Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

by Max Tegmark

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!