Life Actually
Book Review: Max Tegmark, "Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence", Penguin Books, 2018. A great way to follow up on Yuval Noah Harari's Homo Deus is to look at a different perspective on our future as human beings. Whereas Homo Deus pessimistically forecasts the irrelevance of humankind after the proliferation of superintelligent algorithms, the book Life 3.0 by MIT cosmologist Max Tegmark explores a range of possible futures, from utopias to dystopias and the ground in between. These "AI aftermath scenarios" are also summarized on the book's companion website from the Future of Life Institute (where Tegmark is one of the founders). But the book is about much more than that -- it also attempts to address questions about the nature of intelligence, consciousness, goals, and the end of the universe. And while Life 3.0 may be speculative at times, the author is at least honest about it, to the point of including a table with the