Since the client for whom I was working has put my project on hold until further notice (the bloody Yanks), I am once again unemployed and will have time hanging heavy on my hands (at least until January, if not later). I have decided to pursue the goal of actually spending my time in concerted pursuit of constructive and educational goals with an eye to increasing my employ-ability, rather than fritter it away like I usually do. Maybe this time around, I'll get it right and land a fulfilling job doing what I actually want to do to earn my living ...

For starters, I am reading my way through Max Tegmark's book of the same name as this post's title. Here are my thoughts.

"Technology is giving life the potential to flourish like never before — or to self-destruct."
 — Future of Life Institute (FLI)

Chapter 01: Welcome to the Most Important Conversation of Our Time

The meaning of life is to exist and reproduce in order to continue existing. The meaning of sentient life is to be self-aware and improve. Surely, we are, therefore, given the great responsibility of conducting ourselves and living our lives in such a manner as to move towards fulfilling that, rather than away from (or in conflict with) that objective.

It would certainly be wonderful and greatly beneficial to us if we could design, build and refine technology that helps us achieve that. However, based on my own experience of human nature, motivations and failings, as well as our limitations as developers, designers and innovators (especially mine), I remain dubious that we will. I am also highly doubtful that AI will be the one-size-fits-all solution to many existing problems, since we know so little about it (myself especially) and how it works. I am also concerned that we will be able to adequately keep it contained/isolated instead of propagating like a virus, or deal with the negative consequences/impacts *when* (not if) we do not. (I don't think we'd intentionally create Skynet and terminators, but I wouldn't be surprised if it happens. From a certain viewpoint, it might not even be a bad thing as such, given our species' current impact on life on this planet.)'

I am hoping that, by learning more about AI, particularly by reading Tegmark's book, I will have my concerns and fears either confirmed as valid, or dispelled as nothing more than fear of the unknown. At this point, I have not yet made up my mind, but I am leaning away from embracing AI, out of caution.

Defining Life

The definition of what constitutes "life" is somewhat contentious and open to debate. Some definitions of life restrict it to consisting of organic cells. That isn't going to be helpful to understanding what follows, so Tegmark prefers a broader definition:

"Since we don't want to limit our thinking about the future of life to the species we've encountered so far, let's instead define life very broadly, simply as a process that can retain its complexity and replicate. What's replicated isn't matter (made of atoms) but information (made of bits) specifying how the atoms are arranged. When a bacterium makes a copy of its DNA, no new atoms are created (because they cannot be), but a new set of atoms are arranged in the same pattern as the original, thereby copying the information. In other words, we can think of life as a self-replicating information-processing system whose information (software) determines both its behavior and the blueprints for its hardware."

I'll skip the "History of the Cosmos and Life" lesson, because you've probably read it numerous times before (and can find it elsewhere if you haven't). However, I will state this, briefly, to provide some context: Life started out as incredibly simple, single-celled organisms that gradually got more complex over the billions of years it took to get to where we are now.

"It's still an open question how, when and where life first appeared in our Universe, but there is strong evidence that here on Earth life first appeared about 4 billion years ago. Before long, our planet was teeming with a diverse panoply of life forms. The most successful ones, which soon out-competed the rest, were able to react to their environment in some way. Specifically, they were what computer scientists call “intelligent agents”: entities that collect information about their environment from sensors and then process this information to decide how to act back on their environment. This can include highly complex information processing, such as when you use information from your eyes and ears to decide what to say in a conversation. But it can also involve hardware and software that's quite simple.

"For example, many bacteria have a sensor measuring the sugar concentration in the liquid around them and can swim using propeller-shaped structures called flagella."

Side Note: It is not the responsibility/mandate/remit of the Theory of Evolution to explain how life started (which biologists and other scientists don't know for definite, as far as I know), only to explain how it evolved once it did. That, however, is a topic for another post, if I ever feel so inclined to write it. Let's not venture off at a tangent.

Tegmark puts life into three main categories:

1.0 Biological Evolution: Life in this category doesn't do much more than replicate and respond to its environment. It takes many generations for significant change to emerge through DNA.

