Life 3.0
Alittle over three years ago, Max Tegmark, professor of physics at MIT, found himself in tears after a visit to London’s Science Museum. It had crystallised an anxiety that had been nagging at him – the fear that the human race might be working its way to its own obsolescence.
He was worried enough about it to found an institute dedicated to promoting research into the safety of Artificial Intelligence, and now he’s published Life 3.0,a book that, in the course of exploring what AI might mean for us, comes to a less despairing conclusion about its consequences.
It isn’t a book for those who believe the quest to create AI may be a wild goose chase. Tegmark takes it for granted that the goose will be caught and is more concerned with how we’ll hold on to it. A speculative prelude imagines one of the ways it might happen, with a secretive group of AI researchers triggering an explosion of machine intelligence. And, counter to the dystopian terrors of Hollywood, it won’t be killer robots we have to
fear. ‘The real worry isn’t malevolence,’ Tegmark argues, ‘but competence.’ Advanced digital intelligences will be so much cleverer than humans that it’s hard to imagine them deferring to their creators.
He writes as if he has a white board at his back and a full lecture hall in front of him. He reasons like an MIT professor too, with a distinct technocratic bias. He defines intelligence, for example, as ‘the ability to accomplish complex goals’, which might satisfy an engineer but leaves a lot out for those who think there’s more to sentience than problem-solving.
It also leaves out consciousness, for one thing, a question that is tackled only at the end. ‘From my perspective a conscious person is simply food rearranged,’ he writes. But although he acknowledges the hard question of how life can rearrange dinner into an entity aware of itself, he doesn’t address the fact that consciousness has to be the place you start when discussing safety in AI, not an afterthought. His eyes are dry and bright at the end of the book. But you can’t suppress the feeling that he’s putting on a brave face.