[b]Max Tegmark
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. [/b]
Life 3.0? Buy the book.
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.
First, is this true? Second, why does it matter?
As the ancient Greeks replaced myth-based explanations with mechanistic models of the Solar System, their emphasis shifted from asking why to asking how.
On the other hand, even today “why?” is still out there.
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.
Or [today] the parabolic orbits of weapons of mass destruction.
Elon Musk argued that what we need right now from governments isn’t oversight but insight: specifically, technically capable people in government positions who can monitor AI’s progress and steer it if warranted down the road.
Does this sound like Donald Trump to you?
“The enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and there is no rational explanation for it." —Eugene Wigner, 1960
God, maybe?