Slashdot Mirror
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 "Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete and would be superseded."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 Terminators will take out the leftover super mutants (if they survive the nukes)
The simple fact is we've made some crude machine learning algorithms that can be trained but this is not true intelligence, that can make intuitive leaps and predictions about things it has never experienced based on first principles. We are nowhere near being able to create something like that. We may never be able to do that.
... trained as a fundamentalist in AI.
It's not his wheelhouse.
I'm an atheist, too, but like Hawking, I don't have any science to support my faith-based world view.
Stephen's thoughts on these matters are as useless as tits on a boar.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
It should be "said" or "wrote" not "says". The man's dead so we can safely assume past tense.
...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.
Birth Control + Bread and Circuses and they stop breeding enough to sustain their population. This is what's happening in every first world country. Even the US with it's Evangelicals can't keep it's birthrate above 2.0. As for "below average", good enough is always good enough. You just need people smart enough that they don't fall for demagogues and mumbo-jumbo. That's not a very high bar, and we can do it now with some more education (yes, that means the liberal arts education that /.ers hate. If you're not smart enough for a STEM degree that's the next best way to tech critical thinking)
When people have options they don't breed uncontrollably. We're not animals. We're people. In the future the problem is likely to be under population. That is, unless we let the Evangelicals take control. Then they'll ban birth control and sex ed based on a few well chosen passages in their holy books.
What this all means is progressivism vs conservatism. e.g. we need to get folks to favor progress and improvement and stop looking back wistfully at the "good 'ole days". That does mean you're gonna have to take care of some folks who are now obsolete (like coal minors) and get over the fact that they get paid to do nothing because there's no useful work they can do anymore. Another thing folks hate because it pisses people off to have to get up to go to work when somebody else doesn't.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
"For centuries, it was believed that disabled people like me were living under a curse that was inflicted by God,"
From John 9:2:
And his disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”
Jesus answered, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him."
And Stephen Hawking has surely increased our understanding of the Universe.
I suppose it's all in how carefully you read the text, for many books, many authors, many stories are misunderstood.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
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".
Young Earth Creationism... is not science.
...regardless of what he believes or not...he's separated from God for eternity...even Pascal believed it was better to be wrong than separated for an eternity...
nothing to see here - move along
Even though he's considered a renowned physicist I still wouldn't pay too much attention to his sentiments about AI. You know that's what science is: you don't opine about the things which are not even remotely related to your field of research unless you want to make a fool of yourself.
Also, during the past years of his life he kept fear mongering about AI to the point where you just couldn't take any longer. We still know what intelligence is; we don't know how close we are to inventing artificial intelligence; and our intelligence algorithms easily trip over after being fed terabytes of data. One thing is certain: that's not how natural intelligence works.
I'm a lot more interested in what Jeff Hawkins is about to reveal - and if it's not some bluff given that experts from DeepMind couldn't understand anything then we are on the verge of some significant breakthroughs.
Interesting that, if I recall correctly, his "Brief History of Time" and other published works mentioned that it allowed for the possibility of a God.
He leaves stating there's no God to be published post-humously.
Hedging his bets? Or just avoiding controversy while alive?
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Well, I certainly read those quotes in his "voice".
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.
Yet somehow we don't feel bad, or think about us having "wiped out" our ancestors. Almost as if fear of change isn't logical.
Unless you're white, then you're expected to bear the burden of every atrocity your ancestors may or may not have been involved in.
I think most people would be satisfied if we just dealt with the atrocities being committed here and now. If you're not involved in them, I don't think you have anything to be concerned about. Don't let some overheated activist tell you how to feel about yourself. You only hear more about white people today because the pendulum is swinging back.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
The ridiculous accounts of Genesis and Revelation, and everything in between, may not stand up to science, but the notion of an outside creator itself? Mr. Hawking advances his atheism with as little evidence as the Creationists.
I thought the same thing. He must have been quite a scientist if he could prove a negative.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
The answer to your questions is "I don't know", not "God". That is the difference. Scientists don't claim to know the answer to the questions, they just say "I don't know, but we are studying it". There is no faith involved at all.
So, which of the thousands of gods will you put your wager on?
