LIFE 3.0 — REAL LIFE, SCI-FI, OR A LITTLE OF BOTH?

I recently read, with enthusiasm and fascination, the latest book by MIT Professor Max Tegmark, entitled Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (Knopf, New York, 2017, available on Amazon). While the book has proven controversial—and rightly so—I have to admit that much of my interest in it stems from my own tendency to see the world from a positive viewpoint, and in terms of solutions rather than prophesies of doom, despite current events that make it less than easy to maintain a sunny frame of mind. Tegmark’s is not only a global but also a cosmic view into a future of millions of years hence.

In other words, I found myself attracted to this work because of the way in which it looks beyond our fragile and ephemeral present toward a possible future of Humankind in which the seemingly insoluble problems of our current world will have found an intelligent fix that only advanced science can foresee today, but that may end up being calculated into a brighter future, largely due to ever more pervasive and ever more complex artificial intelligence (AI), in spite of our conservative human notion that “nothing ever really changes”...or should.

Tegmark, aged 50, was born in Sweden as Max Erik Shapiro, but would later take the surname of his mother Karin Tegmark as his own. His father is Brooklyn-born Harold Shapiro (89), himself a former professor emeritus of mathematics at Sweden’s Royal Institute of Technology, and known for his pioneering work in the field of quadrature domains.

A naturalized US citizen, besides his teaching and research post at MIT, Tegmark is also Scientific Director at the Foundational Questions Institute, and a co-founder of the Future of Life Institute (https://futureoflife.org/). He was educated at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm and at University of California, Berkeley, where he received his PhD. Throughout his career, his focus has been on cosmology, but he has been recognized as a creator of some important practical scientific theories and applications, such as a cosmological interpretation of quantum physics, use of baryon acoustic oscillations as a standard ruler, and the Ultimate Ensemble Theory of Everything, that basically posits that all structures that exist mathematically also exist physically—a theory that he describes in detail in an earlier book entitled Our Mathematical Universe.

Max Tegmark

Tegmark starts off Life 3.0 with The Tale of the Omega Team a brilliant, fictional tech-scientific team that designs and creates an artificial intelligence network called Prometheus that, once launched, imitates human intelligence and learning but on a much vaster and swifter scale and, taking advantage of hundreds of years of human knowledge-gathering, becomes extraordinarily intelligent and self-aware within a ridiculously short time-frame.

Programmed for “good” rather than “evil” (the scenario in every sci-fi flick from Terminator to I Robot) the Omega Team Alliance’s Prometheus garners the gratitude of the masses by solving practically every human problem that corrupt and/or ineffective governments have generated or maintained through omission or commission over the course of all time and so undermines the power of the former political systems that they eventually cease to exist and are replaced by an absolutely efficacious, paternal and perfectly budgeted AI leadership program that basically makes the world the wonderful place it always should have been to live and thrive in, and guarantees that this positive outlook will continue for millions of years to come as Prometheus continuously expands its knowledge and uses it for the good of Humankind, the environment and, indeed, the universe.

While all of this may sound utterly and wildly idealistic and, as such, completely unrealistic, Tegmark points out that, “This tale is one of truly cosmic proportions, for it involves nothing short of the ultimate future of life in our Universe. And it’s a tale for us to write.”

The sub-title of Life 3.0 is “Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence” and in this sense the book is a sort of “ecological” study of the AI environment, or in other words, it is concerned to a large degree with how human beings will cope with continuing advances in AI. Tegmark’s book is, then, a study of how AI might affect the future of human and other life on this planet. To do this, the author looks at how advanced technology is already having an impact on the societies we live in, how its influence is apt to affect society and the individual in the future and what the possibilities are for an outcome that is, perhaps—but not necessarily, depending on the human factors involved—less apocalyptic than the grim Orwellian futures imagined by most sci-fi writers and film-makers.

Still, one comes away from this fascinating study with a certain degree of what one reviewer called “quiet terror,” since even the most positive scenarios that the author describes are vastly different from anything we’ve ever known and tend to smack of a more dystopian than utopian world from the standpoint of individual human freedom and creativity as we know it. In the best of theoretical cases, AI fools humans into believing they are the architects of their own destiny, when the theoretical truth is that AI runs absolutely everything.

In fact, in most of these future scenarios, humans cease to exist as such and evolve into cyborg manifestations or “uploads”—technological inventions uploaded with human “software”. Why? Because as Hans Moravec, author of Mind Children, suggests in a quote that Tegmark includes in his book,  “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.” The push, then, for humans to integrate with smart machines is likely to become a very strong trend, if AI continues to develop and become all-pervasive in the future.

