The Case Against Stephen Hawking’s Robopocalypse Prediction

January 21st, 2016

Awake Goy

Susanne.Posel-Headline.News.Official- stephen.hawking.elon.musk.robot.war.als.dementia_occupycorporatism Susanne Posel ,Chief Editor Occupy Corporatism | Co-Founder, Legacy Bio-Naturals

Stephen Hawking is a renowned and well respected theoretical physicist who has recently become well-known for warning about the coming robopocalypse; just as predicted in the Terminator films.

While speaking in a radio interview, Hawking turned the conversation from black holes to a global disaster that is coming some time off in the not so distant, but perhaps far off future. This global destruction could be facilitated by nuclear weapons or genetically-engineered viruses.

Hawking ignores the obvious fact that in the future humanity would have more advanced technology than today’s abilities (such as nuclear power and genetic-modification), to warn us today that within the next “100 years” humanity will find “new ways” to make thing go wrong.

And for the physicist, “the chance of a disaster” happening on our planet “in a given year may be quite low, it adds up over time, and becomes a near certainty in the next 1,000 or 10,000 years.”

In recent years, Hawking has spoken out publicly about his emphatic belief that “the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”

Hawking has said that “the primitive forms of artificial intelligence developed so far have already proved very useful, but the consequences of creating something that can match or surpass humans” and the technology would soon “take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate.”

This would be the catalyst to humans being “superseded” by robots.

But there are those out there that see Hawking’s view of a dystopian robotocolypse as “overhyped” and a “disservice to the public”.

The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), a think-tank based in Washington, DC, released a report stating that Hawking and Elon Musk are “part of a coalition of scientists and luminaries that stirred fear and hysteria in 2015 by raising alarms that AI could spell doom for humanity.”

Musk has made public statements about how artificial intelligence “is potentially more dangerous than nukes”.

For this, the ITIF gave Hawking and Musk the Luddite Award .

Robert Atkinson, president of ITIF, commented: “It is deeply unfortunate that luminaries such as Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking have contributed to feverish hand-wringing about a looming artificial intelligence apocalypse. Do we think either of them personally are Luddites? No, of course not. They are pioneers of science and technology. But they and others have done a disservice to the public — and have unquestionably given aid and comfort to an increasingly pervasive neo-Luddite impulse in society today — by demonizing AI in the popular imagination.”

But beyond Hawking being part of a coalition hell-bent on scaring the public, could part of the problem be amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the physicist suffers from?

Hawking has lived with ALS for many decades, and it could be that some of the advanced symptoms of the disease are beginning to affect him.

And perhaps it should be taken into consideration that Hawking could be part of “a small percentage of patients [who] may experience problems with memory or decision-making; and there is growing evidence that some may even develop a form of dementia.”