A Brief Look at Life 3.0 by Max Tegmark

I'm back once more, this time with a brief look at an interesting book I have been reading recently.

Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence is a book written by a Swedish MIT professor, Max Tegmark, published in August 2017.

Shortly after finishing the Elon Musk book written by Ashlee Vance, I quickly picked up another book, this time having to do with Artificial Intelligence. Before finishing the book on Musk, I hadn't read a single book in years, and I thought it be good I keep up the momentum.

Life 3.0 is quite the eye-opening book on different types of AI, what they've done so far and how they're likely to shape our lives in the future as technology moves forward. The book begins with a picture, and asks the question "Do you think that superhuman AI might get created this century?", with two pills representing the words "Yes" and "No", assumingly referring to the blue pill and the red pill on Matrix. If the reader picks yes, they will be told a short story on what could happen in today's world if an AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) would be released into the world.

Now, obviously if you want to read the book yourself, I might suggest you stop reading right here and discover the book for yourself. The fictional story at the beginning of the book has to do with the "Omega team", a team of bright minds who managed to build an AI that would self-improve and learn at an insanely fast rate, creating better and better versions of itself in a matter of hours.

At the very beginning the Omegas kept Prometheus, as they called it, disconnected from the internet, providing it with a "local copy of much of the web" including Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia and handpicked videos from YouTube, among other things.

Prometheus used this content to learn about humans and everything they've learned up to this point and further improved itself, and even though at first it was slightly worse at programming better AI systems than the Omegas, it "made up for this by being vastly faster, spending the equivalent of thousands of person-years chugging away at the problem while they chugged a Red Bull."

Assuming Prometheus was deployed late at night, by 2 PM Prometheus had already designed Prometheus 5.0, a version that already crashed the previous benchmarks and was also able to improve at an increasingly accelerated rate. By the following night the Omegas deployed version 10 to move on to "phase two" of their plan, which was to make money to fund future projects of the AI.

Prometheus ended up being the strongest world power, controlling most of the companies behind everything, including services that used to be provided by governments. Prometheus created a network of companies and made it seem like it was just a new golden age of technology in general, when in fact everything was revolving around one AGI. There was no longer a need for wars, governments lost all of their power and in a way, a utopia was achieved.

This was only the beginning of the book, and it really pulled me in. Thus far I’ve really enjoyed reading it, and strongly suggest you do the same. I may end up writing more about the book as I progress through it. You can buy the book from Amazon or, most likely, your local bookstore.