This week, Instagram feeds have been taken over by carousels of futuristic images, of fine-featured selfies, people turned into fairies, astronauts or Renaissance paintings. On LinkedIn, opinions were divided between those who applauded the ability to generate revenue at scale – since lensa.ai charges for images – and those who brought criticism to the terms of use of the application, which apparently include the irrevocable transfer of images shared.
This whole discussion reminded me of the book Life 3.0 by Max Tegmark, a theoretical physicist at MIT. I’m not going to lie – this is the hardest book I’ve ever read. It has a chapter that goes from Dyson Spheres to Cosmic Engineering. In another, he discusses Aristotle, the Bhagavad Gita, Utilitarianism, and the ultimate goal of having such a superintelligence. My mind spun like it was in a black hole—if heads turn in a black hole. I think I missed that class.
After all – quantum-sociological trips aside – what is this Life 3.0?
To explain, I’ll go back to Life 1.0, which the author defines as purely biological life. Like bacteria. Organisms that grow and reproduce but change very little, only through natural selection, over many, many generations. They are organisms that do not have the ability to change their software or their hardware.
Life 2.0 is the one we live today. Not only do we survive, but as humans we are flexible, we learn new skills, we adapt – as if we were upgrading our software. From life 2.0, language, the press, modern science, the internet were born. Our biological hardware, however, still has many limitations. We may even wear a pacemaker, but we don’t have the capacity to live a million years, to memorize all of Wikipedia, or to make a radical transformation and become 10,000 times smaller (unless you live in a certain Marvel).
This is Vida 3.0: the one that has the ability to change not only its own software, but also the hardware. And this is where Artificial Intelligence comes in. We’ve already created machines with neural networks that update themselves: self-taught computers that learn to play chess. It is “narrow AI”, a taste of what will be “Artificial General Intelligence”, or AGI – when machines will have the ability to perform cognitive tasks as well as humans. From there, we could have superintelligence and beings with Life 3.0. Maybe even in this century.
We still don’t know if it’s a matter of “IF” or “WHEN”. Some are skeptical, pessimistic and see the discussion as hasty. Others believe this is the natural next step for humanity – and they believe it’s for the better. In the middle is the author – and well-known names like Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk – who believe that this could be a positive move, but that it needs to be studied and discussed before the technology is developed.
The only certainty we have today is that technology will transform the way we live and work. The author’s advice for those starting a career is to stick to areas where machines are no good – those involving people, lack of predictability and creativity. Would design be one of them? When looking at the images created by lensa.ai, it is worth asking if this advice – from 2017 – is still valid?
Cover image: Prisma Labs/Reproduction
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