خاتمه

Epilogue

The Tale of the FLI Team

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

Isaac Asimov

Here we are, my dear reader, at the end of the book, after exploring the origin and fate of intelligence, goals and meaning. So how can we translate these ideas into action? What concretely should we do to make our future as good as possible? This is precisely the question I’m asking myself right now as I sit here in my window seat en route from San Francisco back to Boston on January 9, 2017, from the AI conference we just organized in Asilomar, so let me end this book by sharing my thoughts with you.

Meia is catching up on sleep next to me after the many short nights of preparing and organizing. Wow—what a wild week it’s been! We managed to bring almost all the people I’ve mentioned in this book together for a few days to this Puerto Rico sequel, including entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk and Larry Page and AI research leaders from academia and companies such as DeepMind, Google, Facebook, Apple, IBM, Microsoft and Baidu, as well as economists, legal scholars, philosophers and other amazing thinkers (see figure 9.1). The results superseded even my high expectations, and I’m feeling more optimistic about the future of life than I have in a long time. In this epilogue, I’m going to tell you why.

FLI Is Born

Ever since I learned about the nuclear arms race at age fourteen, I’ve been concerned that the power of our technology was growing faster than the wisdom with which we manage it. I therefore decided to sneak a chapter about this challenge into my first book, Our Mathematical Universe, even though the rest of it was primarily about physics. I made a New Year’s resolution for 2014 that I was no longer allowed to complain about anything without putting some serious thought into what I could personally do about it, and I kept my pledge during my book tour that January: Meia and I did lots of brainstorming about starting some sort of nonprofit organization focused on improving the future of life through technological stewardship.

She insisted that we give it a positive name as different as possible from “Doom & Gloom Institute” and “Let’s-Worry-about-the-Future Institute.” Since Future of Humanity Institute was already taken, we converged on the Future of Life Institute (FLI), which had the added advantage of being more inclusive. On January 22, the book tour took us to Santa Cruz, and as the California Sun set over the Pacific, we enjoyed dinner with our old friend Anthony Aguirre and persuaded him to join forces with us. He’s not only one of the wisest and most idealistic people I know, but also someone who’s managed to put up with running another nonprofit organization, the Foundational Questions Institute (see http://fqxi.org), with me for over a decade.

The following week, the tour took me to London. Since the future of AI was very much on my mind, I reached out to Demis Hassabis, who graciously invited me to visit DeepMind’s headquarters. I was awestruck by how much they’d grown since he visited me at MIT two years earlier. Google had just bought them for about $650 million, and seeing their vast office landscape filled with brilliant minds pursuing Demis’ audacious goal to “solve intelligence” gave me a visceral feeling that success was a real possibility.

The next evening, I spoke with my friend Jaan Tallinn using Skype, the software he’d helped create. I explained our FLI vision, and an hour later, he’d decided to take a chance on us, funding us at up to $100,000 a year! Few things touch me more than when someone places more trust in me than I’ve earned, so it meant the world to me when a year later, after the Puerto Rico conference I mentioned in chapter 1, he joked that this was the best investment he’d ever made.

The next day, my publisher had left a gap in my schedule, which I filled with a visit to the London Science Museum. After having obsessed about the past and future of intelligence for so long, I suddenly felt that I was walking through a physical manifestation of my thoughts. They’d assembled a fantastic collection of stuff representing our growth of knowledge, from Stephenson’s Rocket locomotive to the Model T Ford, a life-size Apollo 11 lunar lander replica and computers dating all the way from Babbage’s “Difference Engine” mechanical calculator to present-day hardware. They also had an exhibit about the history of our understanding of the mind, from Galvano’s frog-leg experiments to neurons, EEG and fMRI.

I very rarely cry, but that’s what I did on the way out—and in a tunnel full of pedestrians, no less, en route to the South Kensington tube station. Here were all these people going about their lives blissfully unaware of what I was thinking. First we humans discovered how to replicate some natural processes with machines, making our own wind and lightning, and our own mechanical horsepower. Gradually, we started realizing that our bodies were also machines. Then the discovery of nerve cells started blurring the borderline between body and mind. Then we started building machines that could outperform not only our muscles, but our minds as well. So in parallel with discovering what we are, are we inevitably making ourselves obsolete? That would be poetically tragic.

This thought scared me, but it also strengthened my resolve to keep my New Year’s resolution. I felt that we needed one more person to complete our team of FLI founders, who’d spearhead a team of idealistic young volunteers. The logical choice was Viktoriya Krakovna, a brilliant Harvard grad student who’d not only won a silver medal in the International Mathematics Olympiad, but also founded the Citadel, a house for about a dozen young idealists who wanted reason to play a greater role in their lives and the world. Meia and I invited her over to our place five days later to tell her about our vision, and before we’d finished the sushi, FLI had been born.