Thoughts on Life 3.0

I read Superintelligence not too long ago and had avoided this book by Max Tegmark because I thought it was pretty much the same topic.

They were a bit different, though. Superintelligence focused more extensively on what it would take to create artificial superintelligence. It dove more into the technical aspects, the current work being done and how it looks. It also talked about the risks and crazy scenarios that could happen.

Life 3.0 touched on those things, but was also talked about them through a more tangible all-encompassing view. It touched on the different futures that could exist with super intelligence and got into some philosophical discussions on what we might want as well as what defines consciousness and the differences between man and machine.

The super intelligence assumption

Building super intelligent technology is not a given. There are tons of famous and smart researchers and humans that believe there’s no chance we make it.

There are others who think it’ll happen within like 10 years.

The point that I took away is that we don’t really know whether we are going to make it or not. Super intelligence being defined as machines that really can do everything humans can do but better — not just winning in a game of chess or Go, but literally everything.

In the book, he talks about the different things super intelligent agents would be able to do and they are pretty enormous, which makes sense. The world is so connected today, we’re so influenced by media, a super intelligent machine could get some real shit done.

The different futures

So we don’t know if we’ll reach it, but Max Tegmark harped on the fact that if we do, and we’re not ready, then there could be some real negative consequences — like accidentally programming a super intelligent machine to make the max # of paper clips and having it turn the entire galaxy into paper clips as a funny but real enough example.

Therefore, he talks about how we need to do all this research and preparation in order to build the future we want with machines. I think it makes a lot of sense.

The harder question is what future we want. He mentions something like 8 of them that all have their own pros and cons — some crazier than others.

For example, there could be a machine dictator that doesn’t let anyone do much and where humans are sort of like pets/zoo animals to machines.

There’s a future where we decide to destroy all the machines and send humanity back to square 1 in order to avoid all the chaos.

There’s a future where we all live in different sectors of the world that each have their own laws and regulations. Basically where we aren’t having to work because machines can do pretty much everything and instead it’s all leisure and we pick the leisure we want.

There are others, too. Thinking all of these futures provides interesting philosophical discussions.

Consciousness

He also dives into consciousness and provides interesting thoughts about whether machines would be considered conscious. If so, do they deserve as many rights as humans?

Having just finished Westworld, it gets me even more thinking about this stuff.

Overall

Overall, great book and would highly recommend. Think it brings up really important questions and also prompts more thoughts about what to do with my life and future.

So many jobs have the potential of being automated, so where does that leave us as young people, for instance?

Thoughts on this review/the book in general? Comment or send me a note :)

Full reading list here