Life 3.0 summary

What makes us human? Our ability to think and learn? One might think so.

Researchers in AI, however, are generally opposed to such a notion. They claim that the capability for memory, computation, learning and intelligence has nothing to do with human flesh and blood, let alone carbon atoms.

Machines aren’t anything new to humans. We’ve been using them for manual tasks for millennia. If you define your self-worth by your cognitive skills, such as intelligence, language and creativity, these machines pose no threat. However, recent breakthroughs in AI might begin to worry you.

The author had his own “holy-shit” moment in 2014 when he witnessed an AI system playing an old computer game named Breakout. That’s the game where you hit a ball against a wall by maneuvering a paddle.

Until now, AI has been applied fairly narrowly in limited fields like language translation or strategy games.

In contrast, the holy grail of AI research is the production of AGI that would operate at a human level of intelligence.

Whether we like it or not, the race toward AGI is underway.

But what would we like the aftermath of attaining it to look like?

There’s no doubt that we humans are goal-oriented. Think about it: even something as small as successfully pouring coffee into a cup involves completing a goal.

But actually, nature operates the same way. Specifically, it has one ultimate purpose: destruction. Technically, this is known as maximizing entropy, which in a layperson’s terms means increasing messiness and disorder. When entropy is high, nature is “satisfied.”

The question of what consciousness is and how it relates to life is hardly new. AI researchers are faced with the same age-old issue. More specifically, they wonder how lifeless matter could become conscious.

Let’s come at it from a human perspective first. As a physicist like the author would put it, conscious human beings are just “food rearranged,” meaning that the atoms we ingest are simply rearranged to form our bodies.