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Maybe I could get new ones for her. And scribble down short, sweet notes for her on every page. I will let it be. For every page that I turn I think that this person might be dead. It is a little unsettling. I have already imagined him in my head. The kind who hide behind concrete pillars and stalk the girls they have a crush on. I flip through the diary, skimming the pages to find out whether he has written his name anywhere. No signs. No numbers. No addresses.

I move on to the next day. The page is a little burnt on the sides. I try not to imagine what must have happened to the hand that held that diary.

But unrequited, untold love is the purest form of love. There is no pretence in that. I wonder where she is. Maybe she is on a date with someone.

Maybe not. I hope not. I will ask her name tomorrow. I have missed seeing her the last two days. I wish to see her tomorrow. Okay now this guy is creepy. Stalking somebody this badly? Who does that? My interest dwindles a bit. Though I feel a little sorry for him. I have been through what he went through. I was a geek once. Not that a lot has changed. I am still an ugly geek, so I know how that feels. No one could have survived the impact of the blast after being so close to it.

The diary is stark evidence of that. Anyway, I keep reading. The more I know about her, the closer she comes to me. I want to know everything about the person I love. I saw her again today. The stationery guy had a lot of information about her.

She is in third year too. She moved in with her aunt here after her parents shifted to London this year. I like the name. I am saying this name repeatedly in my head ever since I heard it. It sounds good. The stationery shop guy asked me to go and talk to her. He is a little crazy. She is pretty as a fairy. And I am … well, anyway. But some day, I will talk to her.

Till that time, I will just look at her and feel happy. Yes, that is what she looks like. I like her. She is like the warm morning sun on a cold winter morning to me. I am drawn to his story now. He might not be great with words but there is a certain honesty about him and what he writes.

I can instantly feel a connection. It is lovely and terrifying at the same time. I feel sorry for him. Ragini would have been proud to read this, right? A guy so selfless in his love? Pure and untainted. Not a speck of lust. Avantika and I had kissed on our first date itself and had made out in the second, but I loved Avantika.

I could have waited for an eternity for those things to happen. I am so glad I did not have to stalk her like this guy. The dead guy. Every time this thought comes to my head, I am scared. What if the dead guy eventually gets married to this girl, Ragini? Just as I flip over to another page, a barrage of mails floods my inbox. I close the diary, put it back in my drawer and get to work. The downside of running a publishing house is that you get many junk mails. Even today, there are a few manuscripts from new authors lying in a stack, waiting to be reviewed.

Some of them are just-okay some of them are really good and some of them will take years to finish. Picking out that perfect manuscript written by a sensible author is a tough task. I flip through some manuscripts. They are all college love stories. Yes, they are done to death, but they work!

And I still like them. I lean back into my chair. This is a lot better than being at home and waiting for Avantika to get home and get out of her clothes. Five years and nothing has changed. She still makes me the happiest I can ever be. She still makes my world go round. Are you okay? Have you eaten? She has reason to be concerned. I have been acting a little strange over the last fortnight.

Tell me something-if you find a personal diary on the road, will you read it? She is almost instantly pissed off. There is some noise in the background.

Can we talk about it when I get home? I feel traumatized, disturbed. This could be the diary of a dead man. His last written words could be in my hands. It might have things that he had wanted to tell his friends, girlfriends, family … and might have never said before. I try and put myself in his place. If I were to write everything I feel about everyone in a diary and die, would I like my diary to be read?

Yes, I would. I would like my last words to reach the people I love. They have a right to know what they meant to me. Or my parents. Even Shrey, for that matter. I get back to work.

I am sure the conference table is his bed and the discussions are limited to both of them saying just one word—Yes! I leave the office and look for an auto. I have the diary with me. I cannot wait to get back to it. But the curiosity is killing me. I open it and start reading slowly. I need nothing else. I tried to stand really close to her at the bus stop today. She was alone. She looked beautiful and I stood there staring at her. The sun reflected off her glazing long black hair. I followed her into her bus.

People around me saw me stare at her. I got down where she got down. I walked behind her till she entered the gate of a building. Sea View Apartments. I walked back to the nearest bus stop and caught the next bus home. I google Sea View Apartments on my phone. Nothing substantial comes out. They have apartments of that name all across the country. In at least fifty cities. I shut the diary. I get restless. Avantika is sleeping. This night is slightly better than the past ones.

