About 4 billion years ago, life appeared on Earth. It was simple and quite boring, just bacteria that followed a programmed series of events to reproduce. Life, at this stage, evolved rather than designed. Max Tegmark, a physicist and cosmologist at MIT, calls that Life 1.0. Then humans appeared. We could learn things and design our own software instead of being stuck with the software evolution gave us. This enable us to develop culture and dominate Earth. Tegmark calls this period, Life 2.0. It is where we live right now. But it seems that gradually we are heading towards Life 3.0, where life, if you think of it as a self-replicating information-processing system, will be able to design not only its software but also its hardware. Life 3.0 may arrive during the coming century, perhaps even during our lifetime, spawned by the recent progress in AI. What will happen, and what will this mean for us? That’s the topic of Max Tegmark’s book, Life 3.0: Being Human In The Age Of Artificial Intelligence.

So far the intelligence exhibited by machines was put there by human programmers.Computer systems like Deep Blue, beat Kasparov at chess because it could remember better and think faster. But recently we have moved in an era where in computer systems there is not intelligence at all put in by humans.

Deep Learning, a technique for implementing machine learning, is based in neural-net architectures and it is inspired by our understanding of the biology of our brains – more specifically the interconnections between the neurons. But, unlike the biological brain where any neuron can connect to any other neuron, these artificial neural networks have organised into layers of nodes which are connected to several nodes to layer behind and to the layer above it. By this way, they are able to receive and send data,be trained and process information. Progress in machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been impressive the last few years.

Let’s see how far can AI can go. As it happens in every revolution, there’s a dystopian and a utopian vision of the future. The techno-skeptics think we don’t have to worry too much about AI because it’s not going to happen, or it won’t happen for hundreds of years. Some others think that we don’t have to worry because the outcome would be just awesome. Max Tegmark calls them digital Utopians. Then there are people who think that we’re steadily meandering toward an AI apocalypse where humans are obliterated by a super-intelligent entity. Finally, there are the people, who position themselves somewhere in the middle. This is the beneficial AI movement, people who think that it could be awesome and beneficial for society or it could be dangerous, and what we have to do right now is to steer things in AI in a good direction.

In Life 3.0, Max Tegmark explores our collective journey into the future of Artificial Intelligence. He says that it is not enough to make our technology powerful but we also have to focus on figuring out how to control it and where we want to go with it. In order to explore these questions, Max Tegmark, his wife Meia Chita-Tegmark, Jann Tallinn and others, founded The Future of Life Institute. Their goal, is to do what they can to help make sure that technology would be beneficial for humanity.

As technology is gradually getting more powerful, there are a lot of things that can go wrong, says Max Tegmark. It is therefore crucial, “that we learn to make AI more robust, doing what we want it to do.” We need, as humanity, to try to develop the wisdom and steer thing in the right direction.

This raises a lot more questions. It is clear to me that in order to make social progress towards a more enlightened world, scientific knowledge must be combined with an instinctive insight of wisdom. But, how do we develop that wisdom? Is wisdom a kind of knowledge to be developed?

Life 3.0 is an accessible and engaging book. It covers a wide variety of scenarios concerning the impact of AI on our lives and the promises and perils of the AI revolution. There are no answers in the book, but a lot of possibilities that makes you think about the future and life overall.

What’s my thoughts on this? I am a realistic optimist. I believe that the future will be much more different from what we expect. I try to remain positive and I am hoping for the best. To quote Stephen King, “There’s no harm in hoping for the best as long as you’re prepared for the worst.”

Definitely enjoyed Max Tegmark's Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. This book has something for everyone or anyone interested in the future with AI. There were many references to other books and many scenarios about our future with AI.
The common theme I personally noticed in most scenarios (others may feel differently) is the desire that humans hope to look for a more powerful source or superintelligence to assist in eliminating human problems we all face today such as sickness, crime, poverty, war, unemployment, also space travel. Perhaps it makes more sense to designate an impartial AI to aid in the job humans have a hard time achieving, most importantly can this be done responsibly? Is it possible to inhabit the galaxy with this technology? If so when? Could the future be better or worse with AI? How long will it take to get there? Sooner than we can imagine or never?
Thank you to Knopf DoubleDay Publishing Group and Netgalley for a free copy of this book for review.

