Max Tegmark

'This is the most important conversation of our time, and Tegmark's thought-provoking book will help you join it' Stephen Hawking THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER. DAILY TELEGRAPH AND THE TIMES BOOKS OF THE YEAR SELECTED AS ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVOURITE BOOKS OF 2018 AI is the future - but what will that future look like? Will superhuman intelligence be our slave, or become our god? Taking us to the heart of the latest thinking about AI, Max Tegmark, the MIT professor whose work has helped mainstream research on how to keep AI beneficial, separates myths from reality, utopias from dystopias, to explore the next phase of our existence. How can we grow our prosperity through automation, without leaving people lacking income or purpose? How can we ensure that future AI systems do what we want without crashing, malfunctioning or getting hacked? Should we fear an arms race in lethal autonomous weapons? Will AI help life flourish as never before, or will machines eventually outsmart us at all tasks, and even, perhaps, replace us altogether? 'This is a rich and visionary book and everyone should read it' The Times

Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Life 3.0

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.

Life 3. 0

Fred Rivett

Erik Brynjolfsson spoke of two kinds of optimism in his Asilomar talk. First there's the unconditional kind, such as the positive expectation that the Sun will rise tomorrow morning. Then there's what he called “mindful optimism," which is the expectation that good things will happen if you plan carefully and work hard for them. That's the kind of optimism I now feel about the future of life.

there's a famous computer-science theorem saying that for almost all computations, there's no faster way of determining their outcome than actually running them. This means that it’s typically impossible for you to figure out what you'll decide to do in a second in less than a second, which helps reinforce your experience of having free will.

if a mathematical theory of consciousness whose equations fit on a napkin could successfully predict the outcomes of all experiments we perform on brains, then we'd start taking seriously not merely the theory itself, but also its predictions for consciousness beyond brains for example, in machines.

Indeed, the system that reads that email is continually bombarded with messages from all over your body, some more delayed than others. It takes longer for nerve signals to reach your brain from vour fingers than from your face because of distance, and it takes longer for you to analyze images than sounds because it's more complicated whích is why Olympic races are started with a bang rather than with a visual cue. Yet if you touch your nose, you consciously experience the sensation on your nose and fingertip as simultaneous, and if you clap your hands, you see, hear and feel the clap at exactly the same time. This means that your full conscious experience of an event isn't created until the last slowpoke email reports have trickled in and been analyzed.

Such NCC research has proven that none of your consciousness resides in your gut, even though that's the location of your enteric nervous system with its whopping half-billion neurons that compute how to optimally digest your food; feelings such as hunger and nausea are instead produced in your brain.

The pioneering U.S.-Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield found in the 1930s that his neurosurgery patients reported different parts of their body being touched when he electrically stimulated specific brain areas in what's now called the somatosensory cortex (figure 8.3),° He also found that they involuntarily moved different parts of their body when he stimulated brain areas in what's now called the motor cortex.

Lots of information processing is taking place in our heads right now. Which of it is conscious and which isn't?

Four centuries ago, Galileo Galilei was so impressed by math-based physics theories that he described nature as "a book written in the language of mathematics."

That's why the definition I gave in chapter 1, which I'm sticking with throughout this book, is very broad: consciousness = subjective experience. In other words, if it feels like something to be you right now, then you're conscious.

In other words, the time window during which you can load your goals into an AI may be quite short: the brief period between when it’s too dumb to get you and too smart to let you.

In the stories where a genie grants three wishes, there are many variants for the first two wishes, but the third wish is almost always the same: “Please undo the first two wishes, because that's not what I really wanted.” All these examples show that to figure out what people really want, you can't merely go by what they say.

Schrödinger pointed out that a hallmark of a living system is that it maintains or reduces its entropy by increasing the entropy around it. In other words, the second law of thermodynamics has a life loophole: although the total entropy must increase, it's allowed to decrease in some places as long as it increases even more elsewhere. So life maintains or increases its complexity by making its environment messier.

