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Stephen Hawking Warns That AI and 'Superhumans' Could Wipe Humanity; Says There's No God in Posthumous Book (cnn.com)
Stephen Hawking says artificial intelligence will eventually become so advanced it will "outperform humans." The renowned physicist who died in March warns of both rises in advanced artificial intelligence and genetically-enhanced "superhumans" in a book published Tuesday. Hawking also weighed in on god, and aliens. From a report: According to an excerpt of the book "Brief Answers to the Big Questions" published by the U.K.'s Sunday Times, Hawking wrote AI could prove "huge" to humanity so long as restrictions are in place to control how quickly it grows. "While primitive forms of artificial intelligence developed so far have proved very useful, I fear the consequences of creating something that can match or surpass humans," Hawking wrote. "Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete and would be superseded." Hawking wrote about a need for serious research to explore what impact AI would have on humanity, from the workplace to the military, where he expressed concerns about sophisticated weapons systems "that can choose and eliminate their own targets." Hawking also wrote about advances to manipulating DNA, or what he calls "self-designed evolution. Early advances involving the gene-editing tool CRISPR include alerting DNA to create "low-fat" pigs. CNN: "There is no God. No one directs the universe," he writes in "Brief Answers to the Big Questions." "For centuries, it was believed that disabled people like me were living under a curse that was inflicted by God," he adds. "I prefer to think that everything can be explained another way, by the laws of nature."
"There are forms of intelligent life out there," he writes. "We need to be wary of answering back until we have developed a bit further." And he leaves open the possibility of other phenomena. "Travel back in time can't be ruled out according to our present understanding," he says. He also predicts that "within the next hundred years we will be able to travel to anywhere in the Solar System."
"There are forms of intelligent life out there," he writes. "We need to be wary of answering back until we have developed a bit further." And he leaves open the possibility of other phenomena. "Travel back in time can't be ruled out according to our present understanding," he says. He also predicts that "within the next hundred years we will be able to travel to anywhere in the Solar System."
The danger is there regardless of how "sentient" it actually becomes. In fact isn't it more dangerous the less sentient but more "powerful" or ubiquitous we thoughtless allow it to become, meanwhile?
You mean like the same danger with putting any automated software in charge of a critical function? https://www.flightglobal.com/n...
This wouldn't be anything special about AI, or Machine Learning or even software. Any process that isn't properly vetted can lead to people getting killed, such as mismanaged dams that broke. People somehow think that AI will be more powerful but it isn't about the power of the tool but about the criticality of the application is it allowed to automate without oversight. See DO-178b software levels as an example of how this is handled: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
...gene-editing technology will be used to correct genes leading to diseases like cystic fibrosis, but people won't resist using the technology to make them stronger or smarter. "Once such superhumans appear, there are going to be significant political problems with the unimproved humans, "
True enough, and absolutely inevitable. First, you correct for genetic defects, then you choose features you want. Why wouldn't parents prefer a healthy, attractive, intelligent, athletic child over one lacking those attributes?
We already have the societal problems. As the saying goes: "Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that." Even if we raise the averages, the problems remain essentially the same. What do we do now, with the ineducable and unskilled? We don't currently have any good solution...
Meanwhile, imagine the potential* benefits to society, if we could increase average health, and raise the average intelligence by a standard deviation or two.
*Potential. It is also entirely believable that the people who take most advantage of this will - intentionally or otherwise - select for sociopathy or other deleterious traits.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Ironically, from theology came medical care. Without God, the law survival of the fittest is taken to its most extreme interpretation, and there are no cripples, not for long anyway, until they are sacrificed or abandoned as unwanteds.
Medical care is sourced in empathy - a common trait in humans.
Many religions and ideas of God interpret the sick and disadvantage of being cursed by God as noted in the summary above. For example, the The Hindu's have their caste system and the Christians a notion of the "elect" and "reprobates".
Nobody has conclusive information on the existence or nature of a god or gods.
Any time someone tries to point out that they have a belief in God, the correct response is "yea, right. Whatever you loon". A more polite response is "that's nice, good for you" and carefully skirt around the subject. Because religious people are sometimes dangerously unstable.
The safest course is to act as if there is no god, until you have information about the nature of such god(s). Right now there is nothing in the material world that needs god to explain it. Sometimes we don't understand something, but time and time again we've puzzled out some understanding of natural laws of the Universe.
