Max Tegmark

Foreword

By Edo Segal

The calculation I could not argue with was not about productivity.

It was about time. Specifically, the time remaining between where we stand and where the decisions stop being ours to make.

I built You On AI around a feeling — the vertigo of standing at a threshold, the simultaneous terror and exhilaration of watching the ground shift. I described the river of intelligence, the beaver's dam, the candle of consciousness flickering in an unconscious universe. I meant every word. But I was building with metaphors, and metaphors, however true they feel, do not tell you how fast the water is rising.

Max Tegmark does the math.

He is a physicist at MIT who has spent the last decade doing something that most physicists consider beneath them