First of all, gravity behaves differently from all other forces and strives to make our Universe not more uni- form and boring but more clumpy and interesting.

Digesting a candy bar is merely 0.00000001% efficient, in the sense that it releases a mere ten-trillionth of the energy mnc that it contains. If your stomach were even 0.001% efficient, then you'd only need to eat a single meal for the rest of your life.

Of all traits that our human form of intelligence has, I feel that consciousness is by far the most remarkable, and as far as I'm concerned, it's how our Universe gets meaning. Galaxies are beautiful only because we see and subjectively experience them.

Many people in the benevolent dictatorship meet a similar fate, with lives that feel pleasant but ultimately meaningless. Although people can create artifcal challenges, from scientific rediscovery to rock climbing, everyone knows that there is no true challenge, merely entertainment.

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 DOS emulator, most of us don't find this interesting enough to actually do it.

The history of life shows it self-organizing into an ever more complex hierarchy shaped by collaboration, competition and control. Superintelligence is likely to enable coordination on ever-larger cosmic scales, but it's unclear whether it will ultimately lead to more totalitarian top-down control or more individual empowerment.

If superintelligence indeed comes about, the temptation to become cyborgs or uploads will be strong. As Hans Moravec puts it in his 1988 classic Mind Children: "Long life loses much of its point if we are fated to spend it staring stupidly at ultra-intelligent machines as they try to describe their ever more spectacular discoveries in baby- talk that we can understand."

This physics-imposed speed limit on information transter therefore poses an obvious challenge for any Al wishing to take over our world, let alone our Universe.

The best breakout strategies of all are ones we haven't yet discussed, because they're strategies we humans can't imagine and therefore won't take countermeasures against. Given that a super-intelligent computer has the potential to dramatically supersede human understanding of computer security, even to the point of discovering more fundamental laws of physics than we know today, it's likely that if it breaks out, we'll have no idea how it happened. Rather, it will seem like a Harry Houdini breakout act, indistinguishable from pure magic.

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:

• a social network of friends and colleagues

• 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

Jobs can provide people with more than just money. Voltaire wrote in 1759 that "work keeps at bay three great evils: boredom, vice and need."

Although the main argument tends to be a moral one, there's also evidence that greater equality makes democracy work better: when there's a large well-educated middle class, the electorate is harder to manipulate, and it's tougher for small numbers of people or companies to buy undue influence over the government. A better democracy can in turn enable a better-managed economy that's less corrupt, more efficient and faster growing, ultimately benefiting essentially everyone.

"This is a Borzoi Book published by Alfred A. Knopf."

Pratik M

I got the recommendation from Obama's 2018 book list and 'read' it during my commute over the past two weeks. It offers a general understanding of the current status of AI technology and its potential and threats (real or perceived). As with every technical field, some threats are exaggerated but our limited knowledge in terms of its extent temper any attempts at dismissing most fears. I like that Tegmark delves into the ontological debates and poses the "should we" questions. I particularly liked the 7 potential scenarios that AI can lead to. 

The delivery is a tad dull and it would've helped if the reader didn't spell out the 'colon' and 'backslash backslash' in URLs that are peppered throughout the book.

Bouke van der Bijl

A very thorough book about the last invention humanity will make: human-level artificial intelligence. AI has enormous potential ramifications and this book very clearly goes through all of them, this book explains what AI is and how it will be built, and what the benefits to risks are to humanity. It ends with a solid philosophical exploration of what intelligence and consciousness are.

Vedat Güven

Yapay Zeka ve insanın daha doğrusu toplumun etkileşimi anlatılıyor kitapta. Hatırlama, hesaplama ve öğrenme yapan bir makinaya zeki makina diyebiliriz. Yapay Zeka'nın gelişmesiyle beraber hacklenme, hata yapma, kontrolden çıkma, silahlanma, etiğin ve hukukun geride kalması, iş dünyası, üretim ve gelir paylaşımı gibi konulara güzel görüşler sunuluyor kitapta. Binlerce yıl sonrası için çeşitli senaryolar da var: Yapay Zeka ile insanın birlikteliği, insanların YZ'yı mutlak güç haline getirmesi ve toplumun yararına hizmet etmesinin sağlanması, YZ'nın bir grup insan tarafından kendi çıkarlarına kullanılması ve totaliter rejim uygulanması, YZ'nın insanlığı ele geçirip kontrol etmesi, hapsetmesi, sömürmesi veya yok etmesi gibi.

