Get Your Head Out of the Stars And Up Your A**: A Loving Critique of Max Tegmark

“It’s not our Universe giving meaning to conscious beings, but conscious beings giving meaning to our universe. So the very first goal on our wish list for the future should be retaining (and hopefully expanding) biological and/or artificial consciousness in our cosmos, rather than driving it extinct.” (Life 3.0, p. 313)

I couldn’t control my ass.

Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), the Internet told me. It started when I stepped on an express train to Osaka, a 30-minute ride. I forgot to bring a book and I had yet to form a dependency on my phone. All I could do was stand and wait. Leaning against the wall, watching the blurry buildings disappear, a worry entered, “What if I have to go to the bathroom?” Dull wooden spoons pushed up against my bladder and I felt the area around my hips loosen. My heart got caught up in my throat and choked on my pulse. Everything around me was foreign: the signs, the words, the people. The metal tomb rocked and rolled along without me in mind. The train turned impossibly large. Expanding out into the sky and then the stars. My comically small existence came crashing into me and the wooden spoons pressed further.

What had I eaten for breakfast?

A coffee and a banana.

Did I shit before I left the house?

No.

I’m doomed.

Shoulders tightened up against me. Salarymen sharing their gingivitis-tainted breath. If I had had a brown paper bag, I would have started sucking and heaving air through it.

That was the beginning.

IBS came up again and again, pretty much anywhere outside the apartment. My first order of business at any new establishment was to check for the toilet. Once I knew a bathroom was available, my bowels disappeared from conscious thought.

The body has a funny way of revealing your mental state.

When my hair started falling out, I visited the doctor. He looked at the small bald spot above the ear, shrugged, exclaimed ストレス, and prescribed a beer.

The endoscopy was much less fun. They don’t knock you out in Japan, they just start shoving a camera down your throat. My ass acted up real bad before that procedure. I took about five trips to the bathroom before they brought the cool metal snake out, held me down, rammed, rooted, and exclaimed, “ストレス.”

I was cancelling meetups with friends, afraid I would heave to poop at the wrong time. I was stuck in my head and my head was stuck on the toilet. People back home understood. They recommended a psychiatrist along with some medication to manage my anxiety. Real American. To be honest, I was ready to resort to medication.

And then I found the gods.

See, podcasts were starting to become a thing and a course came into my life: Philosophy 6 at the University of Berkley: Man, God, and Society in Western Literature with Hubert Dreyfus. The word philosophy intimidates me. I always had an interest but never felt like my simple head sponge was up to the task of deciphering the information into anything meaningful. The professor’s creaky kind voice drew me in. Bert seemed completely absent of confidence, as if he were just now coming across the topic he had been teaching for over thirty years and would not possibly be able to finish without the help of his audience.

Uncertainty is not what you would expect from a philosophy professor at Berkley.

Here’s the gist of the 30+ hours of lectures: Your goal, your goal in life, is for you to be at your best. Now, that sounds underwhelming. Let’s be more specific. How can you be at your best? Well, the course lays out the argument by going through different works of art across time and culture: The Odyssey, The Oresteia, The Gospel of John, The Divine Comedy, and Moby Dick. These masterpieces reveal that to be at your best is a cultural phenomenon. Your culture has a big impact on what it means to be at your best. And the rational, scientific culture we have inherited, the one from the Enlightenment, Descartes lingering effect, is a world of subjects and objects and we human subjects dominate these objects. But the ancients could see something different, a different version of someone being at their best and it was connected to moods and developing a receptivity to the world. One way to live a good life is to have a lot of different experiences with a lot of different cultures and use that knowledge to develop a sensitivity to the place you find yourself in. Take a baseball game, for example. The home team hits a home run and everyone whooshes up at the same time. That’s a mood and a terrific one to be a part of. If you can get in touch with moods and learn when to trust them, they will lead to meaning. And, by the way, that is what masters do, masters attune themselves to their craft. It’s a dance. They are not subjects controlling objects. The craftsman is not a man with a hammer, but instead, the craftsman, the hammer, and the wood are all one, engaging in a dance that can not exist without an attuned one guiding the interaction. Through experience, the carpenter wielding the hammer has developed a receptivity that bring out the best in the wood.

I kept listening to this soft weak voice. Profess Dreyfus. Being at my best sounded like a good thing to be. It sounded like a life worth living, and my ass was getting in the way. Pretty quickly, with my eye on having a life of experience, meaning, and receptivity, my IBS went away. My own needs just stopped being that important. I was much more interested in understanding the situation, rather than my own psychology.

That was 15 years ago. I have traveled, married, started a family, grew a business, and did a host of other successful things that would not have been possible while obsessing over myself. Instead, I work to understand the moment, the people in it, and the culture I happen to be in. Sometimes that is a culture of friends at a bar with a few drinks in some hole in the wall in Brooklyn. Other times, I am teaching a group of four-year-olds at a private school in 大阪. Or when I have a camera pointed at my face and filming and I have to play teacher for a YouTube audience of a few thousand strangers I will never meet. These situations have required me to develop a receptivity to the time and place I am in. To be at my best, I can’t be thinking about my bowels but about where I am.

This, for me, constitutes a good life. You must be grounded in your place, working on a skill, developing it over time and having a receptivity to the relationships you build between objects, habits, and people.

The world that has preoccupied my life has been immediate. My hands, the ones I look at now as I type. They don’t work on wood or pluck on strings but punch buttons on the computer. I was lucky. I lived at a time when a computer could still foster craftsmanship. I made products that were meaningful to me and to others.

