Stephen Hawking Continues To Warn Against Artificial Intelligence

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Stephen Hawking, the renowned theoretical physicist and cosmologist, has reiterated his warnings about artificial intelligence at a recent conference in London.

Speaking at the Zeitgeist 2015 conference in London, Stephen Hawking warned that smart computers will overtake human intelligence at some point in the next century.

The internationally renowned cosmologist and Cambridge University professor, said, “Computers will overtake humans with AI at some within the next 100 years. When that happens, we need to make sure the computers have goals aligned with ours.”

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Hawking, who signed an open letter alongside Max Tegmark, Elon Musk, Demis Hassabis, Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton, Ben Goertzel and other expert in the field, also said, “Our future is a race between the growing power of technology and the wisdom with which we use it.”

"Computers will overtake humans with AI at some within the next 100 years. When that happens, we need to make sure the computers have goals aligned with ours."

In the short term, people are concerned about who controls AI, but in the long term, the concern will be whether AI can be controlled at all, he said.

Hawking, the author of A Brief History of Time, believes that scientists and technologists need to safely and carefully coordinate and communicate advancements in AI to ensure it does not grow beyond humanity's control.

The existential risk posed by artificial intelligence has also been brought to a wider audience than just technologists by Nick Bostrom's recent book, Superintelligence.

Bostrom, an Oxford professor and Director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford in his book seeks to replace the prediction of a Singularity—the idea there will be a crossover point where society becomes unrecognizable due to superior machine intelligence— with that of an "intelligence explosion."

Some critics liken the trend of predicting the threat of superintellligence to those of global warming and acid rain in the past. What do you think?  Is this all just hype, or is the threat of super-smart AI's real?


SOURCE  Tech World

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