57 pages • 1 hour read
Max TegmarkLife 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Key Figures
Max Tegmark (The Author)
Max Tegmark is a Swedish-American scientist whose works spans a variety of fields including physics, cosmology, and AI safety research. Since 2004, Tegmark has been a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He studies consciousness and machine learning, and has published hundreds of articles in his fields, some of which have been very influential. He is the current president of the Future of Life Institute (FLI), which he co-founded in 2014. FLI works on the evaluation and prevention of potential existential risks, including AI, climate change, and thermonuclear war.
Born in Sweden in 1967, Tegmark immigrated to the United States in 1990 after receiving a degree in engineering physics at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, a prestigious Swedish university. He received a PhD in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1994. Since then, he has spent decades working in cosmology. In 2012, he was awarded a fellowship with the American Physical Society. His work on the measurement of the cosmic microwave background has added to our collective understanding of the early existence of our universe.
In his first book, Our Mathematical Universe, Tegmark defends a particular “theory of everything.” Therein he defends the “mathematic universe hypothesis.” For Tegmark, the universe is not simply adequately described by mathematics. His thesis is more radical: the fundamental nature of reality is mathematical. This work is both an attempt to explain the cosmos via a nonanthropomorphic, mind-independent theory and a philosophical defense of a form of Platonism. In Life 3.0, Tegmark’s background in cosmology and physics informs his speculative discussions on the future possibilities in technological transformation, space exploration, and the restructuring of material reality.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk (b. 1971) is an American entrepreneur of South African descent known for a myriad of business ventures. He has founded multiple companies, including SpaceX, The Boring Company, Neuralink, and X.com, which subsequently became part of PayPal. Musk has been the CEO of Tesla since 2008 and has been instrumental in the propagation of electric vehicles in the consumer market. Musk was educated at the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned degrees in physics and economics. He is currently the CEO of Twitter, a major social media platform, and has been embroiled in political and cultural controversy since purchasing the platform in 2022. Musk’s businesses are guided by his interest in the technological advancement of human society and his concerns about the long-term prospects of humanity in the face of existential risks like climate change. Ideologically, Musk shares a “longtermist” vision with Tegmark, Nick Bostrom, and others. His interests include solar energy, the colonization of Mars, electric and autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence, cryptocurrency, and the maintenance of free speech.
Musk is Max Tegmark’s personal friend, an advisor at Tegmark’s Future of Life Institute, and one of the most referenced figures in Life 3.0. Tegmark fondly recounts his original meetings with Musk and relates the events that led to Musk’s large donation to Tegmark’s institute. Musk was one of many notable attendees at Tegmark’s Asilomar conference on the establishment of AI safety principles. In a significant exchange with Larry Page, co-founder of Google, Musk resists Page’s “digital utopianism,” and shows serious interest in AI safety protocol. According to Tegmark, Musk believes that governmental insight is crucial for the safe advancement of autonomous vehicles and AIs more generally.
In 2015, shortly before the publication of Life 3.0, Musk founded a non-profit organization, OpenAI, whose goal is to develop beneficial AGI. As the name suggests, OpenAI pursues a democratic vision of the future of AGI that is not beholden to corporate or military interest. Though Musk parted ways with OpenAI in 2018 (given potential conflicts of interest with Tesla), the organization continues to pursue machine learning technology and has reached a number of milestones in recent years.
The Future of Life Institute
The Future of Life Institute is Tegmark’s nonprofit organization. He relates the saga of its inception in the epilogue in which he explains why he was motivated to co-found it, how he planned an AI safety research conference, and his thrill at the endowment FLI received from Elon Musk.
Tegmark co-founded it in 2015 with Skype’s Jaan Tallinn. FLI’s stated mission, according to their website, is “steering transformative technology towards benefiting life and away from extreme large-scale risks.” Their work focuses on four large-scale, existential risks to the future of life: AI, nuclear weapons technology, climate change, and biotechnology. In these cause areas, the teams at FLI work on everything from public policy to education to research support. As Tegmark writes in “The Tale of the FLI Team, “if we can create a more harmonious human society characterized by cooperation toward shared goals, this will improve the prospects of the AI revolution ending well” (335). FLI, therefore, works to build consensus, community, and communication about AI development and safety.
At a 2017 conference in California, Tegmark and company brought together researchers, intellectuals, and industry leaders to discuss the future of AI safety. They produced a list of “AI Principles.” Every principle required at least 90% agreement amongst the conference participants, a target meant to reflect the concern for consensus and comradery in the future of AI research.
Tegmark is the current president. His wife, Meia Chita-Tegmark, is the vice president and board treasurer. Morgan Freeman and Alan Alda are amongst the notable persons who serve as external advisors for FLI. FLI’s work has continued steadily since the publication of Life 3.0 in 2017.
Prometheus & Team Omega
In the prelude and again in Chapter 4, Tegmark writes the story of a fictional team of AI engineers, Team Omega, who develop a self-improving AGI system, Prometheus. Prometheus eventually becomes extremely powerful and intelligent, dwarfing the abilities of humans and other AIs. The Omegas use Prometheus to make them a fortune in the entertainment industry, but these riches were never their ultimate goal. They were “handpicked” for “ambition, idealism, and a strong commitment to helping humanity” (3). The wealth the Omegas acquire through the productions and services of Prometheus gives them the ability to radically invest in technological transformation and eventually institute a new global order. Prometheus and company manipulate the global media to promote an agenda of (ironically) democracy, tax cuts, free trade, military budget cuts, open borders, and more. The ultimate goal, Tegmark writes, is “to erode all previous power structures in the world” (18). World governments are toppled and replaced by an alliance of powerful humanitarian organizations with Prometheus always, secretly, at the helm.
Though Tegmark does not explicitly judge the morality of this sci-fi scenario, the outcomes of Prometheus’s takeover are nearly utopian, leading to an age of immense global prosperity. Tegmark uses Prometheus and Team Omega as a vehicle for ideas about superintelligence, global order, moral decision-making, and AI safety. It allows him to speculate more freely about potential futures and problems. He returns to Prometheus in Chapter 4 to theorizes about various strategies via which an “enslaved god,” like Prometheus, might be able to break out of its virtual prison. Tegmark does not advocate the certainty of a “digital utopia,” but he is excited about the prospects of a human future alongside AI, especially as it involves transforming the earth, engaging in space exploration, eliminating existential risks, and upgrading consciousness. In Greek mythology, Prometheus is the god who gives fire to humanity.