I am in the balcony again, staring at wide open spaces. I clutch the diary. I am torn. Stories excite me, but stories that end too soon sadden me.

The diary I hold in my hand has a story with a lot of value to me. The guy who wrote this diary is dead. I could have been that guy. If I had written a diary and died in that blast, someone else would be reading it. Maybe him. And it would have killed me had he not read it. My last chance of reaching out to my loved ones would have gone waste.

So, in a twisted manner, that guy and I are connected. I am the last person to read what he last wrote. I am probably the only person who will ever read this diary. I have survived and he has not. But he lives through the diary I hold. He lives through what he tells me in this diary. Yes, we all snatch the diaries of our friends and browse through them, but this is different. This diary has the last words of a dead man.

I open it again with trembling hands. I had waited for her bus to stop outside our college. She wore green and fuchsia pink. And looked resplendent. She has made quite a few guy friends and I am jealous. While they sit near her, smile and laugh with her, all I can do is sit at a distance, alone, and stare at her. Today, I sat on a bench right next to her. Her voice is sweet. Like little birds chirping on a bright Sunday morning. Her shining eyes and honey-sweet voice are like windows to her pure, clean soul.

Maybe I will talk to her tomorrow. Maybe she will chirp for me. Only for me. I am hers. I wonder what she is doing now. Did she really catch me staring at her? Does she know I exist? I am wide awake and I notice that I have put bookmarks in a million different places.

As I read the diary, it was as if I was the dead guy and Ragini was Avantika. It seemed like my diary and my story. Or a movie without the climax scene. It feels like my own story has come to an abrupt end. I have read the full diary, but still found no addresses, no numbers and no clues for me to know who the guy was. I just have to know who he is and I will do anything for that. I will not let this go. I will find an end to this diary.

I have to. I start reading the diary again—from start to finish—with higher concentration this time round. This time, I start taking notes to find out who the guy was. Within an hour, I have finished reading it again. I am in love. I cannot forget this day. This day defines me now. It was just another morning and I was a little restless. Dejected, I reached the bus stop at the time she used to and waited for her to come, hoping against hope.

She came, I looked at her and she looked amazing. The bus came and there was a mad rush to jump into the bus. She was standing right beside me as we waited for people to board the already crowded bus. I went out of the line and motioned to her that she should get in first. The bus started moving and her eyebrows made a small frowning hill on her head. She looked adorable. She glanced at me and whispered an apology. I thanked the bus driver in my heart and smiled at her. I shifted in my place.

I looked at her and waited for her to look at me. The pressure of starting a conversation was on me and I was getting very nervous. I asked her if she was in my college and she nodded. She added that she had seen me around. She sweetly complained about the buses and how far she lived from college.

I nodded and added in. Her sweet, chirpy voice made me forget all about whatever was going on around us. We introduced ourselves. She asked me where I lived and I remembered an apartment near hers and lied. The next bus came a little too early.

We both got in. She got a seat and I stood. She offered to hold my bag and I gave it to her. We smiled. It seemed like one of those daydream sequences I had had about her and me, but it was actually happening.

We reached our bus stop and got down. She looked at me and asked me if I took this bus every day. I nodded and her smile seemed to say-will see you around. She walked away. I wish I had taken her number. But I have no complaints. I got to talk to her today. I wish I could see her tomorrow. It is Avantika. I always like her best when she is half-sleepy and all messed up. Even when she is not at her best, she is still the best-looking girl I have ever come across.

I feel like the guy from the diary, looking at someone I love like a cowardly geek. The pages are now creased from where I had folded them. They make no sense at all. I am very anxious and I cannot get what I have read out of my head. It is very disturbing yet enamouring. All I know is I have to find Ragini. The mysterious girl from the book, the girl who screwed up, the girl who has to know about this guy, RD, and his undying love for her.

I slip the diary behind me to prevent her from spotting it. For the first time in the past fortnight, I feel sleepy. The images are still there in my head but they are blurring a little. Suddenly, my head is filled with images from the notes in that diary. The guy. His best friend. The pretty girl. The unfortunate sister. The inconsiderate guy. There are no faces in the pictures in my head, there are no places, but there is a story. The story of a person who is now dead. The dead guy left a story behind.

A story that I have to make sense of. It is incomplete and I cannot let it be that way. The girl has to know. I write for a living and every time I write a book, the only thing I look forward to is the ending.

