In an excerpt from his new book, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology examines the next stage in human evolution.
The definition of life is known to be controversial. There are plenty of alternative definitions, with some including very specific requirements (for example, to be composed of cells) that may exclude the existence of both intelligent machines of the future and extraterrestrial civilizations. Since we do not want to limit our thinking about the future life to only those species that we have encountered so far, let us choose the broadest definition of life as a process that can maintain diversity and repeat itself. The repetitive is not matter (atoms), but information (bits) that determines the arrangement and order of atoms. When a bacterium makes a copy of its DNA, it does not produce new atoms, but a new set of atoms arranged in the same pattern as in the original, copying information. In other words,life can be considered a self-replicating information processing system, in which information (algorithms) determines not only functionality, but also the schemes of hardware informatization.
Like the universe itself, life gradually became more and more interesting. I consider it appropriate to classify life forms into three levels of difficulty: versions 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0.
The question of how, when and where life first appeared in our universe remains open, but there is compelling evidence that it appeared on Earth about 4 billion years ago. Soon, our planet acquired an arsenal of diverse life forms. Some of them were fortunate enough to have surpassed the rest and developed a certain response to their environment. In particular, they have become what programmers call "intelligent agents": structures that collect information about the world around them using receptors, and then process the information received to provide some kind of reverse action. This process can include a very complex information transformation system, such as the one that helps us to conduct a conversation using information received through the eyes and ears. But this may include fairly simple means of informatization.
Many bacteria, for example, have a receptor for measuring the concentration of sugar in the surrounding fluid, and a helical organ called flagella helps them swim. The information hardware that binds the receptor to the flagella can implement the following simple but useful algorithm: "If my receptor detects a lower concentration of sugar than it was a couple of seconds ago, the reverse rotation of the flagella will help to change direction."
You have learned to speak and have acquired countless other skills. Bacteria are not easy to train. Their DNA determines the format of not only hardware (sugar receptors and flagella) but also software informatization. The above algorithm was programmed in their DNA from the very beginning, and they will never learn to swim in the direction of high sugar levels. Of course, some semblance of the cognition process took place, but already outside the life cycle of this particular bacterium.
This was most likely during the previous evolution of this bacterial species as a result of a slow process of trial and error, spanning many generations, during which natural selection favored those random DNA mutations that improved the absorption of sugar. Some of these mutations turned out to be useful in terms of improving the structure of flagella and other informatization hardware, while others improved the information processing system that implements the sugar-containing medium detection algorithm and other informatization software.
Such bacteria represent what I call version 1.0 life: a life in which both hardware and software were not programmed, but formed from scratch. You and I, on the other hand, are examples of Life 2.0: lives whose informatization hardware has evolved and software has been largely designed. By the latter, I mean all the algorithms and knowledge that we use to process information obtained through the senses and make decisions: everything from the ability to recognize our friends and ending with the ability to walk, read, write, count, sing and poison jokes. …
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At birth, you are unable to perform any of these tasks, and all computer software is embedded in your brain through a process called learning. And if in childhood your curriculum is formed mainly by family members and teachers, over time you gain more strength and opportunities to independently create software tools for informatization. Let's say your school allows you to choose a foreign language - would you like to install a software module in your brain that allows you to speak French or Spanish? Would you like to learn how to play tennis or chess? Would you like to learn to be a chef, lawyer or pharmacist? Would you like to learn more about artificial intelligence (AI) and the future by reading a book about it?
Life 2.0's ability to develop computer software makes it significantly more advanced than life 1.0. High intelligence requires a variety of hardware (made up of atoms) and software (made up of bits) informatization tools. The fact that most human informatization hardware comes after birth (through growth) is significant because our size limit is not limited by the width of our mothers' birth canal. Likewise, most of our computer software is introduced after birth (through learning), and our ultimate intelligence is not limited to the amount of information that can be transmitted to us at conception through DNA, in the style of version 1.0.
