Physicist Stephen Hawking issued a stern warning to humanity before his death about the capabilities and threat of artificial intelligence.
The astrophysicist passed away in 2018, but before his death he warned us about how humanity could fall, including a warning against trying to communicate with alien civilizations.
Long before most of us even knew what artificial intelligence was, Hawking was already one step ahead, trying to warn us about what an AI future could hold.
In an interview with the BBC in 2014, Hawking suggested: “The full development of artificial intelligence could mean the end of the human race.”
Although the technology was just beginning to emerge, Hawking had the foresight to theorize about how it could develop and affect our lives, especially if it surpassed human intelligence.
He explained that it would “take off on its own and redesign itself at an ever-increasing rate,” adding: “Humans, limited by slow biological evolution, would be unable to compete and would be replaced.”
Stephen Hawking died in 2018 at the age of 76 (PA Archive)
It was not the last time the astrophysicist warned us about AI.
In 2015, Hawking was one of about 100 experts who signed an open letter to the UN warning of the dangers of unchecked development of artificial intelligence. Likewise, in 2017, a year before his death, he declared to the magazine Wired: “I fear that AI could completely replace humans.”
in his book Brief Answers to the Big Questions (Brief answers to the big questions), published just months after his death, delved even deeper into the threat, writing: “We could face an explosion of AI that would ultimately give rise to machines whose intelligence would surpass ours by more than ours surpasses that of snails.”
He concluded: “It is tempting to dismiss the idea of highly intelligent machines as mere science fiction, but that would be a mistake, and possibly the worst mistake in our history.”
Translation of Sara Pignatiello
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