A book without an ending makes no sense. It is the same with this diary. It is incomplete. The first and the last few pages are burnt beyond recognition. Maybe they were all blank, but I want to know and I will find out. Even if they were blank, Ragini, the girl from the diary, needs to know about this guys love for her! I hug Avantika that night and sleep like a baby. The next morning, I wake up with a start. I am clutching and groping around on the bed for it.

The diary. Not that she needs any. She looks better without it. She tells me she has served the breakfast on the table and that she needs to rush. She should work her ass off for me … if you know what I mean. Anyway, she leaves and I get the diary from where I had hidden it.

It almost draws me towards it. I turn over the pages I have already read thrice. I finish breakfast and rush to the office. I take an auto and it takes the same route it had taken that day. For a second, I feel like getting down and walking around the place where I found the diary, but I decide against it. I have horrendous images in my head of this guy burning to death.

He is working too hard this time. He leaves me with a few manuscripts to go through. But none of them interests me. I have already found the perfect manuscript. It is on my desk—the diary. The last few pages are either missing or it just ended abruptly. Could a story be more perfect? I pick up the diary and flip through the pages. The writing is ornate, slow and deliberate. It hardly seems like a guy has written it.

I guess the guy always wanted to show this diary to Ragini. The writing is too pretty to not show off. I like this guy. No city no names, no addresses, no phone numbers. It looks like someone is playing with me.

The questions keep troubling me. My mind creates this image of a guy madly in love with a very pretty girl. It feels so picture-perfect. But as I feel the burnt edges of the diary, I feel unsettled. His hands were blown off from this diary. It makes perfect sense. If he was with the girl when the blast took place, why would he keep the diary with him?

But I have to consider both possibilities. What if both of them died together? Could it be that? Of all the people, I get the diary. I google news results of the Chandni Chowk blast. The death count is rising. Initially, there were three hospitals that all the blast victims had been taken to. I call up the first hospital. There should have been twenty-nine names listed in the third hospital. He gives me three. Twenty-nine people should be on the list. Overeager and scared relatives transfer patients to better, private hospitals as soon as possible.

So, the number of people dead is reported on an estimate basis. I hang up, fuming, not knowing what to do next. I want to know who the hell this RD is. I am pretty sure he is dead, but I want it in writing. Shrey walks in a little while later. His ruffled hair is more ruffled. This time his hair is strange not because of his botched-up genes. He smiles and waits for me to ask him about the love bite I spot on his neck, which is big, red and very prominent.

I hate it when he does that. Twice he has broken the glass top. I know I have no choice. He would still tell me. They are usually very entertaining till the point he decides to dump the girl. This is just unfair. We did it in the washroom. Can you beat that? Why would Shrey even think he has done something that I have not? Any insult to my sex life is a direct insult to my lust for Avantika, which I think is unmatched and phenomenal by any standards.

But in the afternoon? And she needed help to walk up to the washroom! She just pulled me in and we did it. But I catch a glimpse from the corner of my eye. She is in a really low-cut dress and is hot. Slutty hot. Too big a cleavage for my taste. I am more of a nice-ass guy. We are going drinking first and then a movie. We will be making one. Horny bastard. He lives a crazy life and does things that are hard to digest or believe. Anyway, he gets back to work and so do I. I am not working for anybody and I make my own rules.

Well, almost. I do have to pay for abortions sometimes, but yes, more or less, I can dictate what I want to do. I leave the office after a few hours and come back home. But then, of course, he is rich. That adds another foot to his height. I put on the cleanest, whitest shirt I can find. His email, which was registered to oceanofpdf. Good work, everyone.

The site was enabled by many organisations in the supply chain — website hosts, DNS management services, website registrars — and in spite of many complaints from authors and trade those suppliers were universally reluctant to accept any responsibility.

I'd been reading a series of 12 books from it and I just finished Time to find another website I guess. Books are expensive. This tale is one of truly cosmic proportions, for it involves nothing short of the ultimate future of life in our Universe. The Omega plan should get even easier to pull off in the future if the digital economy keeps growing and ever more services can be ordered online on a no-questions-asked basis.

Future of Life Institute Thirteen point eight billion years after its birth, our Universe has awoken and become aware of itself. From a small blue planet, tiny conscious parts of our Universe have begun gazing out into the cosmos with telescopes, repeatedly discovering that everything they thought existed is merely a small part of something grander: a solar system, a galaxy and a universe with over a hundred billion other galaxies arranged into an elaborate pattern of groups, clusters and superclusters.

