Max Tegmark

We stand at the beginning of a new era. What was once science fiction is fast becoming reality, as AI transforms war, crime, justice, jobs and society-and, even, our very sense of what it means to be human. More than any other technology, AI has the potential to revolutionize our collective future - and there's nobody better situated to explore that future than Max Tegmark, an MIT professor and co-founder of the Future of Life Institute, whose work has helped mainstream research on how to keep AI beneficial. In this deeply researched and vitally important new book, Tegmark takes us to the heart of thinking about AI and the human condition, bringing us face to face with the essential questions of our time. What sort of future do we want? Life 3.0gives us the tools to join what may be the most important conversation of our time.

Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Life 3. 0

Fred Rivett

But beauty is in the eye of the beholder, not in the laws of physics, so before our Universe awoke, there was no beauty.

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.

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 here on our little planet during our lifetime.

If you get struck by a driverless car, it makes no difference to you whether it subjectively feels conscious. In the same way, what will affect us humans is what superintelligent AI does, not how it subjectively feels.

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 theres 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 consciousness misconception is related to the myth that machines can't have goals. Machines can obviously have goals in the narrow sense of exhibiting goal-oriented behavior: the behavior of a heat-seeking missile is most economnically explained as a goal to hit a target. If you feel threatened by a machine whose goals are misaligned with yours, then it's precisely its goals in this narrow sense that trouble you, not whether the machine is conscious and experiences a sense of purpose. If that heat-seeking missile were chasing you, you probably wouldn't exclaim I'm not worried, because machines can't have goals!"

To cause us trouble, such misaligned intelligence needs no robotic body, merely an internet connection — we’ll explore in chapter 4 how this may enable outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders and developing weapons we cannot even understand.

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.

What does it mean to say that a blob of matter is intelligent? What does it mean to say that an object can remember, compute and learn?

So there's clearly no undisputed "correct" definition of intelligence. Instead, there are many competing ones, including capacity for logic, understanding, planning, emotional knowledge, self-awareness, creativity, problem solving and learning.

This fact that low-level sensorimotor tasks seem easy despite requiring enormous computational resources is known as Moravec's paradox, and is explained by the fact that our brain makes such tasks feel easy by dedicating massive amounts of customized hardware to them — more than a quarter of our brains, in fact.

Life 3. 0 quotes

Join the club