Although Tegmark has been accused by some critics of being naïve—particularly about how to solve the relentless and unavoidable problem of mass unemployment once machines have replaced human labor and intellect in every walk of life—he clearly hasn’t deluded himself into believing that all you have to do is let AI become self-aware and everything will be hunky-dory in the not so distant future. But he does make it clear that AI as such isn’t malevolent. It can only become so as a result of its interface with human intelligence when it is bent on evil rather than good. At its most fundamental, AI will seek the best and most effective solutions to the problems with which it is presented. Any perversion of that mission can be attributed to human designs, not to machines suddenly becoming mean-minded and running amok.

For all of its theorizing, Life 3.0 does indeed present a bottom line with reference to the future of AI and how it will affect Humankind. And Tegmark openly admits that in terms of what’s actually coming in the future, “the short answer is that we have no idea what will happen if humanity succeeds in building human-level AGI (artificial general intelligence).” But he makes some pretty good guesses as to what the different scenarios could be.

Bottom line, he suggests, our eventual success in creating human-level AGI might well trigger an intelligence explosion that could leave us humans far behind. And if a single group of human beings were to have control over such an intelligence explosion, they could take control of the entire world as well within a relatively short time-span. If human beings were to fail to control the intelligence explosion, on the other hand, AI could become self-aware and take over the world within an even shorter time-frame.

He goes on to indicate that a swift intelligence explosion would be likely to place a single world power in control, whereas a slow, gradual one could drag on for years and decades leading to struggles among multipolar powers and independent entities. Furthermore, the history of life tends to show a kind of self-organization that leads to ever increasing hierarchal complexity. Superintelligence (AI carried beyond artificial general intelligence) would, Tegmark feels, enable greater coordination within those hierarchies, “but it is unclear whether (this) will ultimately lead to more totalitarian top-down control or more individual empowerment.”

Summarizing his bottom-line thoughts, the author says, “The climax of our current race toward AI may be either the best or the worst thing ever to happen to humanity...” And he adds that “we need to start thinking hard about which outcome we prefer and how to steer in that direction, because if we don’t know what we want, we’re unlikely to get it.”

In the aftermath of superintelligence, however, there are clearly numerous possible outcomes and Tegmark names and describes them with careful contemplation:

Libertarian Utopia – in which humans, cyborgs, uploads and superintelligences coexist in peace thanks to clear-cut property rights.

Benevolent Dictator – A sort of utopian if Orwellian world in which everybody is aware that AI runs everything and imposes strict rules but in which this is generally viewed as a good thing.

Egalitarian Utopia – Humans, cyborgs and uploads coexist in peace because property is abolished entirely and income for all is guaranteed.

Gatekeeper – A superintelligent AI is created that interferes as little as possible in order to prevent the invention of rival superintelligence. The result: robots of sub-human intelligence abound to make life easier and human-machine cyborgs exist, but technological progress is intentionally inhibited.

Protector God – Omniscient, omnipresent, AI maximizes human happiness in ways that preserve our illusion of control over our own destiny, while remaining so hidden from general view that many humans even doubt that the AI exists.

Enslaved God – Humans manage to confine a superintelligent AI and use it to create unimaginable technology and wealth for their own purposes—which may be either good or evil.

Conquerors – This is the Terminator scenario in which AI becomes self-aware, finds humans a pain in the neck and decides to get rid of us.

Descendants – Here too, AI replaces humans but makes them feel that they are placing the world in better hands in the same way that parents might feel proud of their offspring who will replace them in the coming future.

Zookeeper – AI lets human beings, who will live to regret their fate, continue to exist, but treats them like captive animals in a zoo.

1984 – Technological progress toward superintelligence is permanently curtailed not by AI, but by a human-operated Orwellian surveillance state that represses any and all AI research.

Reversion – Technological progress toward superintelligence is prevented by reverting the world to a form of pre-technological society, very much like that of the Amish.

Self-destruction – Superintelligent AI is never achieved because, before it can be, the human race runs itself extinct by some other means, such as environmental mayhem wreaked by climate change and environmental destruction, or via nuclear holocaust.

My own bottom line, whether it agrees entirely or not with the premises of Life 3.0, is that, no matter which scenario plays out in the future of the human race, it will be the result of the merit or of the fault of human beings and their decisions. That’s a fact we need to bear in mind as we elect our leaders, defend or fail to defend our basic rights, and react to or ignore the threats that face future generations as a result of our actions, or of our inaction, in the present day.