Читать книгу Mythos Urknall - Jacob Winter - Страница 25

The astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has warned that artificial intelligence “could outsmart us all” and is calling for humans to establish colonies on other planets to avoid ultimately a “near-certainty” of technological catastrophe. His dire predictions join recent warnings by several Silicon Valley tycoons about artificial intelligence even as many have piled more money into it. Prof Hawking, who has motor neurone disease and uses a system designed by Intel to speak, said artificial intelligence could become “a real danger in the not-too-distant future” if it became capable of designing improvements to itself. Genetic engineering will allow us to increase the complexity of our DNA and “improve the human race”, he told the Financial Times. But he added it would be a slow process and would take about 18 years before human beings saw any of the benefits.

“By contrast, according to Moore’s Law, computers double their speed and memory capacity every 18 months. The risk is that computers develop intelligence and take over. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded,” he said. Both PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, the entrepreneur behind the electric car Tesla and SpaceX, the private space flight company, have warned of the dangers of complacency over the consequences of unconstrained advances in artificial intelligence.