Life 3.0: Being Human in the age of Artificial Intelligence by Max Tegmark
Finished reading on December 13th, 2017
Rating: 8/10
The premise of the book is that there are some life forms that get all their information needed for a pleasant enough life from their genetic code – Life 1.0. Then there’s life that has the ability to learn new skills or knowledge and by doing that extend their lifetime to something more than it would be otherwise – Life 2.0. And then there’s the elusive Life 3.0 that would be able to not only learn and gain new knowledge but even construct itself new in a way.
In this book Tegmark presents his view of what Life 3.0 might mean to humankind if the main improvement was Artificial General Intelligence – something that is taken to be able to figure out pretty much everything including the fact that humans might not be coolest life-form to hang around with, and that could given enough time come up with highly advanced technology.
Tegmark showcases some advances in AI such as AlphaGo and others that are consistently pushing the boundary of what we think is impossible for a glorified computer to do.
There are several scenarios as to what might occur depending on what kind of precautions are taken by the people working on creating AI, and possibly later keeping it “chained”.
The scenarios vary from rather optimistic ones to really pessimistic – will the future see a Universe where humanity is governed by AI (whether the humans know it or not), or one where humans have a say in their future beyond creating AI, or maybe real AI won’t ever come about whether it’s by someones choice or our incompetence – anyway there’re options to choose from for everyone.