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
The real question isn't "is there a God?" The question we will ultimately face is "Is God necessary?" It's where my atheism stems. It's not a rejection of the concept, some sort of fist shaking at the Heavens because of what I view as trite complaints about the Problem of Evil. It comes down to my view, as unscientific as it may be, that I simply cannot see a necessity for such a being to exist. If a Prime Mover is needed, and we have to, in Aristotlean fashion, declare that that being be uncaused, primarily to escape an infinite regression problem, then parsimony would seem to dictate that if we have two entities; God and the Universe, I will take the property "uncaused", move it to the Universe, the which I know exists, and eliminate the entity that I do not, and perhaps can never know exists.
Oh, and I feel the same way about multiverse theory. While it's likely possible that within a generation or two we may be able to actually test string theory, and thus, at least indirectly test concepts like branes, for the moment string theory represents a lovely mathematical model that we really can't know whether it has any association to reality or not. It remains fundamentally a set of mathematical models, much as God represents a theological model, and both are burdened by being purely metaphysical and philosophical problems with no empirical backing.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
Except the Big Bang didn't create the Earth. It created a soup of energy and particles. The earth didn't come along for another 7 billion years or so. The Genesis account is not a scientific theory, and the verse you pull out is so vague that it really doesn't have any scientific utility at all. And the Genesis cosmography myth only gets more scientifically troublesome as you proceed, and requires even more artful interpretations to get past problems like the Earth existing before the Sun.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Dr. Hawking didn't say or mean that it was because people used to believe disability was caused by sin that he doesn't believe God exists. That was simply an example of something people used to believe which he does not. It is an an analogy of the folly of people who still believe there is a God.
The ridiculous accounts of Genesis and Revelation, and everything in between...
Everything in between chronologically? I think you're vastly overestimating how exciting those parts are.
After Genesis, most of the Torah is just descriptions of religious practice and civil law; several chapters of Exodus are just Ikea instructions for putting together the portable sanctuary used during the migration from Egypt to Canaan. Most of the early parts of the books of Prophets (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings) read like a history book, though the books of Samuel (primarily covering the period of Saul and David) could make a pretty good TV drama or soap opera. The later prophets get more preachy about how evil the people are, but the beginning of Ezekiel is a good example of what certain mushrooms can do to you.
In what you might call spiritual terms, yes. Morality is largely a human construct. As a social species we need rules of conduct, but the nature of those rules has varied wildly in time and space.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
is the main proponent of what Hawking was talking about. Jesus, for example, said that afflictions were caused not by diseases but by what they say. The implication that if you're suffering from a disease you must have blasphemed. There's lots of other examples if you research Prosperity Gospel
The trouble with the Christian Bible is that it was never meant to be read by laypersons. So it's chock full of inconsistencies. You can find something in it to support literally any point of view. Want to be a good person? Bible will tell you how. Want slavery? There's a verse for that. Want to advance human civilization through learning? Check. Want a reason to commit Genocide? Bible's got you covered.
I'm not saying we should go back to the days when people couldn't read the bible unless they were a church leader (Scientology, I'm lookin' at you). But what this does mean is that it doesn't matter how carefully you read the text. The Bible doesn't make a starting point for a viable society. Which is why the US has such a clear separation of Church and State. Because it's too hard to agree on how to read a religion.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
If morality is a human construct, then it is arbitrary.
I don't understand this comment. If morality is a human construct then it would not be arbitray (ie random or unrestrained) but directly related to human flourishing and welfare. Not if morality is a Super Being construct... then it might be with respect to us puny humans... arbitary.
Easy peasy... Evil ->> That which harms human flourishing!
Only in the short-term. In the longer term features or personalities that result in having more children will spread via regular natural selection.
For example, my friend's sister's body released endorphins when pregnant. She had a lot of kids because pregnancy made her high. When her 1st husband left her because he got overwhelmed by kids, she found a new husband who liked, or at least tolerated kids.
When I first heard about that condition, it I thought it was a medical fluke: a random mutation. Then I realized that trait is likely to spread and is perhaps being selected for already.
You might ask why that condition doesn't exist in every woman if it results in more offspring. In the past women didn't have much control over pregnancy: it happened or didn't happen whether they wanted it to or not. Therefore, there was little selection pressure for it. In the age of birth control, it can make a big difference in birth rate.
Table-ized A.I.
Good old Pascal's Wager, an act of craven cowardice and an insult to God Almighty. Pascal's Wager is predicated on God being so stupid that He can't tell you're going through the motions out of fear and that you don't actually have faith. I'm sorry, but if God does exist, I'm not going to stand in front of him as a liar and insult Him to His face. And as for "what will you say to God?", there is nothing I can say, no case to plead, nothing to explain because God knows all. He (if He exists) knows why I didn't believe in Him. I will either burn or not, but I will do it with a clean conscience.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
We know that Roman leaders like Pliny and Tacitus wrote of the disgusting Christians and of Jesus, "their so-called Christ".