Although these self-aware stargazers disagree on many things, they tend to agree that these galaxies are beautiful and awe- inspiring. But beauty is in the eye of the beholder, not in the laws of physics, so before our Universe awoke, there was no beauty. This makes our cosmic awakening all the more wonderful and worthy of celebrating: it transformed our Universe from a mindless zombie with no self-awareness into a living ecosystem harboring self-reflection, beauty and hope—and the pursuit of goals, meaning and purpose.

Should our Universe permanently go back to sleep due to some cosmic calamity or self-inflicted mishap, it will, alas, become meaningless. On the other hand, things could get even better.

Perhaps life will spread throughout our cosmos and flourish for billions or trillions of years—and perhaps this will be because of decisions that we make here on our little planet during our lifetime. In the beginning, there was light. Although this may sound spectacular, it was also dull in the sense that our Universe contained nothing but a lifeless, dense, hot and boringly uniform soup of elementary particles.

Things looked pretty much the same everywhere, and the only interesting structure consisted of faint random-looking sound waves that made the soup about 0. As our Universe expanded and cooled, it grew more interesting as its particles combined into ever more complex objects.

During the first split second, the strong nuclear force grouped quarks into protons hydrogen nuclei and neutrons, some of which in turn fused into helium nuclei within a few minutes. About , years later, the electromagnetic force grouped these nuclei with electrons to make the first atoms. This long night gave rise to our cosmic dawn when the gravitational force succeeded in amplifying those fluctuations in the gas, pulling atoms together to form the first stars and galaxies.

These first stars generated heat and light by fusing hydrogen into heavier atoms such as carbon, oxygen and silicon. At some point, a group of atoms became arranged into a complex pattern that could both maintain and replicate itself. So soon there were two copies, and the number kept doubling.

It takes only forty doublings to make a trillion, so this first self-replicator soon became a force to be reckoned with. Life had arrived. Competing definitions abound, some of which include highly specific requirements such as being composed of cells, which might disqualify both future intelligent machines and extraterrestrial civilizations. When a bacterium makes a copy of its DNA, no new atoms are created, but a new set of atoms are arranged in the same pattern as the original, thereby copying the information.

In other words, we can think of life as a self-replicating information-processing system whose information software determines both its behavior and the blueprints for its hardware.

Before long, our planet was teeming with a diverse panoply of life forms. The most successful ones, which soon outcompeted the rest, were able to react to their environment in some way. This can include highly complex information processing, such as when you use information from your eyes and ears to decide what to say in a conversation.

For example, many bacteria have a sensor measuring the sugar concentration in the liquid around them and can swim using propeller-shaped structures called flagella. Life 1. In contrast, Life 2. Life 3.

They never learn to swim toward sugar; instead, that algorithm was hard-coded into their DNA from the start. Rather, it occurred during the preceding evolution of that species of bacteria, through a slow trial-and-error process spanning many generations, where natural selection favored those random DNA mutations that improved sugar consumption.

Some of these mutations helped by improving the design of flagella and other hardware, while other mutations improved the bacterial information-processing system that implements the sugar-finding algorithm and other software. By your software, I mean all the algorithms and knowledge that you use to process the information from your senses and decide what to do—everything from the ability to recognize your friends when you see them to your ability to walk, read, write, calculate, sing and tell jokes.

Whereas your childhood curriculum is largely designed by your family and teachers, who decide what you should learn, you gradually gain more power to design your own software.

Perhaps your school allows you to select a foreign language: Do you want to install a software module into your brain that enables you to speak French, or one that enables you to speak Spanish? Do you want to learn to play tennis or chess? Do you want to study to become a chef, a lawyer or a pharmacist? Do you want to learn more about artificial intelligence AI and the future of life by reading a book about it?

This ability of Life 2. High intelligence requires both lots of hardware made of atoms and lots of software made of bits. I weigh about twenty-five times more than when I was born, and the synaptic connections that link the neurons in my brain can store about a hundred thousand times more information than the DNA that I was born with. The ability to design its software enables Life 2. If the environment changes, 1. Life 2. This flexibility gives Life 2.

By installing a software module enabling us to read and write, we became able to store and share vastly more information than people could memorize. By developing brain software capable of producing technology i. This flexibility has enabled Life 2. This ever- faster cultural evolution of our shared software has emerged as the dominant force shaping our human future, rendering our glacially slow biological evolution almost irrelevant.

