Life 3.0
2017
- moral and ethical aspects
- technological forecasting
- social aspects
- philosophy
- artificial intelligence
- automation
- nyt:business-books=2017-09-10
- technology, social aspects
- human-computer interaction
- information society
The story
"How will artificial intelligence affect crime, war, justice, jobs, society and our very sense of being human? The rise of AI has the potential to transform our future more than any other technology--and there's nobody better qualified or situated to explore that future than Max Tegmark, an MIT professor who's helped mainstream research on how to keep AI beneficial. How can we grow our prosperity through automation without leaving people lacking income or purpose? What career advice should we give today's kids? How can we make future AI systems more robust, so that they do what we want without crashing, malfunctioning or getting hacked? Should we fear an arms race in lethal autonomous weapons? Will machines eventually outsmart us at all tasks, replacing humans on the job market and perhaps altogether? Will AI help life flourish like never before or give us more power than we can handle? What sort of future do you want? This book empowers you to join what may be the most important conversation of our time. It doesn't shy away from the full range of viewpoints or from the most controversial issues--from superintelligence to meaning, consciousness and the ultimate physical limits on life in the cosmos."--Jacket.
What it’s like
Brisk, clear-eyed prose with a lucid, unhurried voice, the feel of a late-evening lecture given by someone genuinely delighted by hard questions. Tegmark writes in short chapters that open with concrete scenarios (a robot tutor, a flash crash, a cosmic timeline) and then widen into speculation, so the reading rhythm alternates between grounded anecdote and sweeping, almost vertiginous zoom-outs toward the far future of the universe. Imagery is mostly conceptual rather than sensory: thought experiments, thinking-machine metaphors, the occasional diagram sketched in words, with a faint pulse of wonder and unease running underneath. The register is hopeful but deliberately unresolved, more an open invitation than a verdict. It suits a slow weekend morning with coffee, a long train ride with time to pause and argue back to the page, or a reading group that wants a shared starting point. Intensity is low: no violence or gore, no sexual content, and fear appears only as abstract existential dread about catastrophic outcomes. For readers who enjoy big questions about minds, machines, meaning and the long future, who want to be provoked rather than frightened, and who are happy to sit with ideas that stay open-ended.
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