Also by Max Tegmark
Our Mathematical Universe
This Is a Borzoi Book Published by Alfred A. Knopf
Copyright 2017 by Max Tegmark
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Tegmark, Max, author.
Title: Life 3.0 : being human in the age of artificial intelligence / by Max Tegmark.
Other titles: Life three point zero
Description: New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2017. | This is a Borzoi Book published by Alfred A. Knopf. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017006248 (print) | LCCN 2017022912 (ebook) | ISBN 9781101946596 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781101946602 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Artificial intelligencePhilosophy. | Artificial intelligenceSocial aspects. | AutomationSocial aspects. | Artificial intelligenceMoral and ethical aspects. | AutomationMoral and ethical aspects. | Artificial intelligencePhilosophy. | Technological forecasting. | BISAC: TECHNOLOGY & ENGINEERING / Robotics. | SCIENCE / Experiments & Projects. | TECHNOLOGY & ENGINEERING / Inventions.
Classification: LCC Q334.7 (ebook) | LCC Q334.7 .T44 2017 (print) | DDC 006.301dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017006248
Ebook ISBN9781101946602
Cover art by Suvadip Das; (man) based on Netfalls Remy Musser/Shutterstock
Cover design by John Vorhees
v4.1_r1
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Contents
To the FLI team,
who made everything possible
Acknowledgments
Im truly grateful to everyone who has encouraged and helped me write this book, including
my family, friends, teachers, colleagues and collaborators for support and inspiration over the years,
Mom for kindling my curiosity about consciousness and meaning,
Dad for the fighting spirit to make the world a better place,
my sons, Philip and Alexander, for demonstrating the wonders of human-level intelligence emerging,
all the science and technology enthusiasts around the world whove contacted me over the years with questions, comments and encouragement to pursue and publish my ideas,
my agent, John Brockman, for twisting my arm until I agreed to write this book,
Bob Penna, Jesse Thaler and Jeremy England for helpful discussions about quasars, sphalerons and thermodynamics, respectively,
those who gave me feedback on parts of the manuscript, including Mom, my brother Per, Luisa Bahet, Rob Bensinger, Katerina Bergstrm, Erik Brynjolfsson, Daniela Chita, David Chalmers, Nima Deghani, Henry Lin, Elin Malmskld, Toby Ord, Jeremy Owen, Lucas Perry, Anthony Romero, Nate Soares and Jaan Tallinn,
the superheroes who commented on drafts of the entire book, namely Meia, Dad, Anthony Aguirre, Paul Almond, Matthew Graves, Phillip Helbig, Richard Mallah, David Marble, Howard Messing, Luio Seoane, Marin Soljai, my editor Dan Frank and, most of all,
Meia, my beloved muse and fellow traveler, for her eternal encouragement, support and inspiration, without which this book wouldnt exist.
LIFE 3.0
Prelude
The Tale of the Omega Team
The Omega Team was the soul of the company. Whereas the rest of the enterprise brought in the money to keep things going, by various commercial applications of narrow AI, the Omega Team pushed ahead in their quest for what had always been the CEOs dream: building general artificial intelligence. Most other employees viewed the Omegas, as they affectionately called them, as a bunch of pie-in-the-sky dreamers, perpetually decades away from their goal. They happily indulged them, however, because they liked the prestige that the cutting-edge work of the Omegas gave their company, and they also appreciated the improved algorithms that the Omegas occasionally gave them.
What they didnt realize was that the Omegas had carefully crafted their image to hide a secret: they were extremely close to pulling off the most audacious plan in human history. Their charismatic CEO had handpicked them not only for being brilliant researchers, but also for ambition, idealism and a strong commitment to helping humanity. He reminded them that their plan was extremely dangerous, and that if powerful governments found out, they would do virtually anythingincluding kidnappingto shut them down or, preferably, to steal their code. But they were all in, 100%, for much the same reason that many of the worlds top physicists joined the Manhattan Project to develop nuclear weapons: they were convinced that if they didnt do it first, someone less idealistic would.
The AI they had built, nicknamed Prometheus, kept getting more capable. Although its cognitive abilities still lagged far behind those of humans in many areas, for example, social skills, the Omegas had pushed hard to make it extraordinary at one particular task: programming AI systems. Theyd deliberately chosen this strategy because they had bought the intelligence explosion argument made by the British mathematician Irving Good back in 1965: Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an intelligence explosion, and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.
They figured that if they could get this recursive self-improvement going, the machine would soon get smart enough that it could also teach itself all other human skills that would be useful.
The First Millions
It was nine oclock on a Friday morning when they decided to launch. Prometheus was humming away in its custom-built computer cluster, which resided in long rows of racks in a vast, access-controlled, air-conditioned room. For security reasons, it was completely disconnected from the internet, but it contained a local copy of much of the web (Wikipedia, the Library of Congress, Twitter, a selection from YouTube, much of Facebook, etc.) to use as its training data to learn from. Theyd picked this start time to work undisturbed: their families and friends thought they were on a weekend corporate retreat. The kitchenette was loaded with microwaveable food and energy drinks, and they were ready to roll.
When they launched, Prometheus was slightly worse than them at programming AI systems, but made up for this by being vastly faster, spending the equivalent of thousands of person-years chugging away at the problem while they chugged a Red Bull. By 10 a.m., it had completed the first redesign of itself, v2.0, which was slightly better but still subhuman. By the time Prometheus 5.0 launched at 2 p.m., however, the Omegas were awestruck: it had blown their performance benchmarks out of the water, and the rate of progress seemed to be accelerating. By nightfall, they decided to deploy Prometheus 10.0 to start phase 2 of their plan: making money.