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I was introduced to Max Tegmark some years ago by his MIT colleague Alan Guth, the father of the inflationary universe. A distinguished theoretical physicist and cosmologist himself, Max’s principal concern nowadays is the looming existential risk posed by the creation of an AGI (artificial general intelligence—that is, one that matches human intelligence). Four years ago, Max co-founded, with Jaan Tallinn and others, the Future of Life Institute (FLI), which bills itself as “an outreach organization working to ensure that tomorrow’s most powerful technologies are beneficial for humanity.” While on a book tour in London, he was in the midst of planning for FLI, and he admits being driven to tears in a tube station after a trip to the London Science Museum, with its exhibitions spanning the gamut of humanity’s technological achievements. Was all that impressive progress in vain?

FLI’s scientific advisory board includes Elon Musk, Frank Wilczek, George Church, Stuart Russell, and the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, who dreamed up an oft-quoted Gedankenexperiment that results in a world full of paper clips and nothing else, produced by an (apparently) well-meaning AGI who was just following orders. The Institute sponsors conferences (Puerto Rico 2015, Asilomar 2017) on AI safety issues and in 2018 instituted a grants competition focusing on research in aid of maximizing the societal benefits of AGI.

While Max is sometimes listed—by the non-cognoscenti—on the side of the scaremongers, he believes, like Frank Wilczek, in a future that will immensely benefit from AGI if, in the attempt to create it, we can keep the human species from being sidelined.

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