Max Tegmark > Quotes

“There’s no better guarantee of failure than convincing yourself that success is impossible, and therefore never even trying.”
― Max Tegmark, Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality

“Your synapses store all your knowledge and skills as roughly 100 terabytes’ worth of information, while your DNA stores merely about a gigabyte, barely enough to store a single movie download.”
― Max Tegmark, Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

“… when people ask about the meaning of life as if it were the job of our cosmos to give meaning to our existence, they’re getting it backward: It’s not our Universe giving meaning to conscious beings, but conscious beings giving meaning to our Universe.”
― Max Tegmark, Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

“I think that consciousness is the way information feels when being processed in certain complex ways.”
― Max Tegmark, Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality

“Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance. —Confucius The highest form of ignorance is when you reject something you don’t know anything about. —Wayne Dyer”
― Max Tegmark, Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality

“If consciousness is the way that information feels when it’s processed in certain ways, then it must be substrate-independent; it’s only the structure of the information processing that matters, not the structure of the matter doing the information processing. In other words, consciousness is substrate-independent twice over!”
― Max Tegmark, Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

“If we don't know what we want we're less likely to get it.”
― Max Tegmark, Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

“computer scientists call validation: whereas verification asks “Did I build the system right?,” validation asks “Did I build the right system?”
― Max Tegmark, Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

“Why do we perceive the world as stable and ourselves as local and unique? Here’s my guess: because it’s useful.”
― Max Tegmark, Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality

“We invented fire, repeatedly messed up, and then invented the fire extinguisher, fire exit, fire alarm and fire department.”
― Max Tegmark, Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

“Life 1.0”: life where both the hardware and software are evolved rather than designed. You and I, on the other hand, are examples of “Life 2.0”: life whose hardware is evolved, but whose software is largely designed. 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.”
― Max Tegmark, Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

“I feel that my main responsibility as a teacher isn’t to convey facts, but to rekindle that lost enthusiasm for asking questions.”
― Max Tegmark, Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality

“let’s instead define life very broadly, simply as a process that can retain its complexity and replicate.”
― Max Tegmark, Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

“So I feel that the experimental verdict is in: the world is weird, and we just have to learn to live with it.”
― Max Tegmark, Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality

“economics was largely a form of intellectual prostitution where you got rewarded for saying what the powers that be wanted to hear.”
― Max Tegmark, Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality

“THE BOTTOM LINE •  Parallel universes are not a theory, but a prediction of certain theories. •  Eternal inflation predicts that our Universe (the spherical region of space from which light has had time to reach us during the 14 billion years since our Big Bang) is just one of infinitely many universes in a Level I multiverse where everything that can happen does happen somewhere. •  For a theory to be scientific, we need not be able to observe and test all its predictions, merely at least one of them. Inflation is the leading theory for our cosmic origins because it’s passed observational tests, and parallel universes seem to be a non-optional part of the package. •  Inflation converts potentiality into reality: if the mathematical equations governing”
― Max Tegmark, Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality

“Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these one is wandering in a dark labyrinth. —Galileo Galilei, The Assayer, 1623”
― Max Tegmark, Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality

“The more automated society gets and the more powerful the attacking AI becomes, the more devastating cyberwarfare can be. If you can hack and crash your enemy’s self-driving cars, auto-piloted planes, nuclear reactors, industrial robots, communication systems, financial systems and power grids, then you can effectively crash his economy and cripple his defenses. If you can hack some of his weapons systems as well, even better.”
― Max Tegmark, Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

