In the penultimate chapter, Tegmark discusses the nature of goals, their origin and development, and the types of goals that we should have for AI. He describes goal determination as the “thorniest” issue in AI research (249). His guiding question this time: “Should we give AI goals, and is so, whose goals?” (249). Like Chapter 6, this chapter heavily relies upon concepts from physics.

Tegmark believes that goal-oriented behavior is embedded in the laws of physics and is a fundamental part of our reality. He notes that one of the two ways we can describe the actions of nature is via a process of optimization. Connectedly, he discusses the heat death of the universe through entropy, a tendency of the world to become “maximally messy” as described through the second law of thermodynamics (251). He describes how gravity helped form the universe into recognizable places, like galaxies. When discussing the “dissipation-driven adaptation” of any group of particles, he comes to the following conclusion: “nature appears to have a built-in goal of producing self-organizing systems that are increasingly complex and lifelike, and this goal is hardwired into the very laws of physics.

He then makes the jump from physics to biology and explains the way that goal-like behavior “evolves” in the cases of living organisms.