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81 " In other words, your subjective feeling that time is flowing comes from the relations between these memories that you have right now. Imagine a thought experiment where a perfect clone of me is built asleep, complete with all my memories, and is only woken up long enough to perceive a single observer moment. He'd still feel that time flowed from a complex and interesting past, even though he got to experience only that one moment. This means that the subjective perceptions of duration and change are qualia, basic instantaneous perceptions just as redness, blueness or sweetness. "
― Max Tegmark , Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality
82 " there’s no such thing as brown light! The color brown doesn’t exist in the external reality, but only in your internal reality: it’s simply what you perceive when seeing dim orange light against a darker background. "
83 " In the first chapter, we encountered what computer scientists call intelligent agents: entities that collect information about their environment from sensors and then process this information to decide how to act back on their environment. "
― Max Tegmark , Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
84 " that operate in a wide variety of ways, and the exact details of how and when electrical activity in one neuron affects other neurons is still the subject of active study. "
85 " Don’t galaxies receding faster than the speed of light violate relativity theory? Hubble’s law v = Hd implies that galaxies will move away from us faster than the speed of light c if their distance from us is greater than c/H ≈ 14 billion light-years, and we have no reason to doubt that such galaxies exist, so doesn’t this violate Einstein’s claim that nothing can go faster than light? The answer is yes and no: it violates Einstein’s special relativity theory from 1905 but not his general relativity theory from 1915, and the latter is Einstein’s final word on the subject, so we’re okay. "
86 " Above we worried about how to think about our initial conditions, and we now have a radical answer: this information isn't fundamentally about our physical reality, but about our place in it. The vast complexity we observe is an illusion in the sense that the underlying reality is quite simple to describe, and what requires close to a googol bits to specify is just our particular address in the multiverse. "
87 " What people have the ability to accomplish the goal of speaking? Newborns? No. Radio hosts? Yes. But what about toddlers who can speak ten words? Or five hundred words? Where would you draw the line? I’ve used the deliberately vague word “complex” in the definition above, because it’s not very interesting to try to draw an artificial line between intelligence and non-intelligence, and it’s more useful to simply quantify the degree of ability for accomplishing different goals. "
88 " If machine learning can help reveal relationships between genes, diseases and treatment responses, it could revolutionize personalized medicine, make farm animals healthier and enable more resilient crops. Moreover, robots have the potential to become more accurate and reliable surgeons than humans, even without using advanced AI. A wide variety of robotic surgeries have been successfully performed in recent years, often allowing precision, miniaturization and smaller incisions that lead to decreased blood loss, less pain and shorter healing time. "
89 " The currently most popular model for such an artificial neural network represents the state of each neuron by a single number and the strength of each synapse by a single number. In this model, each neuron updates its state at regular time steps by simply averaging together the inputs from all connected neurons, weighting them by the synaptic strengths, optionally adding a constant, and then applying what’s called an activation function to the result to compute its next state.fn5 The easiest way to use a neural network as a function is to make it feedforward, with information flowing only in one direction, as in figure 2.9, plugging the input to the function into a layer of neurons at the top and extracting the output from a layer of neurons at the bottom. "
90 " Superintelligence, Nick Bostrom estimates that 1058 human lives could be simulated with more conservative assumptions about energy efficiency. However we slice and dice these numbers, they’re huge, as is our responsibility for ensuring that this future potential of life to flourish isn’t squandered. As Bostrom puts it: “If we represent all the happiness experienced during one entire such life by a single teardrop of joy, then the happiness of these souls could fill and refill the Earth’s oceans every second, and keep doing so for a hundred billion billion millennia. "
91 " DeepMind soon published their method and shared their code, explaining that it used a very simple yet powerful idea called deep reinforcement learning.2 Basic reinforcement learning is a classic machine learning technique inspired by behaviorist psychology, where getting a positive reward increases your tendency to do something again and vice versa. Just like a dog learns to do tricks when this increases the likelihood of its getting encouragement or a snack from its owner soon, DeepMind’s AI learned to move the paddle to catch the ball because this increased the likelihood of its getting more points soon. DeepMind combined this idea with deep learning: they trained a deep neural net, as in the previous chapter, to predict how many points would on average be gained by pressing each of the allowed keys on the keyboard, and then the AI selected whatever key the neural net rated as most promising given the current state of the game. "
92 " Recall that FLOPS are floating-point operations per second, say, how many 19-digit numbers can be multiplied each second. "
93 " After DeepMind’s breakthrough, there’s no reason why a robot can’t ultimately use some variant of deep reinforcement learning to teach itself to walk without help from human programmers: all that’s needed is a system that gives it points whenever it makes progress. Robots in the real world similarly have the potential to learn to swim, fly, play ping-pong, fight and perform a nearly endless list of other motor tasks without help from human programmers. To speed things up and reduce the risk of getting stuck or damaging themselves during the learning process, they would probably do the first stages of their learning in virtual reality. "
94 " Some ancients speculated that the stars were small holes in a black sphere through which distant light shone through. The Italian astronomer Giordano Bruno suggested that they were instead objects like our Sun, just much farther away, perhaps with their own planets and civilizations—this didn’t go down too well with the Catholic Church, which had him burned at the stake in 1600. "
95 " The holy grail of AI research is to build “general AI” (better known as artificial general intelligence, AGI) that is maximally broad: able to accomplish virtually any goal, including learning. "
96 " Your synapses store all your knowledge and skills as roughly 100 terabytes’ worth of information, while your DNA stores merely about a gigabyte, "
97 " The AI enforces two tiers of rules: universal and local. Universal rules apply in all sectors, for example a ban on harming other people, making weapons or trying to create a rival superintelligence. Individual sectors have additional local rules on top of this, encoding certain moral values. "
98 " The term “AGI” was popularized by the AI researchers Shane Legg, Mark Gubrud and Ben Goertzel to more specifically mean human-level artificial general intelligence: the ability to accomplish any goal at least as well as humans. "
99 " Yet all these scenarios have two features in common: A "
100 " Yet all these scenarios have two features in common: A fast takeoff: the transition from subhuman to vastly superhuman intelligence occurs in a matter of days, not decades. A unipolar outcome: the result is a single entity controlling Earth. "
