He sums it up best in Chapter 5, Intelligence Explosion: But he’s not afraid to present bold scenarios to awaken our awareness. He knows that the experts don’t really know, and neither does he. Tegmark is not so much warning against its development-it’s probably impossible to stop-as he is advising about its challenges, opportunities and dangers. And yet, he asserts, all of the scenarios he presents have actual expert believers in their possibility. Many are not pretty-from a corporation using advanced AI to control global markets and ultimately governments, to a runaway AI that discards human intervention to rule the world itself. He provides the reader with a wide range of scenarios. The problem is, there is no consensus even among the experts. Even as Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk are shouting loudly about the potential dangers of artificial intelligence, and many actual AI researchers are countering that the dangers are overblown and distorted, Tegmark is doing something to bridge hype and reality. Intelligence is happening right in front of us, and we have a multiplicity of issues to deal with, while we still can control it. And his taxonomy of Life 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 is not a mere conjecture that can’t yet- or might never-be tested. So, what, if anything, makes Life 3.0, Being Human in The Age of Artificial Intelligence different? Unlike a universe of multiverses, or of pure mathematics, it deals with issues that are right in front of our faces. In his previous book, Our Mathematical Universe, My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality, he offers the astounding conjecture that the whole of reality may be nothing more than pure mathematics.

The MIT cosmologist and physics professor is perhaps best known for his taxonomy of a four level multiverse-some levels of which are predicted by certain theories, but none of which have been proven to exist. Max Tegmark is not one to shy away from bold scientific pronouncements. LIFE 3.0: BEING HUMAN IN THE AGE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Max Tegmark ©2017, Borzoi Book published by Alfred A. Reprinted with permission of the publisher, my review of Max Tegmark’s new book, from the November/December issue of Age of Robots. “The short answer is obviously that we have no idea what will happen if humanity succeeds in building human-level AGI.”–Max Tegmark, in Life 3.0

Life 3.0 book