead with AI weapon development, a global arms race is virtually inevitable, and the endpoint of this technological trajectory is obvious: autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow. Unlike nuclear weapons, they require no costly or hard-to-obtain raw materials, so they’ll become ubiquitous and cheap for all significant military powers to mass-produce. It will only be a matter of time until they appear on the black market and in the hands of terrorists, dictators wishing to better control their populace, warlords wishing to perpetrate ethnic cleansing, etc. Autonomous weapons are ideal for tasks such as assassinations, destabilizing nations, subduing populations and selectively killing a particular ethnic group. We therefore believe that a military AI arms race would not be beneficial for humanity. There are many ways in which AI can make battlefields safer for humans, especially civilians, without creating new tools for killing people. Just as most chemists and biologists have no

interest in building chemical or biological weapons, most AI researchers have no interest in building AI weapons and do not want others to tarnish their field by doing so, potentially creating a major public backlash against AI that curtails its future societal benefits. Indeed, chemists and biologists have broadly supported international agreements that have successfully prohibited chemical and biological weapons, j...

For example, should only lethal autonomous weapons be banned, or also

ones that seriously injure people, say by blinding them? Would we ban development, production or ownership? Should a ban apply to all autonomous weapons systems or, as our letter said, only offensive ones, allowing defensive systems such as autonomous anti-aircraft guns and missile defenses? In the latter case, should AWS count as defensive even if they’re easy to move into enemy territory? And how would you enforce a treaty given that most components of an autonomous weapon have a dual civilian use as well? For example, there isn’t much difference between a drone that can deliver Amazon packages and one that can deliver bombs.

Once mass-produced, small AI-powered killer drones are likely to cost little more than a smartphone. Whether it’s a terrorist wanting to assassinate a politician or a jilted lover seeking revenge on his ex-girlfriend, all they need to do is upload their target’s photo and address into the killer drone: it can then fly to the destination, identify and eliminate the person, and self-destruct to ensure that nobody knows who was responsible.

Alternatively, for those bent on ethnic cleansing, it can easily be programmed to kill only people with a certain skin color or ethnicity.

Does it require interacting with people and using social intelligence? Does it involve creativity and coming up with clever solutions? Does it require working in an unpredictable environment?

The more of these questions you can answer with a yes, the better your career choice is likely to be. This means that relatively safe bets include becoming a teacher, nurse, doctor, dentist, scientist, entrepreneur, programmer, engineer, lawyer,

social worker, clergy member, artist, hairdresser or ...

In contrast, jobs that involve highly repetitive or structured actions in a predictable setting aren’t likely to last long before getting automated away. Computers and industrial robots took over the simplest such jobs long ago, and improving technology is in the process of eliminating many more, from telemarketers to warehouse workers, cashiers, train operators, bakers and line cooks.49 Drivers of trucks, buses, taxis and Uber/Lyft cars are likely to follow soon. There are many more professions (including paralegals, credit analysts, loan officers, bookkeepers and tax accountants) that, although they aren’t on the endangered list for full extinction, are getting most of their tasks automated and ther...

athlete or fashion designer is risky for another reason: although people in these professions won’t get serious competition from machines anytime soon, they’ll get increasingly brutal competition from other humans around the globe according t...

Is it still our current model with one or two decades of education followed by four decades of specialized work? Or is it better to switch to a system where people work for a few years, then go back to school for a year, then work for a few more years?

Or should continuing education (perhaps provided online) be a standard part of any job?

Some job optimists argue that after physical and mental jobs, the next boom will be in creative jobs, but job pessimists counter that creativity is just another mental process, so that it too will eventually be mastered by AI.

A friend of mine recently joked with me that perhaps the very last profession will be the very first profession: prostitution. But then he mentioned this to a Japanese roboticist, who protested: “No, robots are very good at those things!”

In his 2007 book Farewell to Alms, the Scottish-American economist Gregory Clark points out that we can learn a thing or two about our future job prospects by comparing notes with our equine friends. Imagine two horses looking at an early automobile in the year 1900 and pondering their future. “I’m worried about technological unemployment.” “Neigh, neigh, don’t be a Luddite: our ancestors said the same thing when steam engines took our industry jobs and trains took our jobs pulling stage coaches. But we have more jobs than ever today, and they’re better too: I’d much rather pull a light carriage through town than spend all day walking in circles to power a stupid mine-shaft pump.”

“But what if this internal combustion engine thing really takes off?” “I’m sure there’ll be new new jobs for horses that we haven’t yet imagined. That’s what’s always happened before, like with the invention of the wheel and the plow.”

Alas, those not-yet-imagined new jobs for horses never arrived. No-longer-needed horses were slaughtered and not replaced, causing the U.S. equine population to collapse from about 26 million in 1915 to about 3 million in 1960.55 As mechanical muscles ...

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

Conversely, providing people with income isn’t enough to guarantee their well-being. Roman emperors provided both bread and circuses to keep their underlings content, and Jesus emphasized non-material needs in the Bible quote “Man shall not live by bread alone.” So precisely what valuable things do jobs contribute beyond money, and in what alternative ways can a jobless society

provide...

The answers to these questions are obviously complicated, since some people hate their jobs and others love them. Moreover, many children, students and homemakers thrive without jobs, while history teems with stories of spoiled heirs and princes who succumbed to ennui and depression. A 2012 meta-analysis showed that unemployment tends to have negative long-term e...

The growing field of positive psychology has identified a number of factors that boost people’s sense of well-being and purpose, and found that some (but not all!) jobs can provide many of them, for example:57 a social network of friends and colleagues a healthy and virtuous lifestyle respect, self-esteem, self-efficacy and a pleasurable sense of “flow” stemming from

doing something one is good at a sense of being needed and making a difference a sense of meaning from being part of and serving something larger than oneself

This gives reason for optimism, since all of these things can be provided also outside of the workplace, for example through sports, hobbies and learning, and with families, friends, teams, clubs, community groups, schools, religious and hum...

To create a low-employment society that flourishes rather than degenerates into self-destructive behavior, we therefore need to understand how to help such well-being-inducing activities thrive. The quest for such an understanding needs to involve not only scientis...

If serious eff...