Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google Artificial intelligence (AI) The Observer Max Tegmark: ‘Machines taking control doesn’t have to be a bad thing’ The artificial intelligence expert’s new book, Life 3.
0, urges us to act now to decide our future, rather than risk it being decided for us Max Tegmark in his lab at MIT.
 Tegmark in his lab at MIT.
 Photograph: The Washington Post/Getty Images Artificial intelligence (AI) The Observer Max Tegmark: ‘Machines taking control doesn’t have to be a bad thing’ The artificial intelligence expert’s new book, Life 3.
0, urges us to act now to decide our future, rather than risk it being decided for us Andrew Anthony Sat 16 Sep ‘17 19.
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 Once we understood how muscles worked we built much better muscles in the form of machines, and maybe when we understand how our brains work we’ll build much better brains and become utterly obsolete.
” Tegmark’s melancholy insight was not some idle hypothesis, but instead an intellectual challenge to himself at the dawn of the age of artificial intelligence.
 What will become of humanity, he was moved to ask, if we manage to create an intelligence that outstrips our own?
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 Tegmark also set about writing a book, which he has just published, entitled Life 3.
0: Being Human in an Age of Artificial Intelligence.
 Having previously written about such abstruse and highly theoretical concepts as the multiverse, Tegmark is not a man daunted by the prospect of informed but imaginative speculation.
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 And world governments should include this as a major part of computer science research.
” Preventing the rise of a superintelligence by abandoning research in artificial intelligence is not, he believes, a credible approach.
 “Every single way that 2017 is better than the stone age is because of technology.