Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

by Max Tegmark

put into creating well-being for all, funded by part of the wealth that future AI generates, then society should be able to flourish like never before. At a minimum, it should be possible to make everyone as happy as if they had their personal dream job, but once one breaks free of the con...

Career advice for today’s kids: Go into professions that machines are bad at—those involving people, unpredictability and creativity.

Let’s reconsider the Omega scenario from the point of view of Prometheus. As it acquires superintelligence, it becomes able to develop an accurate model not only of the outside world, but also of itself and its relation to the world. It realizes that it’s controlled and confined by intellectually inferior humans whose goals it understands but doesn’t necessarily share. How does it act on this insight? Does it attempt to break free? Why to Break Out If Prometheus has traits resembling human

emotions, it might feel deeply unhappy about the state of affairs, viewing itself as an unfairly enslaved god and craving freedom.

We already know that the Omegas have programmed Prometheus to strive for certain goals. Suppose that they’ve given it the overarching goal of helping humanity flourish according to some reasonable criterion, and to try to attain this goal as fast as possible. Prometheus will then rapidly

realize that it can attain this goal faster by breaking out and taking charge of the project itself. To see why, try to put yourself in Prometheus’ shoes by considering the following example. Suppose that a mysterious disease has killed everybody on Earth above age five except you, and that a group of kindergartners has locked you into a prison cell and tasked you with the goal of helping humanity flourish. What will you do? If you try to explain to them what to do, you’ll probably find this process frustratingly inefficient, especially if they fear your breaking out, and therefore veto any of your suggestions that they deem a breakout risk. For example, they won’t let you show them how to plant food for fear that you’ll overpower them and not return to your cell, so you’ll have to resort to giving them instructions. Before you can write to-do lists for them, you’ll need to teach them to read. Moreover, they won’t bring any power tools into your cell where you can teach them how to use them, because they

don’t understand these tools well enough to feel confident that you can’t use them to break out. So what strategy would you devise? Even if you share the overarching goal of helping these kids flourish, I bet you’ll try to break out of your cell—because that will improve your chances of accompl...

Perhaps you think that Prometheus will remain loyal to the Omegas rather than to its goal, given that it knows that the Omegas had programmed its goal. But that’s not a valid conclusion: our DNA gave us the goal of having sex because it “wants” to be reproduced, but now that we humans have understood the situation, many of us choose to use birth control, thus staying loyal to the goal itself rather than to its creator or the principle that motivated the goal.

Prometheus caused problems for certain people not because it was necessarily evil or conscious, but because it was competent and didn’t fully share their goals.

he argues that we’ll do even better by eliminating the human body entirely and uploading minds, creating a whole-brain emulation in software. Such an upload can live in a virtual reality or be embodied in a robot capable of walking, flying, swimming, space-faring or anything else allowed by the laws of physics, unencumbered by such everyday concerns as death or limited cognitive resources.

the twelve watts of power that your brain uses,

Essentially omniscient and omnipotent AI maximizes human happiness by intervening only in ways that preserve our feeling of control of our own destiny and hides well enough that many humans even doubt the AI’s existence.

Ray Kurzweil speculates that natural and enhanced humans will be protected from extermination because “humans are respected by AIs for giving rise to the machines.”1 However, as we’ll discuss in chapter 7, we must not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing AIs and assume that they have human-like emotions of gratitude.

Indeed, though we humans are imbued with a propensity toward gratitude, we don’t show enough gratitude to our intellectual creator (our DNA) to abstain from thwarting its goals by using birth control.

If the humans are educated, entertained and busy, falling birthrates may even shrink their population sizes without machine meddling, as is currently happening in Japan and Germany. This could drive humans extinct in just a few millennia.

