Tegmark begins the book with a fictional vignette describing how a small division in a tech company could plausibly build an AI that could take over the world in a single person’s lifetime. The rest of Life 3.0 fails to pay off on the promise of its opening, settling for a tone the is more “wondering aloud” than “dee scientific thinking.”

Rather than dive deeply into the science behind AI and how it works, Tegmark spends much of the book airily describing possible future states of certain types of AI, then asking “what do you think, reader?” His ultimate conclusion for the future of life as AI continues to develop is an optimistic one, which I don’t happen to share.

A great way to jump into AI and get to know what's actually going on, rather than just listening to people with no experience or knowledge. The book helps you understand the pace of progress of technology, and what you can reasonably expect, what's already been achieved, and the possible risks and rewards ahead of us. The author goes off into some ideas about space travel and harnessing energy that feel more like the subject of another book, say on physics, space travel or the future of energy, but he eventually pulls them all back to relate to AI and what the significance of knowledge and thought might be.

The author is a founder of an organization that wants to push for the safe development of AI, and you can feel that throughout the book. He discusses fatalities that have already occurred, as well as the good and bad that may come from a future with strong AI. You'll see that in many cases, even if AI isn't perfect, it would likely be a better option than people for a lot of work. We make a lot of mistakes, a lot of deadly mistakes.

Max Tegmark discounts AI consciousness, favoring motivation and goals, in a way that sounds exactly like what you'd expect to hear from a behavioral psychologist. He later loops back to a perspective that seems to appreciate the dangers of consciousness, without changing any earlier statements. He occasionally suggests that a belief in God is primitive and ignorant. I don't appreciate this view, and don't think it's a seriously intelligent way to discuss a difference of view. To me it's also ironic that you can see a future where AI is made in man's image, able to learn and adapt and create, but you can't imagine a creator having done the same with us.

Overall a really great read that will increase your knowledge of AI, energy and space travel and communications a lot, if you haven't been deeply into these subjects at a university level.

Didn't learn all that much. A lot of wild speculation. The author is a bit gay for Elon Musk.

Listened to it on Audible. I really enjoyed it. It started off with a story of a possible utopian future with AGI. In further chapters it went in to detail on different scenarios and goals an AI might have compared to humans.

Some Fascinating Arguments: What is Life? Why just confine life to the carbon-based lifeforms of the current Life 2.0 model? Why not extend the definition to include silicon-based systems as well? What is Mind? What is the Soul? What is Consciousness?

Furthermore, why not be merely content with the humanistic philosophy but to realistically plan for the future that does not look inevitable at this stage in time. Will it prove to be a new Adam?; the culmination of this Lazarus-like project could spell something akin to magic for humanity or may prove to be it's final creation instead.

Thought provoking and well-written and structured, although the name dropping and faux humility gets a bit wearing after a while.

Tegmark assumes that philosophical materialism is true, and while in general I agree with him, that might bear some more detailed discussion and justification than it gets here.

There were a number of ideas presented in this book which really excited me: the fictional introductory scenario of superintelligence being developed, the prospect of experiences being tradeable in the future, teleological physics being responsible for the emergence of life and the discussion on consciousness and free will. I would have liked some more depth on these topics, which I wasn’t entirely convinced about even though they were fun to read. I enjoyed Max Tegmark’s optimism, humanity and expertise about superintelligence and the future of life.

Great book, it provides a lot of food for thought. I would have given 4.5 stars, with 0.5 marks off for some parts being too short for me (e.g. Tegmark mentioned his recent work on neural networks - I wish there were more detail; also his chapter on consciousness could have had more details). That being said, this book is an excellent read and I highly recommend it.

A thought provoking view into the future of AI.

Parts of this seem like a great introduction to the AI alignment problem for nontechnical people. (Specifically, the apocalyptic version of the alignment problem—contrast with Brian Christian’s excellent book The Alignment Problem, which focused more on the sorts of problems we already face from ML models right now). The fictional story in the “prelude” helps make things concrete, and chapter 1 does a good job rectifying some misunderstandings as to what people are really worried about. On the other hand, chapter 2—with subsections like “What Is Memory?” and “What Is Computation?”—goes down rabbit holes that might lose the casual audience. And other parts—like chapter 6, titled “Our Cosmic Endowment: The Next Billion Years and Beyond”—delve* into topics so speculative and distant that they may undermine the sense of seriousness and respectability the book wants to convey regarding the alignment problem. (There is a handy chart on page 72 categorizing the chapters into “Extremely Speculative”, “Not very speculative”, and “Speculative”, though.)

(( * “Delve” is the word that came out of my head naturally as I typed that sentence, and I’m not gonna let the fact that one of my childhood heroes tweeted that it’s only used by ChatGPT and people who “want to sound clever” goad me into rephrasing myself, but it’s fun to realize that my list of personal insecurities now includes will my vocabulary make rich people mistake me for a robot? ))

The coolest part of the book is chapter 5, which imagines 12 different “AI Aftermath Scenarios” and asks you to consider how you would feel about each of them. Even if I was often silently screaming that’s insane throughout some of them, it’s a fun exercise. The twelve scenarios are:[1]

- “Libertarian utopia”
- “Benevolent dictator”
- “Egalitarian utopia”
- “Gatekeeper”
- “Protector god”
- “Enslaved god”
- “Conquerors”
- “Descendants”
- “Zookeeper”
- “1984”
- “Reversion”
- “Self-destruction”

A recurring concern that arises in discussions of these scenarios is that humans would find life meaningless if we were no longer at the forefront of things:

Many people in the benevolent dictatorship [scenario]… [would have] lives that feel pleasant but ultimately meaningless. Although people can create artificial challenges, from scientific rediscovery to rock climbing, everyone knows that there is no true challenge, merely entertainment. There’s no real point in humans trying to do science or figure other things out, because the AI already has. There’s no real point in humans trying to create something to improve their lives, because they’ll readily get it from the AI if they simply ask.[2]

I’d like to point out that most humans have never been involved in pushing the boundaries of human knowledge. The average person’s quest to improve their own life usually centers around trying to get for themselves things that others already have. And artificial challenges are wildly popular: there are far more gamers in the world than scientists. I can’t help but roll my eyes at the idea of us collectively declining to create paradise out of a fear that we’d get bored.

The book says something I found really surprising in its discussion of whether jobs lost to AI will be replaced by “new technology-enabled professions that we haven’t even thought of yet”[3]. That’s what happened with “the computer revolution”[4], right? No:

…the vast majority of today’s occupations are ones that already existed a century ago, and when we sort them by the number of jobs they provide, we have to go all the way down to twenty-first place in the list until we encounter a new occupation: software developers, who make up less than 1% of the U.S. job market….[5]

The main trend on the job market isn’t that we’re moving into entirely new professions. Rather, we’re crowding into those pieces of terrain … that haven’t yet been submerged by the rising tide of technology![6]

[1] Max Tegmark, Life 3.0: being human in the age of artificial intelligence, A Borzoi book (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017), 231–35.

[2] Ibid., 246–47.

[3] Ibid., 180.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., 180–81.

(crosspost)