Jeremy Cote

Note: I received this book as an Advanced Reading Copy on Netgalley.

This is the first book that I've read by Max Tegmark, and it really was a wonderful read. The book is engaging, and easy to read. I found that he had thoughtful ideas about artificial intelligence and the nature of how superintelligence can change the world. I loved his style and enjoyed how he explained how his mindset went from concerned to optimistic.

The topic itself is arguably one of the most important of our time, so I think it's very important to get right. This book is a great entry into the subject, and I heartily recommend it.

Ilia Markov

Promising topic, I was feeling very hopeful about this book, unfortunately, it falls flat on the ambition it starts with.

I think it's too long, it explores topics that are not really related to AI (such as physics, astronomy, etc.)

There's also a lot of namedropping as other reviewers have pointed out.

Bryan Alexander

This is a delightful book, if you're interested in possible futures of technology and civilization.

Tegmark starts off with the huge idea that human life is starting to change in an enormous way. AI represents a new order of being, and humans have the ability to modify ourselves. The rest of the book is speculation about what follows.

Chapters proceed in a strange kind of order. Entertainingly, the first page offers a choose-your-own-adventure style choice, making an introduction optional. Said introduction is a sketch of how things might play out if a company invents artificial general intelligence*. In the middle of the book Tegmark races ahead several thousand years, then several billion, ramping up the scale to imagine what might happen if we turn the entire universe into a combination of human habitation and computational substrate.

I enjoyed the sharp changes in direction. I also appreciated the author's style, a combination of clarity and humor.

*artificial general intelligence is akin to the human mind, software that can think across numerous situations and registers. Right now AI is very different, typically being focused on very narrow, usually single problems (self-driving car, playing Go, etc).

Chris Andersson

New York Times Best Seller How will Artificial Intelligence affect crime, war, justice, jobs, society and our very sense of being human? The rise of AI has the potential to transform our future more than any other technology—and there’s nobody better qualified or situated to explore that future than Max Tegmark, an MIT professor who’s helped mainstream research on how to keep AI beneficial. How can we grow our prosperity through automation without leaving people lacking income or purpose? What career advice should we give today’s kids? How can we make future AI systems more robust, so that they do what we want without crashing, malfunctioning or getting hacked? Should we fear an arms race in lethal autonomous weapons? Will machines eventually outsmart us at all tasks, replacing humans on the job market and perhaps altogether? Will AI help life flourish like never before or give us more power than we can handle? What sort of future do you want? This book empowers you to join what may be the most important conversation of our time. It doesn’t shy away from the full range of viewpoints or from the most controversial issues—from superintelligence to meaning, consciousness and the ultimate physical limits on life in the cosmos.

HsinJu

'All of us - not only scientists, industrialists and generals-should ask ourselves what can we do now to improve the chances of reaping the benefits of future AI and avoiding the risks. This is the most important conversation of our time, and Tegmark's thought-provoking book will help you join it' Stephen Hawking 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. How can we grow our prosperity through automation, without leaving people lacking income or purpose? How can we ensure that future AI systems do what we want without crashing, malfunctioning or getting hacked? Should we fear an arms race in lethal autonomous weapons? Will AI help life flourish as never before, or will machines eventually outsmart us at all tasks, and even, perhaps, replace us altogether? Life 3.0 gives us the tools to join what may be the most important conversation of our time, guiding us through the most controversial issues around AI today -- from superintelligence to meaning, consciousness and the ultimate physical limits on life in the cosmos. What sort of future do you want?

Life 3.0 Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

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