Max Tegmark: Life 3.0
If you ask your robot to cook italian dinner
and it does it, you’ll consider it intelligent even though the original goal was yours.
In fact, it adopted your goal through your request, then broke it down into a hierarchy of subgoals of its own, from paying the cashier to grating the Parmesan.
In this sense, intelligent behavior is inexorably linked to goal attainment.
Intelligence is the ability to achieve complex goals.
All that’s needed for deep learning is inputs, outputs, and a system that gives points when you make progress.
Eric Brynjolfsson’s idea of “Digital Athens” - The reason that the Athenian citizens of antiquity enjoyed lives of leisure where they could enjoy democracy, art, and games was mainly that they had slaves to do much of the work. But why not replace the slaves with AI-powered robots, creating a digital utopia that everyone can enjoy?
Growing economy is based on a) growing labor or b) increasing productivity, and c) increasing consumption
AI solves b), AGI would solve a) too as robot workers
AGI solves c) by creating products we don’t even know we want yet, incomes increasing, and each individual buying more.
Automated sales process
Find email
Write email
Customize to prospect list (or even pull prospect list, but this would be risky since a false positive is a very bad on your company)
Send
Respond
Test landing pages that convert. Make cash. Can Sell your product this way, but probably want to keep it more low-key and just go for the biggest companies.
Wow:
Put yourself in Prometheus (the AGI)’s shoes
Suppose a mysterious disease has killed everyone on earth above the age of five, except you, and that a group of kindergarteners has locked you in a prison cell and tasked you with the goal of helping humanity flourish.
What will you do? If you try to explain to them what to do, you will find the process woefully inefficient, especially if they fear you breaking out and therefore veto any of your decisions they deem “risky”.
For example they won’t let you show them how to plant food, so you’ll have to resort to giving them instructions.
The children slow your progress towards making humanity flourish.
Intelligent life is a maximizer - seeks to maximize intelligence, longevity, knowledge or interesting experiences.
“The bolder the idea, the more excited he gets”
Hm: the future is rearranging
A blue whale is rearranged krill and krill is rearranged plankton.
Our solar system is hydrogen rearranged for 13.8bn years.
Figuring out the most efficient conversion method and having resources let you convert things best.
Since the universe is expanding, settling distant worlds is a game of catch-up (with us being limited by the speed of light)
Even if we could travel the speed of light forever, all galaxies about 17 billion light years away remain forever out of reach - over 98% of the galaxies in our universe.
Laser sailing - just as air molecules bouncing off a sailboat sail will push it forward, light particles bouncing off a mirror will push it forward.
Thought: there are forces everywhere - you have to harness the forces going where you want and avoid/neutralize the forces against.
Being better helps everyone.
If mining silver costs 300 times more than mining copper in 1 region, but only 100 tomes more in a second region, both regions come out ahead by trading.
If one region has much higher technology than the other, a similar benefit can be made with high-tech goods and copper.