Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Imagine the universe as a vast stage where matter gradually awakens to intelligence. Intelligence is not a mysterious gift but the ability to accomplish complex goals, a definition broad enough to include everything from simple bacteria to superhuman AI. This spectrum of intelligence defies the idea that it can be measured by a single number like IQ. Instead, it’s a rich landscape where different entities excel at different tasks. A chess program might dominate the game board but fail miserably at recognizing faces or understanding language, while a child learns a variety of skills over time, adapting and growing.

This realization leads us to a fascinating paradox discovered decades ago—Moravec’s paradox. While humans find high-level reasoning and arithmetic challenging, these are relatively easy for machines. Conversely, tasks like visual recognition and motor coordination, which humans perform effortlessly, have long been elusive for computers. This happens because evolution has finely tuned our brains to perform survival-critical sensorimotor tasks with incredible efficiency, dedicating a large portion of neural real estate to these functions. Computers, lacking this evolutionary heritage, must expend enormous computational resources to mimic these “easy” tasks.

Consider the implications: the rise of AI has been marked by machines conquering narrow domains such as arithmetic and games like chess and Go, but only recently have they begun to master perceptual tasks like image captioning and speech recognition. This progression is like a rising sea flooding the foothills of human competence, slowly submerging tasks once thought uniquely human.

Understanding intelligence as a broad, goal-oriented ability helps us appreciate the challenges in building artificial general intelligence. It is not enough to excel in one task; true intelligence must be flexible and capable across many domains. This sets the stage for our journey into AI’s present capabilities and future potential.

As we move forward, we will explore how matter can embody intelligence through memory, computation, and learning, revealing the substrate-independent nature of mind itself.