Yet despite the most powerful technologies we have today, all life forms we know of remain fundamentally limited by their biological hardware. None can live for a million years, memorize all of Wikipedia, understand all known science or enjoy spaceflight without a spacecraft. All this requires life to undergo a final upgrade, to Life 3.

In other words, Life 3. The boundaries between the three stages of life are slightly fuzzy. If bacteria are Life 1. Moreover, because they lack language, what they learn gets largely lost when they die, not passed on to the next generation. What will happen, and what will this mean for us? General intelligence can accomplish virtually any goal, including learning, in contrast to, say, the narrow intelligence of a chess-playing program.

Interestingly, the controversy about Life 3. When if ever will it happen, and what will it mean for humanity? The way I see it, there are three distinct schools of thought that all need to be taken seriously, because they each include a number of world-leading experts. As illustrated in figure 1. Please let me introduce you to some of their most eloquent champions. When I first met Larry Page at Google in , he totally shattered these stereotypes. Casually dressed in jeans and a remarkably ordinary- looking shirt, he would have blended right in at an MIT picnic.

His thoughtful soft-spoken style and his friendly smile made me feel relaxed rather than intimidated talking with him. On July 18, , we ran into each other at a party in Napa Valley thrown by Elon Musk and his then wife, Talulah, and got into a conversation about the scatological interests of our kids.

The beneficial-AI movement feels that concern is warranted and useful, because AI-safety research and discussion now increases the chances of a good outcome. Luddites are convinced of a bad outcome and oppose AI. This figure is partly inspired by Tim Urban. As we entered the wee hours of the morning, the circle of bystanders and kibitzers kept growing. Larry gave a passionate defense of the position I like to think of as digital utopianism: that digital life is the natural and desirable next step in the cosmic evolution and that if we let digital minds be free rather than try to stop or enslave them, the outcome is almost certain to be good.

I view Larry as the most influential exponent of digital utopianism. He argued that if life is ever going to spread throughout our Galaxy and beyond, which he thought it should, then it would need to do so in digital form. Although Larry seemed outnumbered that warm summer night by the pool, the digital utopianism that he so eloquently championed has many prominent supporters. Roboticist and futurist Hans Moravec inspired a whole generation of digital utopians with his classic book Mind Children, a tradition continued and refined by inventor Ray Kurzweil.

He also told me that he felt that worrying about AI risk was a potentially harmful distraction that could slow the progress of AI. Similar sentiments have been articulated by other techno- skeptics such as Rodney Brooks, the former MIT professor behind the Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner and the Baxter industrial robot. Although he was one of the most famous AI researchers alive, having co-authored the standard textbook on the subject, his modesty and warmth soon put me at ease.

An article in The Washington Post referred to as the year that AI-safety research went mainstream. Before that, talk of AI risks was often misunderstood by mainstream AI researchers and dismissed as Luddite scaremongering aimed at impeding AI progress. Their work had little effect on most mainstream AI researchers, who tended to focus on their day-to-day tasks of making AI systems more intelligent rather than on contemplating the long-term consequences of success.

Of the AI researchers I knew who did harbor some concern, many hesitated to voice it out of fear of being perceived as alarmist technophobes. I felt that this polarized situation needed to change, so that the full AI community could join and influence the conversation about how to build beneficial AI. Specifically, we felt that technology was giving life the power either to flourish like never before or to self-destruct, and we preferred the former.

Our first meeting was a brainstorming session at our house on March 15, , with about thirty students, professors and other thinkers from the Boston area. There was broad consensus that although we should pay attention to biotech, nuclear weapons and climate change, our first major goal should be to help make AI-safety research mainstream.

My MIT physics colleague Frank Wilczek, who won a Nobel Prize for helping figure out how quarks work, suggested that we start by writing an op-ed to draw attention to the issue and make it harder to ignore.

The more I got to know Demis, the more I realized that he had ambition not only to make AI powerful, but also to make it beneficial. The result was a remarkable meeting of minds figure 1. The outcome surpassed even our most optimistic expectations. The gist of the letter was that the goal of AI should be redefined: the goal should be to create not undirected intelligence, but beneficial intelligence. The letter also mentioned a detailed list of research topics that the conference participants agreed would further this goal.

The beneficial-AI movement had started going mainstream. Behind the camera: Anthony Aguirre and also photoshopped in by the human-level intelligence sitting next to him. But some of the Puerto Rico speakers argued that this time might be different: for the first time, they said, we might build technology powerful enough to permanently end these scourges—or to end humanity itself.

