HAMPSHIRE: Cosmologist Stephen Hawking warned that independent artificial intelligence could doom mankind. The robots will rise, we’re told. The machines will assume control. For decades we have heard these warnings and fears about artificial intelligence taking over and ending humankind.
Prof Stephen Hawking, one of Britain’s pre-eminent scientists, has said that efforts to create thinking machines pose a threat to our very existence.
These issues are far less sexy perhaps than that of super intelligence or the end of humankind. They are not about intelligence or about robots as such; they are about what kinds of lives and what kind of society we want to have.
These are ancient questions we have faced since the beginnings of science and philosophy, and today new information technologies, which indeed rapidly change our world, force us to ask them again. Let us hope that the best human minds of our age begin to focus most of their energy and attention on those questions rather than the end of the world.
