If you're driving down a highway at fifty-five miles per hour and suddenly see a squirrel a few meters in front of you, it's too late for you to do a… - Max Tegmark

I'll be the first to admit that we ultimately don't know what's going on exactly with quantum mechanics, and my personal guess... is that even quantum mechanics is probably an emergent theory, maybe an approximation of... something deeper. Maybe we can get it out of GU somehow, but... I also would guess... the opposite of Roger Penrose... that gravity doesn't really have much to do with this. I think you can... be in a spaceship far away... from any... important gravitating objects and do your little quantum experiments with a Schrödinger-like apparatus and you would get all the same fascinating things happening. So... ignoring gravity... ignoring relativistic effects altogether, you still have this thing people love fighting about. Does the wave function collapse or not, and that's why I'm so interested in this kind of discussion...

After DeepMind’s breakthrough, there’s no reason why a robot can’t ultimately use some variant of deep reinforcement learning to teach itself to walk without help from human programmers: all that’s needed is a system that gives it points whenever it makes progress. Robots in the real world similarly have the potential to learn to swim, fly, play ping-pong, fight and perform a nearly endless list of other motor tasks without help from human programmers. To speed things up and reduce the risk of getting stuck or damaging themselves during the learning process, they would probably do the first stages of their learning in virtual reality.

The question of how to define life is notoriously controversial. Competing definitions abound, some of which include highly specific requirements such as being composed of cells, which might disqualify both future intelligent machines and extraterrestrial civilizations. Since we don’t want to limit our thinking about the future of life to the species we’ve encountered so far, let’s instead define life very broadly, simply as a process that can retain its complexity and replicate.