Max Tegmark essay on AI and cosmic consciousness

LET’S ASPIRE TO MORE THAN MAKING OURSELVES OBSOLETE Max Tegmark Max Tegmark is an MIT physicist and AI researcher; president of the Future of Life Institute; scientific director of the Foundational Questions Institute; and the author of Our Mathematical Universe and Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Although there’s great controversy about how and when AI will impact humanity, the situation is clearer from a cosmic perspective: The technology-developing life that has evolved on Earth is rushing to make itself obsolete without devoting much serious thought to the consequences. This strikes me as embarrassingly lame, given that we can create amazing opportunities for humanity to flourish like never before, if we dare to steer a more ambitious course. 13.8 billion years after its birth, our Universe has become aware of itself. On a small blue planet, tiny conscious parts of our Universe have discovered that what they once thought was the sum total of existence was a minute part of something far grander: a solar system in a galaxy in a universe with over 100 billion other galaxies, arranged into an elaborate pattern of groups, clusters, and superclusters. Consciousness is the cosmic awakening; it transformed our Universe from a mindless zombie with no self-awareness into a living ecosystem harboring self-reflection, beauty, hope, meaning, and purpose. Had that awakening never taken place, our Universe would have been pointless—a gigantic waste of space. Should our Universe go back to sleep permanently due to some cosmic calamity or self-inflicted mishap, it will become meaningless again. On the other hand, things could get even better. We don’t yet know whether we humans are the only stargazers in the cosmos, or even the first, but we’ve already learned enough about our Universe to know that it has the potential to wake up much more fully than it has thus far. AI pioneers such as Norbert Wiener have taught us that a further awakening of our Universe’s ability to process and experience information need not require eons of additional evolution but perhaps mere decades of human scientific ingenuity. We may be like that first glimmer of self-awareness you experienced when you emerged from sleep this morning, a premonition of the much greater consciousness that would arrive once you opened your eyes and fully awoke. Perhaps artificial superintelligence will enable life to spread throughout the cosmos and flourish for billions or trillions of years, and perhaps this will be because of decisions we make here, on our planet, in our lifetime. Or humanity may soon go extinct, through some self-inflicted calamity caused by the power of our technology growing faster than the wisdom with which we manage it. The evolving debate about AI’s societal impact Many thinkers dismiss the idea of superintelligence as science fiction, because they view intelligence as something mysterious that can exist only in biological organisms— especially humans—and as fundamentally limited to what today’s humans can do. But from my perspective as a physicist, intelligence is simply a certain kind of information 63 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016283