Life 3.0

Begin Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Max Tegmark

Summary: Refreshingly interesting although it sometimes feels like blog entries or a diary of an extremely intelligent scientist

Score: 70 / 100

Blink was weird and I didn’t like it, so I started reading the book on 2022-05-21 on Kindle.

Clippings from Kindle

Had our Universe never awoken, then, as far as I’m concerned, it would have been completely pointless—merely a gigantic waste of space.

• Life 1.0 (biological stage): evolves its hardware and software
• Life 2.0 (cultural stage): evolves its hardware, designs much of its software
• Life 3.0 (technological stage): designs its hardware and software

The Day My Butt Went Psycho, by Andy Griffiths.

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 there’s 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.

Low-level sensorimotor tasks seem easy despite requiring enormous computational resources is known as Moravec’s paradox.

July 22, 1962, after the flight-control software was foiled.

whereas verification asks “Did I build the system right?,” validation asks “Did I build the right system?”

But then he mentioned this to a Japanese roboticist, who protested: “No, robots are very good at those things!”

A 2012 meta-analysis showed that unemployment tends to have negative long-term effects on well-being, while retirement was a mixed bag with both positive and negative aspects.

When cells learned to signal to neighbors, small multicellular organisms became possible, adding a new hierarchical level. When evolution invented circulatory systems and nervous systems for transportation and communication, large animals became possible. Further improving communication by inventing language allowed humans to coordinate well enough to form further hierarchical levels such as villages, and additional breakthroughs in communication, transportation and other technology enabled the empires of antiquity. Globalization is merely the latest example of this multi-billion-year trend of hierarchical growth.

The Age of Em, economist Robin Hanson gives

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.”

Your brain uses ~12 W.

Hans Moravec supports this view in his book Mind Children.

Today’s zoos are designed to maximize human rather than panda happiness.

Recent AI progress has given us systems such as Deep Blue, Watson and AlphaGo, whose goals of winning at chess, winning at quiz shows and winning at Go are so elaborate that it takes significant human mastery to properly appreciate how skilled they are.

A superintelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals aren’t aligned with ours, we’re in trouble.

touching video of Clive Wearing, who appears perfectly conscious even though his memories last less than a minute.

It’s not our Universe giving meaning to conscious beings, but conscious beings giving meaning to our Universe.

I made a New Year’s resolution for 2014 that I was no longer allowed to complain about anything without putting some serious thought into what I could personally do about it,

In parallel with the baby steps of setting up a new organization (such as incorporating, recruiting an advisory board and launching a website), we held a fun launch event in front of a packed MIT auditorium, at which Alan Alda explored the future of technology with leading experts.

Of course you can vote at the ballot box and tell your politicians what you think about education, privacy, lethal autonomous weapons, technological unemployment and other issues. But you also vote every day through what you choose to buy, what news you choose to consume, what you choose to share and what sort of role model you choose to be.