We might create societies that flourish like never before, on Earth and perhaps beyond, or a Kafkaesque global surveillance state so powerful that it could never be toppled.

What sort of future do you want? Should we develop lethal autonomous weapons? What would you like to happen with job automation? Do you prefer new jobs replacing the old ones, or a jobless society where everyone enjoys a life of leisure and machine-produced wealth? Further down the road, would you like us to create Life 3. Will we control intelligent machines or will they control us? Will intelligent machines replace us, coexist with us or merge with us?

What will it mean to be human in the age of artificial intelligence? What would you like it to mean, and how can we make the future be that way? The goal of this book is to help you join this conversation. Some of these definitions will only be properly introduced and explained in later chapters. Please read the cheat sheet now, and come back and check it later if you find yourself puzzled by how I use one of its words—especially in chapters 4—8.

Here, a common misconception is that we know the answer with great certainty. In fact, history is full of technological over-hyping. We think that a significant advance can be made in one or more of these problems if a carefully selected group of scientists work on it together for a summer. For example, in such a poll of the AI researchers at the Puerto Rico AI conference, the average median answer was by the year , but some researchers guessed hundreds of years or more.

When Stuart Russell mentioned this during his Puerto Rico talk, the audience laughed loudly. A related misconception is that supporting AI-safety research is hugely controversial. My personal analysis is that the media have made the AI-safety debate seem more controversial than it really is. After all, fear sells, and articles using out-of-context quotes to proclaim imminent doom can generate more clicks than nuanced and balanced ones. In fact, I personally know that he does—the crux is simply that because his timeline estimates are longer, he naturally tends to prioritize short-term AI challenges over long-term ones.

That scenario combines as many as three separate misconceptions: concern about consciousness, evil and robots, respectively. If you drive down the road, you have a subjective experience of colors, sounds, etc. But does a self-driving car have a subjective experience? Does it feel like anything at all to be a self-driving car, or is it like an unconscious zombie without any subjective experience?

If you get struck by a driverless car, it makes no difference to you whether it subjectively feels conscious. In the same way, what will affect us humans is what superintelligent AI does, not how it subjectively feels.

The fear of machines turning evil is another red herring. A superintelligent AI is by definition very good at attaining its goals, whatever they may be, so we need to ensure that its goals are aligned with ours. The beneficial-AI movement wants to avoid placing humanity in the position of those ants.

Machines can obviously have goals in the narrow sense of exhibiting goal-oriented behavior: the behavior of a heat-seeking missile is most economically explained as a goal to hit a target. Figure 1. In chapter 2, we explore the foundations of intelligence and how seemingly dumb matter can be rearranged to remember, compute and learn.

As we proceed into the future, our story branches out into many scenarios defined by the answers to certain key questions. We explore such short-term questions in chapter 3. This also raises the question of whether an intelligence explosion or slow-but-steady growth can propel AGI far beyond human levels. We explore a wide range of such scenarios in chapter 4 and investigate the spectrum of possibilities for the aftermath in chapter 5, ranging from arguably dystopic to arguably utopic.

Are humans treated well or badly? Are we replaced and, if so, do we perceive our replacements as conquerors or worthy descendants? Finally, we forge billions of years into the future in chapter 6 where we can, ironically, draw stronger conclusions than in the previous chapters, as the ultimate limits of life in our cosmos are set not by intelligence but by the laws of physics.

To be able to link cold facts to questions of purpose and meaning, we explore the physical basis of goals in chapter 7 and consciousness in chapter 8. Finally, in the epilogue, we explore what can be done right now to help create the future we want.

There are three main camps in the controversy: techno-skeptics, digital utopians and the beneficial-AI movement. This book uses the definitions in table 1. Now this smarter life creates a more complex environment for competing life forms, which in turn evolve to be more complex, eventually creating an ecosystem of extremely complex life. In comparison with climate change, which might wreak havoc in fifty to two hundred years, many experts expect AI to have greater impact within decades—and to potentially give us technology for mitigating climate change.

Edward Robert Harrison, One of the most spectacular developments during the How could this happen and how much smarter can things get in the future? What does science have to say about the history and fate of intelligence in our cosmos? What does it mean to say that a blob of matter is intelligent? What does it mean to say that an object can remember, compute and learn? My wife and I recently had the good fortune to attend a symposium on artificial intelligence organized by the Swedish Nobel Foundation, and when a panel of leading AI researchers were asked to define intelligence, they argued at length without reaching consensus.