Here I am.

My wife’s hand, warm, clutched in my own before we drift to other worlds, me to the soccer coaches and her to the moms. I go once a week to help out. The kids try to follow my broken Japanese, and the coaches know to keep their instructions short. There is trust. I am consistent. I look people in the eye. I comment on new haircuts and untied shoelaces. When the field is muddy, I grab a rake and even out the pitch, no one asked. During the game, I pay special attention to the keeper since he doesn’t know the rules. He was looking for his mom before the game, his eyes darting around as I shoved the gloves on his hand. “お母さん向こうに。” He sees her and smiles. 心配しないで。頑張って。I place an arm around his shoulder and walk him to the net, tell him where to stand, toss a few balls, encourage him to do the crab walk and leave with a thumbs up as the whistle blows and the game starts. On the sidelines, I slide in close to the kids on the bench and cheer. Calling out names and saying the same handful of stock phrases, しんちゃん取り返すぞう！The kids drift back to the moment and follow along, even when they scream and I cover my ears and wince. They smile and proceed to scream louder. I breathe in, everything working, in motion, moving, responding, moving again, looking up at the sky, taking it in, the moment, here, look at that sky, all that blue, and your wife behind you, tittering with the other mothers, and your daughter is there, glancing up to wave from her manga, and this is what’s important, moving, predicting, smiling, encouraging, being there, being here.

Max Tegmark. I should get to him. His name is in the title, after all.

He is a physicist and cosmologist at MIT. Any -ist at MIT is a big deal. I’m punching way, way, way above my weight class.

I like the guy. I watched a couple of his interviews. He seems level-headed and genuinely concerned about Artificial Intelligence. He proposed a 6-month pause on AI, a widely criticized measure, but I respected the effort. He was diplomatic. He could see the arguments from both sides. A pause was the best shot at slapping some regulation on AI before it does irrevocable harm.

It inspired me to pick up his book, Life 3.0. Impressive. There’s a lot to the book and I recommend it to anyone interested in the topic. Some parts, however, bothered me, one in particular. He had a list in this book, a list of possible future scenarios of a world with artificial intelligence:

• Libertarian utopia
• Benevolent dictator
• Egalitarian utopia
• Gatekeeper
• Protector God
• Enslaved God
• Conquerors
• Zookeeper
• 1984
• Reversion
• Self-destruction

Pause.

Take this list in.

Consider the scale: the future of all humanity.

Think about you. Go ahead while you put rice on the stove for dinner in a suburb of Mumbai or turn on the TV while snuggling up with your new wife in your basement apartment in Kuala Lumpur, or as you check to make sure the kids are asleep and safe upstairs in your quiet ranch on the midwestern plains.

At the same time there is a physicist in his office at MIT hunched over a laptop, punching buttons and writing a book where he outlines the 50/50 chance of an incredible or horrible future based on technology he wants to foster “the right way.” Now, Max is not creating this technology. He is an academic that runs in the same circles as people like Sam Altman, Nick Bostram, and Elon Musk. I am using him as an example of an American researcher who thinks on the scale of all humanity and believes he knows the best course to take, and it involves super-intelligent beings, cyborgs, and transcendent humans “done right.”

Again, let me repeat this crazy shit because I think the implications fail to register the first time. A small group of Americans are working towards a future where there will be:

• Super intelligent entities (probably)
• Cyborgs (probably)
• Enslaved humans (maybe)
• Extinction (maybe)

I’m paraphrasing, but a sentence out of Max Tegmark’s mouth went something like this, “Look, guys, Artificial Intelligence is going to be more powerful than human beings, so we have to get it right.”

‘So we have to get it right?!’ What a fucking conclusion!

I mean, I would kind of respect the hubris if the consequences didn’t entail the extinction of humanity. The scale on which he thinks has eschewed his calculations. AI is a zero-sum game. Humanity loses.

Remember, he called for a pause, not a ban.

For Max, AI is an opportunity, a dangerous one certainly, but a necessary one if we are to thrive across the cosmos and spread consciousness.

No thanks.

I’m good.

We live in abundance. There is no doubt. Our world is vast. Knowledge is more available than ever. We have science to thank for that, but we must recognize our peril. Artificial Intelligence will either destroy or replace us. There may be a short-term golden age, but it will not last. And we will not be in control.

Whatever happens, we will not be in control.

And how did this happen? How did we get to such a maddening place? Why is it so hard to get out of when the writing is so clearly on the wall? Even my cab driver told me this is the end.

It’s the problem of scale, of the goal of thinking we need to spread our consciousness into the cosmos or to become a cyborg. That was never humanity’s goal, that’s your goal Max. Take a poll. Humanity doesn’t want it.

Unlike the groceries we choose to eat, the device we choose to buy, or the place we choose to live, we will have no choice in the face of Super-intelligence. It will write better than us. Compose better than us. Teach better than us. Draw better than us. Work faster than us. Raise our kids better than us.

Without all the sound and fury.

Max is thinking about consciousness throughout the cosmos.

I am thinking about the untied shoelace, the untucked shirt, the new haircut, and the thoughts of the kids on the soccer field. Imperfect. Trying. Working together to understand each other. Engaging in the dance. Finding meaning in our mishaps and moving on. Him trying his best and me trying my best. In the moment, moving, appreciating, thinking, tweaking, helping. My hands. His needs. The moment. Here. Meaning is here.

I hope you find your meaning, Max. It’s not in the cosmos. It’s up your ass.