Name: Life 3.0
Rating: 3.773809523809524 (42 reviews)
ISBN: 9780451485076

Max Tegmark

Rob Shapiro

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.

First, substrate independence doesn't mean that a substrate is unnecessary, but that most of its details don't matter. You obviously can't have sound waves in a gas if there's no gas, but any gas whatsoever will suffice. Similarly, you obviously can't have computation without matter, but any matter will do as long as it can be arranged into NAND gates, connected neurons or some other building block enabling universal computation.

In short, computation is a pattern in the spacetime arrangement of particles, and it's not the particles but the pattern that really matters! Matter doesn't matter.

As illustrated in figure 2.8, computation keeps getting half as expensive roughly every couple of years, and this trend has now persisted for over a century, cutting the computer cost a whopping million million million (10^18) times since ny grandmothers were born. If everything got a million million million times cheaper, then a hundredth of a cent would enable you to buy all goods and services produced on Earth this year.

When we could no longer keep shrinking our vacuum tubes, we replaced them with transistors and then integrated circuits, where electrons move around in two dimensions. When this technology reaches its limits, there are many other alternatives we can try — for example, using three-dimensional circuits and using something other than electrons to do our bidding. Nobody knows for sure what the next blockbuster computational substrate will be, but we do know that we're nowhere near the limits imposed by the laws of physics.

The part of the computer that keeps track of what to do next is merely another part of its memory, called the program counter, which stores the current line number in the program. To go to the next instruction, simply add one to the program counter. To jump to another line of the program, simply copy that line number into the program counter — this is how so-called “if" statements and loops are implemented.

Although a pocket calculator can crush me in an arithmetic contest, it will never improve its speedor accuracy, no matter how much it practices. It doesn't learn…

Similarly, the first computer program that ever beat me at chess never learned from its mistakes, but merely implemented a function that its clever programmer had designed to compute a good next move. In contrast, when Magnus Carlsen lost his first game of chess at age five, he began a learning process that made him the World Chess Champion eighteen years later.

The ability to learn is arguably the most fascinating aspect of general intelligence.

When we humans first created pocket calculators and chess programs, we did the arranging. For matter to learn, it must instead rearrange itself to get better and better at computing the desired function simply by obeying the laws of physics.

Other physical systems, such as brains, can learn much more efficiently based on the same idea. John Hopfield showed that his above-mentioned network of interconnected neurons can learn in an analogous way: if you repeatedly put it into certain states, it will gradually learn these states and return to them from any nearby state. If you've seen each of your family members many times, then memories of what they look like can be triggered by anything related to them.

A neural network is simply a group of interconnected neurons that are able to influence each other's behavior. Your brain contains about as many neurons as there are stars in our Galaxy: in the ballpark of a hundred billion.

"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.

Timeo Williams

For those interested in understanding both the possibilities and physics of AI. I recommend reading this book.

Tyler Gibbs

I like the way Max explained neural networks and how he formulated different variants of the future of AI back by all his knowledge he’s accumulated throughout the years at MIT. My favorite chapter is the one on consciousness.

'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

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.

Keven Wang

Master piece. The chapters on ethics and consciousness are brilliant.

Irene Alegre

DNF, but still giving it 4 stars because I don't think it's the book's fault that I didn't finish. This is not my kind of book, and therefore often I'd find myself lost in what felt like a complex universe of physics, computer programming and technology.

I do think it's well written, and a good book for the right audience.

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

Manuel Steinberg

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 Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Reviews

Highlights