Life 3.0: What Will You Do When AI Takes Over the World
Do you remember cell phones? Those that could only call and send SMS. I bought a Nokia phone that could also play mp3s when I was 14 years old. Who would have thought we could play movies and use internet on those phones just 10 years later.
Artificial Intelligence is now in same level as mobile phones playing mp3s. Or maybe it already took over the world without knowing us, as Life 3.0 story unveils...
"The poorest 50 % of Earth's population had earned only about 4 % of the global income, enabling the Omega-controller companies to win their hearts (and votes) by sharing only a modest fraction of their profits with them."
Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Daniel Pink in one of his PinkCast (the best value/time deal vlogs I know, just ~ 2 minutes) shared a link to book Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Max Tegmark.
Few more people liked it too, so why not give it a try:
Until then I only thought about artificial intelligence from Maths and Psychology point of view, which is great combination but merely enough to understand the topic properly. This book is mix of fiction, utopia, dystopia, number of researches, with focus on beneficial intelligence.
Complex put Simple
Max is skilled in putting complex technical concepts in very simple way.
From DeepMind AI playing Atari games:
to Alpha GO beating the greatest human master in 2016:
Ask Elon Musk
Worth reading Life 3.0 by @Tegmark. AI will be the best or worst thing ever for humanity, so let’s get it right.https://t.co/lT0uMH3ujZ
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 29, 2017
I knew Elon Musk is making cars and rockets, but I didn't knew he supported non-profit Future of Life Institute with $10M.
"What we really need to do is make sure that life continues into the future. […] It’s best to try to prevent a negative circumstance from occurring than to wait for it to occur and then be reactive."
What Will You Do when AI comes?
The book made me think really hard. I tried to answer questions that never occur relevant to me:
- How I want to focus my career in world, where human tasks get more and more automated?
- How I want to raise my child to be adaptable in the future?
I love this part of book:
"What career advice should we give to our kids? I'm encouraging mine to go into professions that machines are currently bad at, and therefore seem unlikely to get automated in the near future.
- 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?"
What are my Takeaways?
The books states that every field have parts that can be easily automated and parts that will take some time.
And not only in non-IT positions. As a programmer you can:
- create e-commerce one after another,
- focus on prediction of nearest next product the customer wants to buy before he knows.
I found lot of inspiration and possible blind paths for RectorPHP project. It's narrow intelligence, that upgrades code for you based on your dependencies (I will write about it soon).
If I should apply the same logic as above, you can be teacher:
- who explains news and trends in software for last 2 years
- or the one who teaches people how to write a tool, that applies those trends to the code and is usable for next 10 years with minimal work
I realized how I underestimate the AI and remembered my (dead) Nokia:
Reading Protip!
The 2nd half of the book focuses on future of 100+ years. The main focus for me lies in first part: where are we now, what could happens soon and how can we prepare.
So if you read first half, you'll get most of this book. Of course, if you like sci-fi stories of harvesting Saturn into circu-planet colony keep on reading.
Happy reading!
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