Omne ignotum pro magnifico

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 ...

Book Review: Benjamin Todd and the 80,000 Hours team, "80,000 Hours: Find a Fulfilling Career That Does Good", Centre for Effective Altruism, 2016. As an appropriate follow-up to my book review of Will MacAskill's Doing Good Better ( link ), I have recently read 80,000 Hours's career guide in book form. Their career guide is available for free online (on their website 80000hours.org), but I thought the PDF edition would be nice. And as I'm soon finishing my Master's degree, it was personally relevant. For the unfamiliar, 80,000 Hours is a nonprofit organization that is part of the effective altruism movement, and focuses on giving advice on how to choose and plan a career that is both fulfilling and has a maximally-positive social impact. Their name comes from the fact that the average person does about eighty thousand hours of work in their career over a lifetime. This is relevant because it puts into perspective the importance of making the right care...

Book Review: William MacAskill, "Doing Good Better: Effective Altruism and a Radical New Way to Make a Difference", 2016, Guardian Books & Faber. This is a book that introduces the core ideas behind the effective altruism movement. It is also, I think, a book that conveys the principles of good reasoning. Writing with clarity, Will MacAskill tells us how to select a charity to which to donate, how to pick a career or cause area to work in, and how to make the greatest difference as consumers. However, the principles underlying his advice -- the "five key questions of effective altruism" as MacAskill calls them -- could also be adapted to decision-making in general. Doing Good Better begins by discussing two different approaches to helping others: the first is exemplified by the PlayPump (a kind of water pump that doubles as a roundabout/playground for kids), which caught a lot of attention in the early 2000s and raised millions of dollars. People thought ...