2.0 Social Evolution: Such life as fits this category not only replicates, but it also learns (behaviours and skills), improves and has complex interactions with other forms of life. While it might build and refine tools, it cannot do that to itself (except in very limited ways that are often not as good as the original parts).

3.0: Technological Evolution: Life in this category can completely refine not just its software, but it's hardware (physical form) as well. Change (particularly physical) happens rapidly, rather than over many generations. At the time of writing, such life does not yet exist on Earth, but we're heading in that direction.

If body augmentation becomes an achievable and affordable thing in my lifetime, I'd certainly like to replace my knees and spine (if not other parts of my anatomy which are yet to give me grief).

Sentient life learns behaviours and skills, but simple life doesn't. Bacteria don't learn to swim or how to find food; it's hard-coded into their DNA. You, on the other hand, learned to swim (or perhaps not), how to read and write, do Maths, shop and cook (to some degree). While they no doubt underwent some sort of learning process, it didn't happen during the lifetime of a single bacterium. Instead, it occurred through the trial and error process that is encompassed by evolution. In Life 1.0, hardware and software improve haphazardly through evolution; they are not intelligently designed, even if they appear to be. In Life 2.0, the hardware is evolved, but the software (knowledge, patterns and skills) is largely designed/driven by goals and learning. (This consists of every ability you've developed and refined since birth. While much of this is dictated in childhood, every choice that you make about what you learn and when is a design/upgrade decision. By reading a book about AI — or any topic, for that matter — and learning more about it, you're upgrading your brain.)

The ability to learn is what gives Life 2.0 (sentient life) a massive advantage over Life 1.0 (in terms of both intelligence and flexibility). We adapt more quickly. (It takes generations of bacteria to evolve drug resistance, but someone can discover a penicillin allergy and change their behaviour within a couple of months.) Neurons are at least 100 times more effective at information storage and retrieval than DNA (about 100 TB as opposed to 1 GB). That is why you have to learn so much in order to survive; there's no way that everything you need to know can be placed in your head before you're born; DNA just doesn't have that storage capacity.

"... even though the information in our human DNA hasn't evolved dramatically over the past fifty thousand years, the information collectively stored in our brains, books and computers has exploded. By installing a software module enabling us to communicate through sophisticated spoken language(s), we ensured that the most useful information stored in one person’s brain could get copied to other brains, potentially surviving even after the original brain died. By installing a software module enabling us to read and write, we became able to store and share vastly more information than people could memorize. By developing brain software capable of producing technology (i.e., by studying science and engineering), we enabled much of the world's information to be accessed by many of the world's humans with just a few clicks (or, before that, a trip to the nearest library). This flexibility has enabled Life 2.0 to dominate Earth. Freed from its genetic shackles, humanity's combined knowledge has kept growing at an accelerating pace as each breakthrough enabled the next: language, writing, the printing press, modern science, computers, the Internet, etc. This ever-faster cultural evolution of our shared software has emerged as the dominant force shaping our human future, rendering our glacially slow biological evolution almost irrelevant.

"Yet despite the most powerful technologies we have today, all life forms of which we know remain fundamentally limited by their biological hardware. None can live for a million years, memorize all of Wikipedia, understand all known science or enjoy spaceflight without a spacecraft. None can transform our largely lifeless cosmos into a diverse biosphere that will flourish for billions or trillions of years, enabling our Universe to finally fulfill its potential and wake up fully.

"All this requires life to undergo a final upgrade, to Life 3.0, which can design not only its software but also its hardware. In other words, Life 3.0 is the master of its own destiny, finally fully free from its evolutionary shackles."

My fear is that it will both replace us and make us irrelevant, rob us of our purpose, our raison d'être. One certainty in evolution is extinction. Perhaps that of Homo Sapiens is overdue. C'est la vie and it's a real pig (although, when you're a mottled pink reptile that's a member of a species that will some day evolve into a real pig, it probably doesn't seem like it's worth the effort).

To be continued ...

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