Life 3.0 by Max Tegmark is part of a pairing with “Homo Deus” to force some noodling on some threads on the evolution of man.
One line summary: great book for placing the advent of Artificial Intelligence into the context of human evolution and for putting some visible milestones to look for before we start fearing the rise of the machines. With Homo Deus and this TED Talk on AI (LINK).
The book also rides a constantly restated caveat of “nobody knows what is going to happen”.
THE CONTEXT: man is hardware (the body) and software (the brain).
Life 1.0 was most of existence when a human got the standard model, and made the best of it.
Life 2.0 kicked off with the introduction of “upgrades” to the hardware, form artificial corneas and hearts to pending artificial kidneys to someday arrivals of enhanced arms, legs and everything else to support longevity or specialty purposes.
Life 3.0 is going to be “upgrades” to the brain. From simple chemo-enhancements that might impact sleep cycles or facilitate learning/retention to eventual Neuromancer-style jacking in and, for example, learning fluent French in 30 seconds.
AI in Perspective: there are no early signs of our machine overlords
The work draws an important demarcation between “task” AI and general AI (you can use the term AGI to sound like an insider — Artificial General Intelligence). All of the cool stuff we read about from Watson winning a game of Go to self-driving cars flows from extremely focused implementation of AI learning. None of these intelligences can be applied to much anything else, i.e., a self-driving car AI will lose tic-tac-toe to a five year old and has no internal path to learning the game without human intervention. The movie AGIs and the implications of sentience are on nobodies radar in the half-predictable future.
Beyond the long-and-winding paths that boil down into these two sections, there are mostly questions about “where could this go?” Similar to Homo Deus, it’s easy to draw a line out to where huge swaths of society have their jobs displaced and role in humanity redefined.
If you’ve only got 10 minutes, take these two blocks and read the first chapter. It is a mind-warping implications party surrounding the group that creates the first AGI and its application towards everything from stock markets to movie production. It’s worth the purchase of the book to read this chapter and sit down with a couple of beers and think of the ten businesses you might build or twenty bets you might make.