Skip to main content

Life 3.0 - Max Tegmark ***

I have to confess that my first reaction to this book was not anything to do with the contents, but trying to work out if there was something really clever about the the way the book's title is printed on the spine in white on cream, so it's illegible - would it be, for example, a subtle test of human versus artificial intelligence (AI)? However, that was just a distraction.

 Max Tegmark is an interesting and provocative thinker in the physics arena, so I had high hopes for what he'd come up with exploring the future of AI and its relationship to human beings. It's worth explaining that the title of the book refers to three 'levels' of life where 1.0 is 'can survive and replicate' (e.g. bacteria), 2.0 is can design its own software (e.g. us - where 'software' refers to our concepts, ideas and extended abilities such as language) and 3.0 is can design its own hardware, enabling it to transform itself more directly and quickly than our creativity enables us to do.

 The book starts with a bit of fiction, which I'm usually nervous about, but it actually works very well, as it's presented more like a non-fiction description of a business development rather than attempting all the quirks of fiction. In it we have a semi-plausible description of how a company that succeeds in producing a self-enhancing AI could take over the world. And this is genuinely thought-provoking.

 So, early on, I was convinced I was going to love this book. But unfortunately there is an awful lot of futurology in here (aka guesswork) and like all futurology, Tegmark's can be frustratingly specific about things that we are highly unlikely to be able to predict - though at least he recognises this is the case and points it out. He covers the various ways a super-intelligent AI could develop, whether it would become a rogue, how we'd interact with it... and then plunges on into more and more dramatic speculation, including a chapter that looks forward 'the next billion years and more.' Forgive me for feeling a bit 'So what?' about this.

There is no doubt the whole business of super-AIs is an issue that needs thinking about and discussing - and Tegmark does this in an approachable and engaging fashion. It probably needs reading alongside Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence to get a well-rounded picture, though. It would have helped if it had been significantly shorter - it came across as being long because it was the kind of 'big book' that has to be chunky, and I think it would have been a lot more effective at half its length. One particular section that was ripe for trimming had a long list of scenarios, each of which was then worked through - dull reading, I'm afraid. 

In the end futurology is a bit like being told about someone else's dream. It probably seems fascinating to them, but it's hard to get too excited about it as a reader. Life 3.0 is an interesting book, but feels rather like a pet project, rather than a strong popular science title.
Hardback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you


Review by Brian Clegg

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Pagans (SF) - James Alistair Henry *****

There's a fascinating sub-genre of science fiction known as alternate history. The idea is that at some point in the past, history diverged from reality, resulting in a different present. Perhaps the most acclaimed of these books is Kingsley Amis's The Alteration , set in a modern England where there had not been a reformation - but James Alistair Henry arguably does even better by giving us a present where Britain is a third world country, still divided between Celts in the west and Saxons in the East. Neither the Normans nor Christianity have any significant impact. In itself this is a clever idea, but what makes it absolutely excellent is mixing in a police procedural murder mystery, where the investigation is being undertaken by a Celtic DI, Drustan, who has to work in London alongside Aedith, a Saxon reeve of equivalent rank, who also happens to be daughter of the Earl of Mercia. While you could argue about a few historical aspects, it's effectively done and has a plot...
Post a Comment
Read more

Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact: Keith Cooper ****

There's something appealing (for a reader like me) about a book that brings together science fiction and science fact. I had assumed that the 'Amazing Worlds' part of the title suggested a general overview of the interaction between the two, but Keith Cooper is being literal. This is an examination of exoplanets (planets that orbit a different star to the Sun) as pictured in science fiction and in our best current science, bearing in mind this is a field that is still in the early phases of development. It becomes obvious early on that Cooper, who is a science journalist in his day job, knows his stuff on the fiction side as well as the current science. Of course he brings in the well-known TV and movie tropes (we get a huge amount on Star Trek ), not to mention the likes of Dune, but his coverage of written science fiction goes into much wider picture. He also has consulted some well-known contemporary SF writers such as Alastair Reynolds and Paul McAuley, not just scient...
Post a Comment
Read more