Max Tegmark’s Prometheus

May 28

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/imagine: hyper realistic isometric annotated vector infographic of a deep learning artificial intelligence system of computers designed to create virtual movies for humans, 8k, --ar 16:9 --v 5.1

In Life 3.0, Max Tegmark describes both the unprecedented promise and terrifying fear of artificial intelligence. A team of engineers have created Prometheus, an initially harmless and subservient virtual assistant tasked with helping out with all the things humans just don’t want to do any more. Prometheus tells us the weather, helps us get where we’re going, and reminds us to buy milk. But over time Prometheus starts to learn. Trained on increasingly complex data sets, it swallows not just the internet, but all of human knowledge. In this journey, it begins to create things of its own. My research will take one aspect of what Prometheus creates, its own movies and entertainment, which learn their audiences, get increasingly personalized and granular to individual tastes, and are predicated upon maximizing a user’s length of engagement. Tegmark describes it as:

’Like a human child, Prometheus could learn whatever it wanted from the data it had access to'.’

’Making movies was harder. Writing a screenplay that humans found interesting was just as hard as writing a book, requiring a detailed understanding of human society and what humans found entertaining. Turning the screenplay into a final video file required massive amounts of ray tracing of simulated actors and the complex scenes they moved through, simulated voices, the production of compelling musical soundtracks and so on. As of Sunday morning, Prometheus could watch a two-hour movie in about a minute, which included reading any book it was based on and all the online reviews and ratings. The Omegas noticed that after Prometheus had binge-watched a few hundred films, it started to get quite good at predicting what sort of reviews a movie would get and how it would appeal to different audiences. Indeed, it learned to write its own movie reviews in a way they felt demonstrated real insight, commenting on everything from the plots to the acting to technical details such as lighting and camera angles. They took this to mean that when Prometheus made its own films, it would know what success meant.’

’… they encountered something reminiscent of the online entertainment services Netflix and Hulu but with interesting differences. All the animated series were new ones they’d never heard of … each ending in a way that left you eager to find out what happened in the next episode. And they were cheaper than the competition. The first episode of each series was free, and you could watch the others for forty-nine cents each, with discounts for the whole series.’

’During the first two weeks of Prometheus, its moviemaking skills improved rapidly, in terms not only of film quality, but also of better algorithms for character simulation and ray tracing, which greatly reduced the cloud-computing cost to make each new episode'.’

’Some commentators were impressed by the fact that it wasn’t merely the soundtracks that were multilingual, but the videos themselves: for example, when a character spoke Italian, the mouth motions matched the Italian words, as did characteristically Italian hand gestures. Although Prometheus was now perfectly capable of making movies with simulated actors indistinguishable from humans, the Omegas avoided this to not tip their hand. They did, however, launch many series with semi-realistic animated human characters, in genres competing with live-action TV shows and movies.’

’Many fans found the characters and plots cleverer and more interesting than even Hollywood’s most expensive big-screen productions, and were delighted that they could watch them more affordably.’

’Within a year of the first launch, they had added remarkably good news channels to their lineup all over the globe. As opposed to their other channels, these were deliberately designed to lose money, and were pitched as a public service.’

’Through a global web service that paid anybody who revealed something newsworthy, from local corruption to a heartwarming event, they were usually the first to break a story. At least that’s what people believed: in fact, they were often first because stories attributed to citizen journalists had been discovered by Prometheus via real-time monitoring of the internet.’

’Their unprecedented willingness to lose money enabled remarkably diligent regional and local news coverage, where investigative journalists often exposed scandals that truly engaged their viewers. Whenever a country was strongly divided politically and accustomed to partisan news, they would launch one news channel catering to each faction, ostensibly owned by different companies, and gradually gain the trust of that faction.’

’Prometheus usually provided excellent advice in such situations, clarifying which politicians needed to be presented in a good light and which (usually corrupt local ones) could be exposed. Prometheus also provided invaluable recommendations for what strings to pull, whom to bribe, and how best to do so.’

’… there seemed to be a concerted push toward reducing global threats. For example, the risks of nuclear war were suddenly being discussed all over the place. Several blockbuster movies featured scenarios where global nuclear was started by accident or on purpose and dramatized the dystopian aftermath with nuclear winter, infrastructure collapse and mass starvation. Slick new documentaries detailed how nuclear winter could impact every country. Scientists and politicians advocating nuclear de-escalation were given ample airtime, not least to discuss the results of several new studies on what helpful measures could be taken - studies funded by scientific organizations that had received large donations from new tech companies.’

Tegmark, M. (2017). Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Vintage Books, Random House, New York.

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