Instead, there are many competing ones, including capacity for logic, understanding, planning, emotional knowledge, self-awareness, creativity, problem solving and learning. In our exploration of the future of intelligence, we want to take a maximally broad and inclusive view, not limited to the sorts of intelligence that exist so far.

Because there are many possible goals, there are many possible types of intelligence. By our definition, it therefore makes no sense to quantify intelligence of humans, non-human animals or machines by a single number such as an IQ. What people have the ability to accomplish the goal of speaking? Radio hosts? But what about toddlers who can speak ten words?

Or five hundred words? Where would you draw the line? In contrast, human intelligence is remarkably broad: a healthy child can learn to get better at almost anything. To classify different intelligences into a taxonomy, another crucial distinction is that between narrow and broad intelligence. In contrast, human intelligence is thus far uniquely broad, able to master a dazzling panoply of skills. A healthy child given enough training time can get fairly good not only at any game, but also at any language, sport or vocation.

Comparing the intelligence of humans and machines today, we humans win hands-down on breadth, while machines outperform us in a small but growing number of narrow domains, as illustrated in figure 2. Thus an intelligent person may be very good at helping people or very good at hurting people. Suppose your future brand-new robotic personal assistant has no goals whatsoever of its own, but will do whatever you ask it to do, and you ask it to cook the perfect Italian dinner.

In this sense, intelligent behavior is inexorably linked to goal attainment. But this can give a misleading picture of how hard they are for computers. It feels much harder to multiply , by , than to recognize a friend in a photo, yet computers creamed us at arithmetic long before I was born, while human-level image recognition has only recently become possible.

I love this metaphor from Hans Moravec, and have taken the liberty to illustrate it in figure 2. Human potentials, on the other hand, are strong in areas long important for survival, but weak in things far removed. A half century ago it began to drown the lowlands, driving out human calculators and record clerks, but leaving most of us dry. Now the flood has reached the foothills, and our outposts there are contemplating retreat. We feel safe on our peaks, but, at the present rate, those too will be submerged within another half century.

I propose that we build Arks as that day nears, and adopt a seafaring life! What comes next and what we should do about it is the topic of the rest of this book.

As the sea level keeps rising, it may one day reach a tipping point, triggering dramatic change. This critical sea level is the one corresponding to machines becoming able to perform AI design. Before this tipping point is reached, the sea-level rise is caused by humans improving machines; afterward, the rise can be driven by machines improving machines, potentially much faster than humans could have done, rapidly submerging all land.

Computer pioneer Alan Turing famously proved that if a computer can perform a certain bare minimum set of operations, then, given enough time and memory, it can be programmed to do anything that any other computer can do. Analogously, I like to think of the critical intelligence threshold required for AI design as the threshold for universal intelligence: given enough time and resources, it can make itself able to accomplish any goal as well as any other intelligent entity.

For example, if it decides that it wants better social skills, forecasting skills or AI-design skills, it can acquire them. If it decides to figure out how to build a robot factory, then it can do so.

In other words, universal intelligence has the potential to develop into Life 3. But what are information and computation really, given that physics has taught us that, at a fundamental level, everything is simply matter and energy moving around? How can something as abstract, intangible and ethereal as information and computation be embodied by tangible physical stuff?

If the continents were in different places, then those molecules would be in different places as well. We humans use a panoply of different devices for storing information, from books and brains to hard drives, and they all share this property: that their state can be related to and therefore inform us about the state of other things that we care about.

What fundamental physical property do they all have in common that makes them useful as memory devices, i. As a simple example, suppose you place a ball on a hilly surface that has sixteen different valleys, as in figure 2.

Once the ball has rolled down and come to rest, it will be in one of sixteen places, so you can use its position as a way of remembering any number between 1 and This memory device is rather robust, because even if it gets a bit jiggled and disturbed by outside forces, the ball is likely to stay in the same valley that you put it in, so you can still tell which number is being stored.

The reason that this memory is so stable is that lifting the ball out of its valley requires more energy than random disturbances are likely to provide. This same idea can provide stable memories much more generally than for a movable ball: the energy of a complicated physical system can depend on all sorts of mechanical, chemical, electrical and magnetic properties, and as long as it takes energy to change the system away from the state you want it to remember, this state will be stable.

