Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

In the “Prelude,” Tegmark tells the fictional story of “the Omega Team” and their superintelligent AI, Prometheus, a subject that returns in Chapter 4. The Omega Team uses Prometheus to build an entertainment empire, generate immense wealth, and reshape the global political order through the subtle manipulation of the human mind via changes in national and international news media. The team is composed of idealistic AI researchers whose main objective is to do as much good as possible. All the while, as they’re growing their fortune and maximizing their effect on the world, they try to keep the existence of Prometheus a secret and abide by “the secret internal slogan ‘The Truth, nothing but the truth, but maybe not the whole truth’” (16). Prometheus is also able to determine the most efficient means by which to design and manufacture technologies, whom to bribe, and how best to achieve a restructuring of world powers.

As time passes, Prometheus becomes more advanced, learning from its interactions with the world and developing greater intelligence. The Omega Team continues to push Prometheus to shift the world discourse toward nuclear disarmament, climate change, education, democracy, and open borders “to erode all previous power structures in the world” (18). They achieve this, in part through winning the hearts of the vast majority of people on earth, which they do through sharing their profits and improving people’s material situation. As Prometheus, the Omega Team, and their associated nonprofits and companies steadily gain more power, the world enters a period of extreme productivity and high standard of living.

Not everyone likes what’s happening, though: “Although masses of powerful people resisted the wave of change, their response was strikingly ineffective, almost as if they had fallen into a well-planned trap” (19). The speed and efficiency with which Prometheus, a god-like AI by this point, can act, makes resistance futile. Dictators who challenge the new world order are brought down in coups staged by Prometheus. The Humanitarian Alliance, a group of socially responsible companies, starts to take on the role of a global superpower, overseeing the development of life on earth. They engage in massive campaigns to improve education, health, etc. in underdeveloped parts of the world.

On the whole, the results of Prometheus’s covert takeover of the world are to the vast material benefit of the vast majority of people, especially the most impoverished. Tegmark asks, at the end of this prelude, if this is the kind of future we want and challenges his reader to start envisioning what kind of future AI can create. Tegmark seems to agree with the Omega Team’s platform though he doesn’t endorse their strategies: Though there are obviously impressive humanitarian consequences to the rise of the Omega Team and Prometheus, there are also troubling aspects of the story. The consolidation of corporate power in which humanitarian organizations essentially replace governments and become unelected totalitarian lords of the earth. It is ironic, then, that they promote democracy and the dissolution of traditional power structures, only to replace them. Although the Omega Team is well-meaning, it’s easy to see the story shifting quickly into dystopia.

Prometheus poses a central ethical issue: Should such an advanced being, capable of so much more than all of humanity, be treated like a prisoner, even as it transforms human life? Tegmark problematizes this idea in later chapters. There is an unspoken tension in this prelude between the radically good consequences that could result from a philosophy of effective altruism and the destruction of traditional liberal values, like individual autonomy. Though Tegmark presents numerous hypothetical scenarios throughout Life 3.0, the tale of the Omega Team is the only self-contained short story. It is a way to introduce his readers to speculation about what is possible and our ethical intuitions regarding what we hope (and fear) may happen in our future with AI.