Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

One of the major goals of Tegmark’s book is to explore the possible futures that humanity can share with AI, cyborgs, and digital lifeforms. Rather than limit his investigations to a specific theory, Tegmark uses Life 3.0 to explore a number of possibilities in areas including technological advancements, space exploration, and political systems. Some of the possibilities utopian, others dystopian, but none is as the logical outcome of our current trajectory. It is important to allay humanity’s fears about the future of AI since so many cultural messages emphasize the uncertainty of the future as an opportunity for things to go wrong. Tegmark uses imagination and scientific inquiry to try to steer our beliefs about the future and the future itself in the right direction.

In Chapter 5, “Aftermath: The Next 10,000 Years,” Tegmark includes (in Table 5.1) a number of long-term possible futures, which he calls “AI Aftermath Scenarios” (162). For many of these he provides detailed speculative fictions that bring to life the advantages and disadvantages of the respective situations. Never does Tegmark explicitly state which scenario he prefers or why, but rather he provides a sense of what the possibilities are and how they may be developed or avoided.