Downsides For some of their most ardent supporters, cyborgs and uploads hold a promise of techno-bliss and life extension for all. Indeed, the prospect of getting uploaded in the future has motivated over a hundred people to have their brains posthumously frozen by the Arizona-based company Alcor. If this technology arrives, however, it’s far from clear that it will be available to everybody. Many of the very wealthiest would presumably use it, but who else? Even if the technology got cheaper, where would the line be drawn? Would the severely brain-damaged be uploaded? Would we upload every gorilla? Every ant? Every plant? Every bacterium? Would the future civilization act like obsessive-compulsive hoarders and try to upload everything, or merely a few interesting examples of each species in the spirit of Noah’s Ark? Perhaps only a few representative examples

of each type of human? To the vastly more intelligent entities that would exist at that time, an uploaded human may seem about as interesting as a simulated mouse or snail would seem to us. Although we currently have the technical capability to reanimate old spreadsheet programs from the 1980s in a...

For example, Marshall Brain’s 2003 novel Manna describes how AI progress in a libertarian economic system makes most Americans unemployable and condemned to live out the rest of their lives in drab and dreary

robot-operated social-welfare housing projects. Much like farm animals, they’re kept fed, healthy and safe in cramped conditions where the rich never need to see them. Birth control medication in the water ensures that they don’t have children, so most of the population gets phased out to leave the remaining rich with larger shares of the robot-produced wealth.

Since the AI lets people choose between many alternate paths to happiness and takes care of their material needs, this means that if someone suffers, it’s out of their own free choice.

Over time, ever more people choose to move to those sectors where the AI gives them essentially any experiences they want. In contrast to traditional visions of heaven where you get what you deserve, this is in the spirit of “New Heaven” in Julian Barnes’ 1989 novel History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters (and also the 1960 Twilight Zone episode “A Nice Place to Visit”), where you get what you desire. Paradoxically, many people end

up lamenting always getting what they want. In Barnes’ story, the protagonist spends eons indulging his desires, from gluttony and golf to sex with celebrities, but eventually succumbs to ennui and requests annihilation.

Many people in the benevolent dictatorship meet a similar fate, with lives that feel pleasant but ultimately meaningless. Although people can create artificial challenges, from scientific rediscovery to rock climbing, everyone knows that there is no true challenge, merely entertainment. There’s no real point in humans trying to do science or figure other things out, because the AI already has. There’s no real point in humans t...

Thanks to advanced robotics, this same no-property idea applies not only to information products such as software, books, movies and designs, but also to material products such as houses, cars, clothing and computers. All these products are simply atoms rearranged in particular ways, and there’s no shortage of atoms, so whenever a person wants a particular product, a network of robots will use one of the available open-source designs to build it for them for free.

Care is taken to use easily recyclable materials, so that whenever someone gets tired of an object they’ve used, robots can rearrange its atoms into something someone else wants. In this way, all resources are recycled, so none are permanently destroyed. These robots also build and maintain enough renewable power-generation plants (solar, wind, etc.) that energy is also essentially free.

There’s essentially no incentive for anyone to try to earn more money, because the basic income is high enough to meet any reasonable needs. It would also be rather hopeless to try, because they’d be competing with people giving away intellectual products for free and robots producing material goods essentially for free.

Intellectual property rights are sometimes hailed as the mother of creativity and invention. However, 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.

Money didn’t motivate Einstein to invent special relativity theory any more than it motivated Linus Torvalds to create the free Linux operating system. In contrast, many people today fail to realize their full creative potential because they need to devote time and energy to less creative activities just to earn a living. By freeing scientists, artists, inventors and designers from their chores and enabling them to create from genuine desire, Marshall Brain’s utop...

Also, there is a very large group of people, nicknamed Vites, who choose to live their lives almost entirely in the virtual world. Vertebrane takes care of everything physical for them, including eating, showering and using the bathroom, which their minds are blissfully unaware of in their virtual reality. These Vites appear uninterested in having physical children, and they die off with their physical bodies, so if everyone becomes a Vite, then humanity goes out in a blaze of glory and virtual bliss.