The future of life and how to get there
In Life 3.0 MIT professor Max Tegmark explores the future of Artificial Intelligence and how it will affect all aspects of Life. The scope is not limited to whether we will have robotic assistants (or masters) in the next 100 years; one of the chapters is entitled Aftermath: The Next 10,000 Years and is followed by one that talks about The Next Billion Years and Beyond. Obviously we cannot predict what science or society will be like in the far future; this is not a how-to manual. So how would one characterize the book? The Amazon product page rated it for readers interested in Business and Economics, Computers, and Medical topics, but I would put it more in the Philosophy category, albeit a philosophy shaped by Tegmark’s education as a physicist.
Tegmark begins, as any good scientist would, by defining his terms, terms like life, intelligence, and consciousness that need to be broadened if they are to include Artificial General Intelligence. He outlines the controversies about when strong artificial intelligence might come about and whether it will be good for humanity and devotes much of the book to the challenges and threats of artificial intelligence and what to do to make it beneficial.
Most people would probably agree that having goals is a key element of intelligence. In the chapter on goals, Tegmark raises issues like should we give AI goals, and how do we assure that the goals we want are retained as the AI gets smarter, maybe smarter than we are? Where did goals come from anyway? “How did goal-oriented behavior emerge from the physics of our early Universe, which consisted merely of a bunch of particles bouncing around?” Consciousness is another aspect we usually associate with intelligence. Tegmark acknowledges the common categorization of consciousness as the “hard problem” but wades in anyway. He defines consciousness as “subjective experience” and wonders “Does it feel like anything at all to be a self-driving car?”
Lest you begin to think of Tegmark as an ivory tower academic who is disassociated from the real world, let me assure you that Tegmark matches his energetic thinking with energetic action. He is one of the founders of the Future of Life Institute, a group focused on improving the future of life through “technological stewardship”. The group has garnered multi-million-dollar support from sponsors like Elon Musk for research into topics like AI safety to avoid both hacking and AI “escape” . They have published a list of Artificial Intelligence Principles that has been signed by over a thousand AI researchers and thinkers like Elon Musk, Steven Hawking, David Chalmers, Sam Harris, Donald Knuth, and Ray Kurzweil.
Tegmark’s writing is clear and even entertaining; he opens the book with a fun science fiction short story about a team that builds the first Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and refers to their experiences throughout the rest of the book. But this is not a book to read quickly. I found myself pausing often. I took side trips to bone up on interesting topics I was not too familiar with, like the Winograd Schema Challenge, a rival to the Turing Test to assess whether an AI can rival human intelligence. I also stopped to reflect on the questions Tegmark asked and his proposed answers. That is exactly what Tegmark wants the readers to do, and he even has a link to a part of his website where you can offer your opinions and exchange ideas with others. You probably will find that hard to resist!

Tegmark, a professor of physics at MIT, argues that the most important conversation of our time is about the future of AI and he quotes numerous experts in his text. Tegmark also makes good use of charts and visuals to explain his thinking, saying "the goal of the book is to help you join this conversation." There is quite a bit of background material to sift through, however, and his explanations were sometimes quite dry or even a bit condescending given the topic. A review in August 29th's Wall Street Journal notes that LIFE 3.0 is likely to be controversial, with the bulk devoted to "how things could go wrong." I agree that this is an extremely important issue, but it is a little unclear who Tegmark's target audience is for this disturbing forecast.

A book to read and reread, to discuss, to consider. The author invites his reader to develop an informed opinion about the role of AI in the future.

Well presented by an author who is not just concerned about the consciousness of artificial intelligence, but humanity's consciousness of how its world is changing.

Challenging, informative and hopeful, the book enables the reader to boldly go where he or she may never have gone before.

Note: I received this book as an Advanced Reading Copy on Netgalley.

This is the first book that I've read by Max Tegmark, and it really was a wonderful read. The book is engaging, and easy to read. I found that he had thoughtful ideas about artificial intelligence and the nature of how superintelligence can change the world. I loved his style and enjoyed how he explained how his mindset went from concerned to optimistic.

The topic itself is arguably one of the most important of our time, so I think it's very important to get right. This book is a great entry into the subject, and I heartily recommend it.