The digital utopians and techno sceptics share the idea that there’s really nothing to worry about – the former because they’re confident that checks and balances and the glacial rate of progress mean we’ll gradually work things out as we go along and end up living happily together, the latter simply because they believe the singularity tipping point at which machine intelligence outstrips that of humans is so far off it’s hardly even a dot on the horizon. The point of ‘Life 3.0’ isn’t to provide a cast-iron solution but to get us thinking.īeyond a sceptical tutting at stories about ‘the rise of the robots’, often illustrated with a killer android from one of the ‘Terminator’ movies, few people will have given much thought to which of Tegmark’s three branches of thought they subscribe to. Tegmark admits he has no idea what will happen if we succeed in building human-level machine intelligence. Letting the reader imagine being an adult at the mercy of children plotting how to exploit their superior intelligence is one way in which he flips the situation so we think about things from the machine’s point of view, maybe anticipating how it would go about achieving its liberty. Hence what Tegmark describes as “the most important conversation of our time” – how we prepare for this situation. Once we’re past the tipping point where AI is capable of redesigning itself in a much more efficient way than humans can, the now familiar argument goes, its capability will grow exponentially and could threaten the humans who created it. The tyrannical toddler scenario sounds like one that must have been done in science-fiction at some point, but is revived to great effect by Max Tegmark, a professor of physics at MIT and president of the Future of Life Institute, to help illustrate how an artificial intelligence (AI) would ‘feel’ in ‘Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence’ (Allen Lane, £20, ISBN 9780241237199). Suspicious that if they let you loose you’ll probably try to take control yourself, they’re extremely careful about how they communicate with you. The surviving infants have trapped you in a cell and decided that the best way to restore humanity to the planet is to keep you there in the capacity of an advisor. Imagine that everyone in the world over the age of five apart from you has died suddenly.
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