You should believe in God once you can establish a practical purpose to such a belief. If that believe enables you to build skyscrapers, harvest crops, whatever.
Abrahamic religion is preposterous though. The insist on monotheism (one true God). But all of them have lots of extra supernatural beings. The issue is, we have no physical evidence of any of them.
We can just barely detect some very elusive classes of sub-atomic particles. But multiple people can run the experiments and confirm they exist.
Beings that come down and talk to people throughout the ages, providing different stories to different "prophets" so that we fight over which story is the right one? That doesn't seem just or all powerful or even sane. If there is a God, we'd have less strife in the world if never talked to us than whatever he/she/it does today giving conflicting stories. (sorry, but man is evil enough without having to invent a Satan to place the blame)
P.S. I'm going to hell. Assuming Christians or Muslims are right. Which is reasonable if reality were a democracy that we can all vote on.
Hawking gave the 1994 MacWorld Boston keynote from his chair. It lasted about an hour. The room had about 5000 people shuffling papers and coughing.. until about 30 min in, and then, for 30 min you could hear a pin drop. I have tried to get a copy (better still, a recording) of that address, even writing a few of his 6 assistants, Apple PR, and the organizers of MacWorld a bunch of different times. No joy.
He compared the genome and the information in the genome to the global library of knowledge and then 30 min in said it was inevitable that 1. We will mess with the genome and create a super-race of humans that will make current humanity puny and incapable in comparison (while he sat motionless in his chair) and 2. artificial intelligence will hasten this outcome. He said these were not inevitable because of human frailty, but because that is the whole nature of adaptation and evolution. We would do it because that would speed up adaptation to a rapidly changing world, and because we can. He ended with a statement along the lines of: Get Ready.
A pin drop. It was electric. I haven't read his book, but it sounds like something along the same lines. If anybody has a recording of the 1994 Macworld adress, please let me know! I know it was recorded. It was a top five memorable speech of my life. I'm 58.
It's rather hard to take a position on the existing of the god of the Deists, the Spinosan Heresy, and similar definitions of god as either a hands-off creator of the universe, or as another name for the universe itself.
The creation of the universe is really an open question in physics. There are a bunch of plausible theories, including brane collisions, Penrose's cyclic cosmology, universe-as-a-simulation, or my own favorite "we're inside a block hole inside a bigger universe". There's also a theory that the universe was created as a result of random fluctuations of the vacuum energy state, but that one's down there with mythology IMO.
Some entity creating the universe on his workbench, whether as a simulation or in some other way, is as good a theory as any other at this point. I'm not sure why it's important to pick one?
If instead you're referring to the idea shared by many religions of "live as if there were a judgemental being that sees everything you do and will hold you accountable", well, that's obviously true. That being is your future self.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The evidence for God is the works He is doing in people's lives today... miracles, healing physical ailments, words of knowledge and wisdom and other works of His Spirit along with His work in changing people's lives and delivering from addictions, come to mind. It's not an all inclusive list.
The problem with science and those who would use science and experimental evidence as a means of proving God doesn't exist is that they demand a reproducible sample. If it can't be made to happen twice, under their control, it doesn't prove anything.
If I observe radioactive decay over enough time, science says what byproducts will form from any group of elements and isotopes. It also predicts the rate at which the changes will happen. This can be observed repeatedly. But I can't look at a particular nucleus and force it to decay at a particular time any more than you can force God to do a particular miracle at a particular time. And clearly, once the isotope has decayed, I can't force it to repeat by myself. But measuring over a large enough sample set and not constraining exactly which isotope will decay at what time, the science of radioactive decay is established.
But measuring over the entire base of Christianity, in a year, there are miracles that happen, healing that occurs, people who are delivered from addiction, and a host of messages to individuals or groups or churches from Him. It is evidence which would be accepted in any reasonable study that isn't confined to a handful of Christians. By this means, the religion of Christianity is established and God's existence is established - through the history of His church for a couple of thousand years (and of Judaism before that). The test is there - your sample set is just too small.
Well first off, megacorps are the secondary antagonists of both the Terminator and Aliens franchise. They're why the monsters ran amok if the first place.
But we don't need crazy aliens or future tech to step into the Shadowrun setting. We're essentially already there.