Author posts
We’re smart enough to create intelligent machines. But are we wise enough?
What is the danger in creating something smarter than you? You can't control it, and pretty soon it could control you.
What it will take for AI to surpass human intelligence
Artificial Intelligence is already outsmarting us at '80s computer games by finding ways to beat games that developers didn't even know were there. Just wait until it figures out how to beat us in ways that matter.
The Meaning of Life: It Could Be Just a Quirk—or Quark—of Consciousness
Is science destined to crack the code of consciousness—and how would we even go about it?
Why Superintelligent AI Could Be the Last Human Invention
When we create something more intelligent than we could ever be, what happens after that? We have to teach it.
Max Tegmark left his native Sweden in 1990 after receiving his B.Sc. in Physics from the Royal Institute of Technology (he’d earned a B.A. in Economics the previous year at the Stockholm School of Economics). His first academic venture beyond Scandinavia brought him to California, where he studied physics at the University of California, Berkeley, earning his M.A. in 1992, and Ph.D. in 1994.
After four years of west coast living, Tegmark returned to Europe and accepted an appointment as a research associate with the Max-Planck-Institut für Physik in Munich. In 1996 he headed back to the U.S. as a Hubble Fellow and member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Tegmark remained in New Jersey for a few years until an opportunity arrived to experience the urban northeast with an Assistant Professorship at the University of Pennsylvania, where he received tenure in 2003.
He extended the east coast experiment and moved north of Philly to the shores of the Charles River (Cambridge-side), arriving at MIT in September 2004. He is married to Meia-Chita Tegmark and has two sons, Philip and Alexander.
Tegmark is an author on more than two hundred technical papers, and has featured in dozens of science documentaries. He has received numerous awards for his research, including a Packard Fellowship (2001-06), Cottrell Scholar Award (2002-07), and an NSF Career grant (2002-07), and is a Fellow of the American Physical Society. His work with the SDSS collaboration on galaxy clustering shared the first prize in Science magazine’s "Breakthrough of the Year: 2003."
