Profound. It’s the only word I can come up with to describe this book. It should be required reading for everyone on the planet.
If you’re a curious reader, it is an excellent primer on where the scientists are now. Tegmark covers the spectrum of physics, cosmology, and artificial intelligence with the clarity and enthusiasm I haven’t witnessed since we were all glued to our televisions in the 1980s watching Carl Sagan unwrap the mysteries of the cosmos. Max Tegmark, a professor at MIT, is brilliant, creative, and rational, giving him that rare ability to explain the complex and mind-boggling to the rest of us.
The primary purpose of the book, in Tegmark’s words, is to invite all of us to participate in setting goals for the development of artificial intelligence and, indeed, the future of scientific inquiry. It is rare that someone of Tegmark’s standing in the scientific community invites us into the tent and as I read the book I felt an overwhelming sense of obligation to oblige the request. This book, I think, is that important.
Philosopher Karl Popper popularized the adage, “If it’s not falsifiable, it’s not scientific.” It is a perspective widely accepted in the scientific community and in popular culture and it has driven a seemingly irreconcilable intellectual wedge between science and philosophy. It is a wedge that has damaged, and will ultimately constrain, both pursuits.
Tegmark makes an impassioned and well argued rejection of the scientific dismissal of consciousness. It is, he argues, the elephant in the room of AI. It must be addressed and understood. And I think he’s right. (He also seems optimistic that science will one day figure it out. Of that I am not so confidant, but I am certainly open to trying.)
As Tegmark clearly notes, there is no consensus in the AI community as to when, if ever, an intelligent machine capable of both learning and improving it’s own physical structure and performance, his definition of Life 3.0, will be created. Once it comes into existence, however, he makes a very convincing case that it will be too late to start thinking about aligning the machine’s goals with our own. The horse, by definition, will be out of the barn. And there is no reason to believe the outcome will be a good one if we don’t plan for it.
If you enjoy incredible facts, Tegmark provides plenty of them. I know he certainly helped me to gain a better appreciation for the sheer magnitude of the universe and the mathematical splendor of time and space.
I started this book with some skepticism. Because language itself is a human convention that we invented, I am naturally skeptical of any written or oral explanation of anything that claims to be final and complete. I think of knowledge in the way that post-Impressionist painter, George Seurat, thought of art. He established the Pointillist school, wherein the artist uses dots of pigment instead of brush strokes to create his or her artistic rendering of reality. When complete the image is obvious. Randomly remove half or more of the dots of pigment, however, and you’re forced to speculate.
And that’s precisely where we are, I believe, in a lot of areas of science and general human understanding. It’s folly for anyone to proclaim that we have fully uncovered all of the laws of reality much less filled in the blanks. We have made progress in our understanding but our journey is far from over.
I won’t suggest that Tegmark would agree with that, at least in degree. He is a scientist, to be sure. I do feel, however, that he is sincerely receptive to dialogue—even insistent on it—and that makes him the voice we need to move forward in our pursuit of understanding and the wonders, like AI, that knowledge will put at our doorstep.
If not here, the future is coming. After reading this book it’s a lot closer than I realized. The conversation Tegmark requests is both timely and necessary.
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In short, computation is a pattern in the spacetime arrangement of particles, and it’s not the particles but the pattern that really matters! Matter doesn’t matter.Highlighted by 1,199 Kindle readers- Does it require interacting with people and using social intelligence? Does it involve creativity and coming up with clever solutions? Does it require working in an unpredictable environment?Highlighted by 1,020 Kindle readers
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Reviews with images
Offensively poor printing quality
This bad review is not because of the content but because of the printing quality. I can barely flick through the pages. Look at the photo attached. What the hell? Is this thing even authentic? Very disappointing.Edit: I was told that the finishing is done on purpose (deckled edge). Apparently is something that some people would pay a higher price for. However, I am not happy with this printing finishing and I would be better of flipping the pages smoothly. There should be a mention of this somewhere in the description.
Top reviews from other countries
corine
Nat geweest dus helemaal gegolfd
Reviewed in the Netherlands on November 11, 2022JAYANTI PRASAD
Honest, deep and insightful account
Reviewed in India on November 8, 2022
JAYANTI PRASAD
Reviewed in India on November 8, 2022
I know Tegmark since I started doing my Ph.D. in cosmology and some of the early papers I read were written by Tegmark. I found him warm and remarkable, in the way his approach was lively and engaging and not cold and authoritarian as mostly is the case if academics. His curiosity looked genuine and his enthusiasm childlike. In early 2000s he was growing and has more enthusiasm and may be less depth. His scientific American article “Parallel Universe” was blockbuster. His account of the historical development of quantum mechanics remarkable and obviously from the very beginning he had privilege of being in company of John Wheeler, Nick Bostrom and Frank Wilczek. When I got a chance to meet Tegmark in 2006 in ICTP, Italy, where he as giving a course and I was one of the attendees, I had a chance to spend some time with him and I had a long list of questions which I was able to ask him and he answered most of them. Just to mention that at that time there was not much hype about AI and occasional philosophers with roots in physics and astrophysics were more interested in origin of the universe, definition of life, free will, space-time singularities and interpretation of quantum mechanics. Now fast forward 15 years and AI has overshadowed other profound questions and Tegmark switched the great and find himself engaging with AI questions. Some of the plus points of the books are as follows:
1. It looks like a single coherent story, rather a bunch of disconnected story.
2. The approach is quite honest, Tegmark mostly asks big questions and he never tries to give authentic answers of those, science there are none !
3. This is a book which is written to be read and not put on bookshelf. He brings minimum technical stuff as required and fill the rest with ideas from other experts and his personal accounts.
4. Whether AI will overtake humanity or not and for that what kind of safety protocols to be put in place that may be hard to converge on but Max is able to convince the need to solve the problem.
5. The books has important references and the readers can check for more details.
There are some negative points also of the book, or approach like the followings.
1. Most of the ideas presented in the book are not new and Max just presented them in a new format.
2. Money is important and it can be a great enabler or distractor and in most cases it is the second. So it is not clear how securing funding for AI safety can be considered an achievement.
The last part of the book mostly talks about how we can regulate the AI research to make it safe and there are many suggestions. But now problem is that we know this approach does not work. After WWII we created United Nations but we know it failed to stop the misery of millions of people by superpower. Ukraine war is an example – the entire world is left on the mercy of one single detector who can press the red button any time. AI empowered superpowers may be much more dangerous than nuclear powered.
Apart from AI safety, the book raises many other questions such as purpose and meaning of life, computation, complexity and consciousness. In short I will say anyone who is interested in deep questions must read this book.
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