New York Times Best SellerHow 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 … 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.
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This guy would make a great Elmer Gantry – what a scumbag
The best future history roadmap since Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
I normally compare every future history, or big picture non-fiction book like this to Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and his equally good follow up Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow.
I consider Harari the best of the best, equivalent to Lebron James, Citizen Kane, Isaac Newton and the like. His books are beyond compare, aside from Cosmos, which acts as the Michael Jordan to Harari’s Lebron James. Both are the best of the best.
So I don’t look to expect books to be better than Harari’s, I just see how close they get to his pinnacle of clarity, importance and ideas.
Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Max Tegmark is not Homo Deus, but it is in the ballpark.
It’s James Harden to Harari’s Lebron James. You’d rather have Lebron James, but whoo – James Harden can be good at times.
Analogies over – how is Life 3.0?
Tegmark, like most future historians, knows his and humanity’s limits. In short:
* He knows what we know – our processing speed is getting faster, and has a lot of room to grow
* He is aware of what we don’t know – What will happen with AI? Will it be good? Will it be bad? Will it be something in between? Will AI develop sentience?
* He is good at laying out the options for all that we don’t know – He splits the options into camps, and gives all sides a say. AI will be great! AI will be bad! True AI won’t happen! And most importantly –
* He holds the humility that there is always the option that something else will happen – He likes to base the future on a probability of options, and saves 50% for an idea that it will be something we haven’t thought of yet
What are some of his theses?
He doesn’t have too many theses – Tegmark likes to present all theses and give them equal voice. He’ll talk about today –
Today’s artificial intelligence tends to be narrow, with each system able to accomplish only very specific goals, while human intelligence is remarkably broad.
But the future? He talks about possibilities – robojudges that could be extraordinarily fair, or perhaps might be flawed. A world with better jobs due to technology, or a world with no jobs, which will cause problems. Or a world with no jobs where such things are unnecessary, and allows humanity to pursue their own goals – which is good. His meta-thesis can best be summarized here –
The short answer is obviously that we have no idea what will happen if humanity succeeds in building human-level AGI. For this reason, we’ve spent this chapter exploring a broad spectrum of scenarios.
He shows the broad spectrum – and occasionally gives his opinion. But he’s more likely to show as many viewpoints as he can, and then mention that something else could happen as well.
One of my favorite quotes he pulls is from a techno-skeptic –
I think of this as the techno-skeptic position, eloquently articulated by Andrew Ng: “Fearing a rise of killer robots is like worrying about overpopulation on Mars.”
Techno-optimists, don’t worry – he shows your point as well.
And oh wow does he map out the future
Just as James Harden can be better than Lebron James at points, Tegmark finds a way to show more than Harari, particularly when it comes to the future.
Harari excels at giving insight and clarity, Tegmark excels at presenting multiple options.
* How could Space Travel work? (many options)
* How could we travel the galaxy and colonize? (he provides many options)
* How can we get more energy? (from Dyson Spheres to turning matter into energy, he shows it all)
And one more thing – he gives summary at the end of the chapter
Tegmark ends each chapter with a Bottom Line section, where he summarizes everything into little paragraphs.
So you can read one chapter intensely, and then skim the next and get to the bottom line.
In conclusion – want something big picture? Read this
It’s worth it, and is the latest non-fiction chart topper for a reason. Great book – I’d advise reading a chapter at least – you might end up reading the whole thing, and expanding your world view because of it!