PERSON
Max Tegmark
The MIT cosmologist who gave the AI safety conversation its most precise conceptual architecture—Life 1.0, 2.0, 3.0; the landscape of futures; the wisdom race—and who insists, with a physicist’s urgency, that the choices being made right now by the generation alive at the threshold will determine the character of intelligence in the cosmos.
Max Tegmark is the physicist of the threshold. Born in Sweden in 1967, trained in physics at MIT where he has remained, he began his career as a cosmologist working on the large-scale structure of the universe—and never entirely left that vantage. When he turned his attention to artificial intelligence, he brought with him the physicist’s instinct for the most fundamental level of description, the cosmologist’s habit of thinking in geological and cosmic timescales, and an unwillingness to treat the present moment as anything other than what it is: the approach to the most consequential threshold in the history of life on Earth. His
Life 1.0 / 2.0 / 3.0 taxonomy—organizing the history of life around the capacity for self-modification at the hardware and software levels—gave the AI safety conversation a conceptual vocabulary of unusual precision, and his co-founding of the
Future of