Last December, I hosted a Talk at Google with Max Tegmark, a renowned scientific communicator and physicist at MIT who has accepted donations from Elon Musk to investigate the existential risk from advanced artificial intelligence.

The video recording is here. In it, Max discusses his thoughts on the fundamental nature of reality and what it means to be human in the age of AI.

A key learning is the ‘dual-use’ nature of AI systems – the same algorithms that we use to develop new image classification techniques or improve our video games can also be used for nefarious reasons (such as mass surveillance). It’s a challenging issue that should be discussed and managed actively within the research community.

*This talk was presented for Google’s Singularity Network.*

Full Bio:
Max Tegmark is a renowned scientific communicator and cosmologist, and has accepted donations from Elon Musk to investigate the existential risk from advanced artificial intelligence. He was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2012, won Science Magazine’s “Breakthrough of the Year” in 2003, and has over 200 publications, nine of which have been cited more than 500 times. He is also scientific director of the Foundational Questions Institute, wrote the bestseller Our Mathematical Universe, and is a Professor of Physics at MIT.