I weigh about 25 times more than at birth, and the synaptic connections that link neurons in my brain can store about a hundred thousand times more information than the DNA with which I was born. Your synapses store all your knowledge and skills, which is about 100 terabytes of information, while DNA contains no more than a gigabyte, which is barely enough to download one movie. So it is physically impossible to be born with excellent knowledge of English and ready for college entrance exams: the information cannot be pre-loaded into the baby's brain, since the basic information module (DNA) received from the parents has an insufficient amount of information storage.
The ability to create your own software tools for informatization makes Life 2.0 not only more developed than version 1.0, but also more flexible. When environmental conditions change, Life 1.0 adapts only through a slow evolution that lasts for generations. The life of version 2.0, on the other hand, can adapt to new conditions almost instantly by updating the computer software. For example, bacteria that often encounter antibiotics can develop drug resistance over many generations, and individual bacteria will not change their behavior at all; but a person, upon learning about a peanut allergy, will immediately change their behavior pattern in order to avoid this product.
This flexibility gives Life 2.0 an even greater advantage in terms of population size: although the information in our human DNA has not evolved so clearly over the past 50 thousand years, all the cumulative information stored in our brains, books and computers has given a burst of development. Having installed a software module that allows you to communicate using a complex spoken language, we provided conditions for copying the most useful information stored in the human brain into the brain of other people and guaranteeing its safety even in the event of the death of the original carrier. By installing a software module that allows us to read and write, we are able to store and transmit much more information than humans could ever remember. By developing software tools for informatization of the brain in order to create technology (through mastering the sciences and engineering), we have provided many inhabitants of the planet with access to most of the world's information with just a couple of clicks.
This flexibility has allowed Life 2.0 to dominate Earth. Liberated from genetic shackles, the body of human knowledge continues to expand at an accelerated pace, for every major scientific discovery gives impetus to the development of language, writing, printing, modern science, computers, the Internet, and so on. This ultra-fast cultural evolution of our shared informatics software has become a dominant force in shaping the future of humans, making our infinitely slow biological evolution practically irrelevant.
However, despite the powerful technologies available to us today, all life forms we know remain significantly limited by their own biological informatization hardware. None of them is able to live a million years, remember all the information from Wikipedia, understand all known sciences, or fly into space without a spacecraft. None of them can transform lifeless space into a multifaceted biosphere that will flourish for billions, and maybe trillions of years, allowing our universe to finally reach its potential and fully awaken. All this is impossible without the final update of life to version 3.0, capable of programming not only software, but also hardware informatization. In other words, at this stage, life becomes the mistress of its own destiny, finally throwing offall the evolutionary fetters that bound it.
The boundaries between the above three stages of life are sometimes indistinct. If bacteria are version 1.0 and humans are version 2.0, then mice, for example, could be classified as version 1.1; they can learn a lot, but it will never be enough for the development of a language or the invention of the Internet. In addition, the absence of language excludes the transmission to the next generation of most of what mice learn in life. Similarly, it can be argued that modern people should be perceived as life version 2.1: we can implant teeth, kneecaps and pacemakers, but we are not capable of a tenfold increase in height or a thousandfold increase in brain volume.
To summarize, from the point of view of life's ability to self-program, its development can be divided into three stages:
• Life 1.0 (biological stage): evolution of hardware and software informatization;
• Life 2.0 (cultural stage): evolution of informatization hardware and programming of most software;
• Life 3.0 (technological stage): programming hardware and software for informatization.
After 13.8 billion years of cosmic evolution, here on Earth the development process has accelerated dramatically: the life of version 1.0 originated about 4 billion years ago, the life of version 2.0 (humans) - about a hundred thousand years ago, and Life 3.0, according to many scientists, may appear in the next century - and, perhaps, in our century - thanks to advances in the development of artificial intelligence. What happens then? And what will become of us?
This, in fact, is the topic of this book.
Max Tegmark is known as "Mad Max" for his free thinking and passion for adventure. His research interests range from precise cosmology to the nature of finite reality, which is what his latest book, Our Mathematical Universe, is dedicated to. Tegmark is a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has written over 200 technical articles and has served as an expert on dozens of documentaries. In 2003, Science magazine recognized the joint achievements of Tegmark and the participants in the SDSS (Sloan Digital Sky Survey) project in the study of galaxy clusters as a breakthrough of the year.
Max Tegmark