We have non-Christian Jewish writers like Flavius Josephus criticizing him.
In a province under Roman rule, where being Jewish was most definitely considered a bad thing, we have Roman records of putting people to death because they wouldn't retract their claims to have known JEWISH king of Kings.
We have Tacitus, a Senator of Rome and no friend of Christians or Jews, writing about the crucifixion of Jesus.
What we DON'T see in any writings for almost 2,000 is anyone ever questioning his existence. People called him a bastard and said all kinds of things about him, but it wasn't until the 20th century that anyone voiced the notion that that it could be possible he didn't exist. Contrast this with denial of such well-documented events as the Holocaust. Within just a few years you had people saying the Holocaust never happened. That didn't happen with Jesus. His enemies called him every name in the book, but to pretend he didn't exist would be ridiculous, it would make them look like utter fools, or insane.
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.
with the Bible, you can interpret it pretty much however you want.
No, you cannot. You especially cannot when the meaning of this passage is as plain as day. First, Jesus spoke directly to the Pharisees complaining about the lack of hand washing.
Matthew 15
7 You hypocrites! Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you:
8 “‘These people honor me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me.
9 They worship me in vain;
their teachings are merely human rules.’”
It is about the heart, not physical health or hygiene. The rest of your ramblings about making it say anything you want... the New Testament has a term for that: false teaching.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
The truly scary people are the people who think that atheists should have no morality.
I think atheists can live moral lives, it's just that they don't have any objective reason for living moral lives. From an atheistic worldview, it has to come down to personal preference.
Yes they can. Doing no harm to others because you wish no harm to yourself is the sort of moral structure that needs no command from on high.
I don't murder people bacause I would not want to be murdered.
I don't go around having sex with prepubescent cirls because it simply isn't right. They are not physically ready, and they are not mentally ready. It is obviously wrong.
I don't try to boink the neighbor lady because it makes for complications that are painful for my spouse, and the same with her for me.
I don't steal things. They are not mine. I do not want my things stolen.
I don't lie because I want people to tell me the truth in dealings with me.
I try to always be mannerful because that is the way I wish to be treated.
There you have it. The basics of a moral code that requires no angry Desert gawd to hand them to us.
I'm not only an atheist, but if the angry desert gawd is actually real, I want no part of being transported to wherever he is simply to worship him for eternity. And reading the olde testament, you can bet he'd get a kick out of kicking your ass into hell even after you get to heaven. Regardless, I'd no more worship him than I would Josef Stalin.
But yeah, the angry desert gawd's heaven is as horrible a place to me as is his special torture chamber he has provided as a kind and loving angry desert gawd.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Heck you can be a theist agnostic.
No you can't.
Your definition of Agnosticism is simply wrong, and the one of gnosticism, as the opposite is wrong, too.
Agnostics is pretty simple: "I believe there are no gods, but I'm not sure about it."
In contrast to that, an Atheist would say: "I'm convinced there is no god".
Gnosticism is parallel religion, more a mystic science than religion, coexisting and overlapping for a while with Christianity, and Judaism and influenced by Mithraism and a few other mono theistic religions.
In Gnosticism, people believe(d) that the universe is god, and what we see around us are his dreams. We are kind of space probes connected with parts of his consciousness, we exist to make him aware about himself and to explore him and hence the universe.
So Agnostics are people who can not be convinced to follow a religion but don't dare to say: "there is no god". And they are not the opposite of "Gnostics", they have nothing to do with each other.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
As there has NEVER, EVER, been a single solitary piece of evidence EVER of any gods existence.... people who have believed in the delusion of a god have done a fantastically miserable job of even beginning to scratch the surface of proving him/her/it.
How do you know that? Are you a god who has a tape recording of every human ever living, and did you have enough time to watch all those tape recordings and do you have the expertise to distinguish all the "miracles" that happened to those people as "divine intervention" or "bad ass luck"?
Sorry, you are an unscientific idiot.
If you want to to argue about something use science, and not unproveble or undisproveble opinions.
You fucking freakenly can not know if there ever was evidence for God(s) and some conspiracy hid them, idiot.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.