Life 3.0 by Max Tegmark (A book review)
Disclaimer: I’m a bit biased when it comes to Max Tegmark. Many years ago I saw his two or three appearances in the ‘BBC Horizon’ series and immediately found him absolutely lovely as a person and a cosmic thinker.
“Life 3.0 — Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence” retraces Max Tegmark’s pioneering journey that accomplished the first international gathering of Artificial Intelligence researchers for the sake of prioritizing safety research in the field of AI engineering. This journey also encompasses the how and why Team Tegmark — Max and his wife Meia Chita-Tegmark — came up with the idea to found the Future of Life Institute (FLI webpage: https://futureoflife.org/).
As many of us, Tegmark is not only excited about the implications of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence = human level intelligence and above). He is also deeply concerned about the existential threat a super intelligence poses to the future of human civilization.
I agree with Tegmark on all his major points he strives to get more widely known through his work Life 3.0. Here are the seven most important ideas:
1. Inevitability
The creation of AGI is bound to happen, it’s just a question of by whom and when it will be achieved. The “when” is probably very close, less than 50 years.
2. Intelligence Explosion
Once an advanced AI is capable of a wide range of general intelligence comparable to humans, there will be an intelligence explosion culminating in super intelligence — which we will have a hard time to control, even if we prepare very well in advance.
3. Humans as Ants
In order to avoid that we as a species become something that needs to be eliminated in the eye of a super intelligence — just like humans destroy ant hills when they want to construct a road right on top of their location — we humans need to find a way how to develop AGI in a way that will ensure its goals are permanently aligned with the goals of humanity.
4. Impermanence
It’s questionable whether we can permanently align the goals but we have to do our best and make the alignment as long lasting as possible.
5. Why keep humanity
Why is it important that conscious beings like humans survive? (Apart from that we want to survive?): Our universe is immensely beautiful. If there is no consciousness to experience the universe with, then all that cosmic beauty would not be experienced and in a sense not exist. A view point Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr were already debating about: “Does the moon exist if nobody is looking at it?”
6. Expansion of Consciousness
In order to expand consciousness across our solar system and, if we dare, maybe even across the galaxy, AGI might be absolutely necessary for humans (or other humanoids) to achieve that expansion far beyond a home planet.
7. Substrate Independence of Life and Consciousness
When does an Artificial Intelligence become alive? Just as information processing is possible in any kind of matter, consciousness is also substrate independent. Even life does not need to be confined to organic matter. A future reality is probable where consciousness arises in man-made superintelligence. With a will to procreate, it is bound to undergo its own strand of evolutionary transformation — interference from humans not welcomed.
So, these are the main concerns of the book as I see it.
Apart from that, I really enjoyed learning about Tegmark’s viewpoint on the connection between Life and entropy:
On first glance, Life seems to counteract entropy. But that is only when you look very short-term and close-up. Zoom back out into a larger frame of time and space and you will come to the conclusion that Life accelerates the progress of entropy.
A section in the book which I find disagreeable: Tegmark starts to calculate how much energy a super-intelligent civilization could extract from the universe as a whole! It might be fun for him as a geek Astro physicist to play around with this line of thought . . . But still, I find it lacks dignity. The universe, for me, is a divine entity which is not there to be consumed to such a degree.
I also wouldn’t like it when a Sun gets all cluttered up by a Dyson Sphere. Stop caging in everything, humans!
To wrap things up, Life 3.0 is written with a lot of heart and wisdom. I recommend it to anyone who is curious about what kind of future is most likely approaching human life on Earth.
Tegmark’s call to action resonates with me. We better become positively pro-active as a species to ensure a superior intelligence has a motif to keep us around instead of deeming us as dispensable.
.
.
.
© Nicole Lüderitz 2022 ~ All Rights Reserved