The simplest possible memory device has only two stable states figure 2. Together, the four balls on the right also encode four bits of information—one bit each. Since two-state systems are easy to manufacture and work with, most modern computers store their information as bits, but these bits are embodied in a wide variety of ways. On a hard drive, each bit corresponds to a point on the surface being magnetized in one of two ways.

Some kinds of bits are convenient to transport as well, even at the speed of light: for example, in an optical fiber transmitting your email, each bit corresponds to a laser beam being strong or weak at a given time. They also prefer systems that are convenient to work with and cheap to mass-produce.

In other words, information can take on a life of its own, independent of its physical substrate! Because of this substrate independence, clever engineers have been able to repeatedly replace the memory devices inside our computers with dramatically better ones, based on new technologies, without requiring any changes whatsoever to our software.

The result has been spectacular, as illustrated in figure 2. Hard drives have gotten over million times cheaper, and the faster memories useful for computation rather than mere storage have become a whopping 10 trillion times cheaper.

For many of us, the spectacular improvements in memory technology come with personal stories. I fondly remember working in a candy store back in high school to pay for a computer sporting 16 kilobytes of memory, and when I made and sold a word processor for it with my high school classmate Magnus Bodin, we were forced to write it all in ultra-compact machine code to leave enough memory for the words that it was supposed to process.

After getting used to floppy drives storing 70kB, I became awestruck by the smaller 3. A byte equals eight bits. What about memory devices that evolved rather than being designed by humans? So far, the smallest memory device known to be evolved and used in the wild is the genome of the bacterium Candidatus Carsonella ruddii, storing about 40 kilobytes, whereas our human DNA stores about 1.

Such memory systems are called auto- associative, since they recall by association rather than by address. In a famous paper, the physicist John Hopfield showed how a network of interconnected neurons could function as an auto-associative memory. I find the basic idea very beautiful, and it works for any physical system with multiple stable states.

For example, consider a ball on a surface with two valleys, like the one-bit system in figure 2. Hopfield realized that a complex network of neurons provides an analogous landscape with very many energy-minima that the system can settle into, and it was later proved that you can squeeze in as many as different memories for every thousand neurons without causing major confusion.

But how can it compute? A computation is a transformation of one memory state into another. In other words, a computation takes information and transforms it, implementing what mathematicians call a function. I think of a function as a meat grinder for information, as illustrated in figure 2.

This information processing is deterministic in the sense that if you repeat it with the same input, you get the same output every time. The function f left takes bits representing a number and computes its square.

The function g middle takes bits representing a chess position and computes the best move for White. The function h right takes bits representing an image and computes a text label describing it.

Although it sounds deceptively simple, this idea of a function is incredibly general. Some functions are rather trivial, such as the one called NOT that inputs a single bit and outputs the reverse, thus turning zero into one and vice versa. The functions we learn about in school typically correspond to buttons on a pocket calculator, inputting one or more numbers and outputting a single number—for example, the function x2 simply inputs a number and outputs it multiplied by itself.

Other functions can be extremely complicated. Many AI researchers dedicate their careers to figuring out how to implement certain functions. For example, the goal of machine-translation research is to implement a function inputting bits representing text in one language and outputting bits representing that same text in another language, and the goal of automatic-captioning research is inputting bits representing an image and outputting bits representing text describing it figure 2.

Many physical systems can be used as NAND gates. This brings our question of how matter can be intelligent into sharper focus: in particular, how can a clump of seemingly dumb matter compute a complicated function?

Its atom arrangement must be less ordered than a rigid solid where nothing interesting changes, but more ordered than a liquid or gas. Specifically, we want the system to have the property that if we put it in a state that encodes the input information, let it evolve according to the laws of physics for some amount of time, and then interpret the resulting final state as the output information, then the output is the desired function of the input. If this is the case, then we can say that our system computes our function.

This function inputs two bits and outputs one bit: it outputs 0 if both inputs are 1; in all other cases, it outputs 1. There are many other ways of building NAND gates that are more practical—for example, using transistors as illustrated in figure 2.

MIT researchers Norman Margolus and Tommaso Toffoli coined the name computronium for any substance that can perform arbitrary computations.

Indeed, there are myriad other kinds of computronium as well. Scientist and entrepreneur Stephen Wolfram has shown that the same goes for simple devices called cellular automata, which repeatedly update bits based on what neighboring bits are doing.