Life 3.0

Max Tegmark, a Swedish-American cosmologist and MIT professor, considers what artificial intelligence could mean for life on Earth and beyond. He sorts life into three stages by what it can redesign: Life 1.0, whose hardware and software both come from evolution; Life 2.0, which shapes its own software through culture; and Life 3.0, which could rebuild both, as advanced AI might. The book weighs near-term issues such as AI weapons, jobs lost to technology and the push toward general intelligence, then lays out twelve possible futures, from a libertarian utopia to self-destruction. Tegmark argues that the risk lies in AI goals misaligned with human ones rather than in malice. He co-founded the Future of Life Institute.

Barack Obama included it in his best of 2018 list on Facebook.