“Evolution endowed us with intuition only for those aspects of physics that had survival value for our distant ancestors, such as the parabolic orbits of flying rocks (explaining our penchant for baseball). A cavewoman thinking too hard about what matter is ultimately made of might fail to notice the tiger sneaking up behind and get cleaned right out of the gene pool. Darwin’s theory thus makes the testable prediction that whenever we use technology to glimpse reality beyond the human scale, our evolved intuition should break down. We’ve repeatedly tested this prediction, and the results overwhelmingly support Darwin. At high speeds, Einstein realized that time slows down, and curmudgeons on the Swedish Nobel committee found this so weird that they refused to give him the Nobel Prize for his relativity theory. At low temperatures, liquid helium can flow upward. At high temperatures, colliding particles change identity; to me, an electron colliding with a positron and turning into a Z-boson feels about as intuitive as two colliding cars turning into a cruise ship. On microscopic scales, particles schizophrenically appear in two places at once, leading to the quantum conundrums mentioned above. On astronomically large scales… weirdness strikes again: if you intuitively understand all aspects of black holes [then you] should immediately put down this book and publish your findings before someone scoops you on the Nobel Prize for quantum gravity… [also,] the leading theory for what happened [in the early universe] suggests that space isn’t merely really really big, but actually infinite, containing infinitely many exact copies of you, and even more near-copies living out every possible variant of your life in two different types of parallel universes.”
― Max Tegmark, Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality

“Since there can be no meaning without consciousness, it’s not our Universe giving meaning to conscious beings, but conscious beings giving meaning to our Universe.”
― Max Tegmark, Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

“a hallmark of a living system is that it maintains or reduces its entropy by increasing the entropy around it. In other words, the second law of thermodynamics has a life loophole: although the total entropy must increase, it’s allowed to decrease in some places as long as it increases even more elsewhere. So life maintains or increases its complexity by making its environment messier.”
― Max Tegmark, Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

“The Matrix, Agent Smith (an AI) articulates this sentiment: “Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague and we are the cure.”
― Max Tegmark, Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

“Advancing computer performance is like water slowly flooding the landscape. 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!”
― Max Tegmark, Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

“What is real? Is there more to reality than meets the eye? Yes! was Plato’s answer over two millennia ago. In his famous cave analogy, he likened us to people who’d lived their entire lives shackled in a cave, facing a blank wall, watching the shadows cast by things passing behind them, and eventually coming to mistakenly believe that these shadows were the full reality. Plato argued that what we humans call our everyday reality is similarly just a limited and distorted representation of the true reality, and that we must free ourselves from our mental shackles to begin comprehending it.”
― Max Tegmark, Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality

“If you're driving down a highway at fifty-five miles per hour and suddenly see a squirrel a few meters in front of you, it's too late for you to do anything about it, because you've already run it over! ...your consciousness lives in the past”
― Max Tegmark, Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

“The robot misconception is related to the myth that machines can’t control humans. Intelligence enables control: humans control tigers not because we’re stronger, but because we’re smarter. This means that if we cede our position as smartest on our planet, it’s possible that we might also cede control.”
― Max Tegmark, Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

“The DQN AI system of Google DeepMind can accomplish a slightly broader range of goals: it can play dozens of different vintage Atari computer games at human level or better. 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 2.1. The holy grail 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.”
― Max Tegmark, Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

“In his 2007 book Farewell to Alms, the Scottish-American economist Gregory Clark points out that we can learn a thing or two about our future job prospects by comparing notes with our equine friends. Imagine two horses looking at an early automobile in the year 1900 and pondering their future. “I’m worried about technological unemployment.” “Neigh, neigh, don’t be a Luddite: our ancestors said the same thing when steam engines took our industry jobs and trains took our jobs pulling stage coaches. But we have more jobs than ever today, and they’re better too: I’d much rather pull a light carriage through town than spend all day walking in circles to power a stupid mine-shaft pump.” “But what if this internal combustion engine thing really takes off?” “I’m sure there’ll be new new jobs for horses that we haven’t yet imagined. That’s what’s always happened before, like with the invention of the wheel and the plow.”
― Max Tegmark, Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

“I think of this as the techno-skeptic position, eloquently articulated by Andrew Ng: “Fearing a rise of killer robots is like worrying about overpopulation on Mars.”
― Max Tegmark, Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

“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. Recent forecasts for when various jobs will get taken over by machines identify several useful questions to ask about a career before deciding to educate oneself for it. 48 For example: • 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?”
― Max Tegmark, Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence