economics was largely a form of intellectual prostitution where you got rewarded for saying what the powers that be wanted to hear. - Max Tegmark

A great way for a particle arrangement to further this goal is to make copies of itself, to produce more energy absorbers. There are many known examples of such emergent self-replication: for example, vortices in turbulent fluids can make copies of themselves, and clusters of microspheres can coax nearby spheres into forming identical clusters. At some point, a particular arrangement of particles got so good at copying itself that it could do so almost indefinitely by extracting energy and raw materials from its environment. We call such a particle arrangement life.

Suppose that humanity flourishes thanks to the enslaved-god AI. Would this be ethical? If the AI has subjective conscious experiences, then would it feel that “life is suffering,” as Buddha put it, and it was doomed to a frustrating eternity of obeying the whims of inferior intellects? After all, the AI “boxing” we explored in the previous chapter could also be called “imprisonment in solitary confinement.” Nick Bostrom terms it mind crime to make a conscious AI suffer.4 The “White Christmas” episode of the Black Mirror TV series gives a great example. Indeed, the TV series Westworld features humans torturing and murdering AIs without moral qualms even when they inhabit human-like bodies.

Since there can be no meaning without consciousness, it’s not our Universe giving meaning to conscious beings, but conscious beings giving meaning to our Universe.