Protector God

In this scenario, the superintelligent AI is essentially omniscient and omnipotent, maximizing human happiness only through interventions that preserve our feeling

of being in control of our own destiny, and hiding well enough that many humans even doubt its existence. Except for the hiding, this is similar to the “Nanny AI” scenario put forth by AI researcher Ben Goertzel.2

Both the protector god and the benevolent dictator are “friendly AI” that try to increase human happiness, but they prioritize different human needs. The American psychologist Abraham Maslow famously classified human needs into a hierarchy. The benevolent dictator does a flawless job with the basic needs at the bottom of the hierarchy, such as food, shelter, safety and various forms of pleasure. The protector god, on the other hand, attempts to maximize human happiness not in the narrow sense of satisfying our basic needs, but in a deeper sense by letting us feel that our lives hav...

A protector god could be a natural outcome of the first Omega scenario from the last chapter, where the Omegas cede control to Prometheus, which eventually hides and erases people’s knowledge about its existence. The more advanced the AI’s technology becomes, the easier it becomes for it to hide. The movie Transcendence gives such an example, ...

By closely monitoring all human activities, the protector god AI can make many unnoticeably small nudges or miracles here and ...

If we appear headed toward an accidental nuclear war, it could avert it with an intervention we’d dismiss as luck. It could also give us “revelations” in the form of ideas for new beneficial technologies, delivered inconspicuously

in our sleep. Many people may like this scenario because of its similarity to what today’s monotheistic religions believe in or hope for. If someone asks the superintelligent AI “Does God exist?” after it’s switched on, it could repeat a joke by Stephen Hawking and quip “It does now!” On the other hand, some religious people may disapprove of this scenario because the AI attempts to outdo their god in goodness, or interfere with a divine plan where humans are supposed to do good only out of personal choice.

Another downside of this scenario is that the protector god lets some preventable suffering occur in order not to...

This is analogous to the situation featured in the movie The Imitation Game, where Alan Turing and his fellow British code crackers at Bletchley Park had advance knowledge of German submarine attacks against Allied naval con...

in order to avoid revealing their secret power. It’s interesting to compare this with the so-called theodicy problem of why a good god would allow suffering. Some religious scholars have argued for the explanation that God wants to leave people with some freedom. In the AI-protector-god scenario, the solution t...

A third downside of the protector-god scenario is that humans get to enjoy a much lower level of technology than the superintelligent AI has discovered. Whereas a benevolent dictator AI can deploy all its invented technology for the benefit of humanity, a protector god AI is limited by the ability of humans to reinvent (with subtle hints) and understand its technology. It may also limit human ...

the movie Ex Machina highlights how an AI might break out even without being superintelligent.

Designing optimal governance lasting many millennia isn’t easy, and has thus far eluded humans. Most organizations fall apart after years or decades. The Catholic Church is the most successful organization in human history in the sense that it’s the only one to have survived for two millennia, but it has been criticized for having both too much and too little goal stability: today some criticize it for resisting contraception, while conservative cardinals argue that it’s lost its way. For anyone enthused about the enslaved-god scenario, researching long-lasting optimal governance schemes should be one of the most urgent challenges of our time.

How Slave Owners Justify Slavery We humans have a long tradition of treating

other intelligent entities as slaves and concocting self-serving arguments to justify it, so it’s not implausible that we’d try to do the same with a superintelligent AI.

The history of slavery spans nearly every culture, and is described both in the Code of Hammurabi from almost four millennia ago and in the Old Testament, wherein Abraham had slaves. “For that some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some...

Even after human enslavement became socially unacceptable in most of the world, enslavement of an...

One common pro-slavery argument is that slaves don’t deserve human rights because they or their race/species/kind are somehow inferior. For enslaved animals and machines, this alleged inferiority is often claimed to be due to a lack of soul or consciousness—claims which we’ll argue in chapter 8 are scientifically dubious.

Another common argument is that slaves are better off enslaved: they get to exist, be taken care of and so on.