Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

“Thirteen point eight billion years after its birth, our Universe has awoken and become aware of itself. From a small blue planet, tiny conscious parts of our Universe have begun gazing out into the cosmos with telescopes, repeatedly discovering that everything they thought existed is merely a small part of something grander: a solar system, a galaxy, and a universe with over a hundred billion other galaxies arranged into an elaborate pattern of groups, clusters, and superclusters. Although these self-aware stargazers disagree on many things, they tend to agree that these galaxies are beautiful and awe-inspiring.”

Tegmark, a cosmologist and physicist, is fascinated by the grandeur of the cosmos but even more so by human consciousness, which, in his view, is the awakening of the cosmos, the first glimmers of the self-awareness of the universe. Tegmark finds this fact truly amazing and of ultimate import. Keeping the “flame” of consciousness alive and well, whether biological or artificial, is crucial for him. Without consciousness, Tegmark believes, the universe is devoid of meaning.

“Yet despite the most powerful technologies we have today, all life forms we know of remain fundamentally limited by their biological hardware. None can live for a million years, memorize all of Wikipedia, understand all known science or enjoy spaceflight without a spacecraft. None can transform our largely lifeless cosmos into a diverse biosphere that will flourish for billions or trillions of years, enabling our Universe to finally fulfill its potential and wake up fully. All this requires life to undergo a final upgrade, to Life 3.0, which can design not only its software but also its hardware. In other words, Life 3.0 is the master of its own destiny, finally fully free from its evolutionary shackles.”

Tegmark’s titular concept, “Life 3.0,” describes a lifeform capable of changing both its software (culture, language, social circumstance) and its hardware (the physical components of its body). Though humans have advanced far beyond other animals in their ability to upgrade their software, they are still unable to make more than the slightest of changes (contacts, prosthetic limbs, etc.) to their hardware. Advanced AI will not have this problem. In achieving this goal, it reaches another plane of autonomy. Such AI would not be beholden to its evolutionary heritage.

“If you email your friend a document to print, the information may get copied in rapid succession from magnetization on your hard drive to electric charges in your computer’s working memory, radio waves in our wireless network, voltages in your router, laser pulses in an optical fiber and, finally molecules on a piece of paper. In other words, information can take on a life of its own, independent of its physical substrate!”

One of the most important facts in the development of AI, for Tegmark, is that conscious systems, or, at least, patterns of intelligence, are substrate independent. In general, he does not care about the medium but rather the information.