There are twelve ways a world with a machine smarter than us could turn out, and the physicist Max Tegmark has written them all down. Every one of them costs something.
This film walks through all twelve, taken from his 2017 book Life 3.0: the Libertarian Utopia, the Egalitarian Utopia, Descendants, the Benevolent Dictator, the Protector God, the Enslaved God, the Gatekeeper, the Zookeeper, the Conquerors, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Reversion and Self-destruction. Along the way it asks how fast a superintelligence might arrive, why a machine that does exactly what it is told can still go badly wrong, and the four questions that sort one future from another. Some of the twelve sound like utopias, and they are not clean wins either.
Running order
- 0:00 Twelve ways this ends
- 0:47 How fast it arrives
- 1:14 A machine that does exactly what it is told
- 1:50 Four questions
- 2:15 Libertarian Utopia
- 2:48 Egalitarian Utopia
- 3:13 Descendants
- 3:45 Benevolent Dictator
- 4:08 Protector God
- 4:28 Enslaved God
- 4:56 Gatekeeper
- 5:19 Zookeeper
- 5:39 Conquerors
- 5:57 Nineteen Eighty-Four
- 6:21 Reversion
- 6:37 Self-destruction
- 7:01 Which one did you pick?
Credit where it is owed
An Uncommon Sense picture, inspired by Life 3.0 by Max Tegmark. The three-stages framework and the twelve-scenario taxonomy are his, published openly by the Future of Life Institute. The ideas are his. The words and the pictures are ours.