
The narration is quite good with somewhat tricky material.The question of how to define life is notoriously controversial. Thus thinking about AI Safety now is a good idea.

Tegmark (and others) point out that AI could transition from weak-AI to super-intelligent AI in just a few hours or days. One of the key issues is that many AI researchers ignore the safety issues as AI is currently so weak safety does not seem to be a realistic concern. Nevertheless this is a worth the time and I would recommend it to anyone who is interested in AI and the potential dangers involved. I prefer realists to optimists or pessimists. The author admits he is an unapologetic optimist which influences his writing in quite a few places. As others have noted there is a lot of name dropping and self-congratulation in this book.

It seems this is because if this distance between civilizations was small we certainly would have noticed other civilizations. Others have pointed out Tegmark seems to believe it is both likely (and preferable) that we are the lone civilization in all the universe. There are lots of interesting ideas, many make sense, some are kind of odd. This is a odd book that seems to be lobbying the reader to accept, and get involved in, the AI Safety movement. It doesn't shy away from the full range of viewpoints or from the most controversial issues - from superintelligence to meaning, consciousness, and the ultimate physical limits on life in the cosmos.

What sort of future do you want? This book empowers you to join what may be the most important conversation of our time.

How can we grow our prosperity through automation without leaving people lacking income or purpose? What career advice should we give today's kids? How can we make future AI systems more robust so that they do what we want without crashing, malfunctioning, or getting hacked? Should we fear an arms race in lethal autonomous weapons? Will machines eventually outsmart us at all tasks, replacing humans on the job market and perhaps altogether? Will AI help life flourish like never before or give us more power than we can handle? How will artificial intelligence affect crime, war, justice, jobs, society, and our very sense of being human? The rise of AI has the potential to transform our future more than any other technology - and there's nobody better qualified or situated to explore that future than Max Tegmark, an MIT professor who's helped mainstream research on how to keep AI beneficial.
