Why The Late Stephen Hawking Feared Robots…and Why We Shouldn’t
Sir Stephen Hawking, the great physicist of our time, bypassed his health trauma for decades using robotic walking and talking technologies. Yet, despite the fact that so much of his life depended on artificial intelligence (AI), he had a real fear of AI and robots.
Hawking’s presence in pop culture, (the Simpsons, the Big Bang Theory, Star Trek and Pink Floyd), catapulted his warnings over AI even further. For Hawking and his generation, robots and aliens were seen as exotic outsiders. They were “the other,” competing for the intelligence throne, with the potential for merciless confrontations.
For millennials, however, AI is an integral part of their lives. They don’t believe that AI will play dice with the world’s digital ecosystem, or that robots will risk their own existence by spelling the end of their creator.
Hawking’s skepticism of AI can be seen as a kind of inter-generational clash. Just as his post-WWII generation was taken by the space revolution and the race to the moon, the millennial generation is taken by the digital revolution, cybernetics, internet, robots and AI. One generation was born with a preoccupation with space, the other was born to the digital world.
Hawking believed in the potential of an AI-generated apocalypse, in which robots could "spell the end of the human race." He feared they could become autonomous and rule the world with an "iron fist." He thought that as robots, creatures made out of silicon and algorithms, become more and more intelligent, we humans, made out of flesh and blood, would still be trapped inside the limitations of our biological bodies.
However, even beautiful minds and top-notch scientists, like Hawking, are imperfect and can lead to intellectually-flawed ideas.
Perhaps the world’s smartest man was driven by a struggle with his coexisting AI body — an inner struggle to define borders between the human-self and the AI-self. His atheism contributed to this belief that AI could take over his own being and that of the world. Like mythological gods and goddesses, AI could use its powers to create cataclysms.
Thanks to Hawking, we reflect on our universe as part of parallel universes. His famous Multiverse Theory was as shocking to his generation as the spherical Earth was to Galileo’s contemporaries. What about UFOs, space conflicts and alien invasions? We are no longer the smartest ones in the multiverse! Or are we? Perhaps Hawking was also influenced by this narrative of catastrophic invasions of the Earth — not by aliens, but by robots.
I believe the real threat to the human race comes from humans themselves. While handling the mighty powers of AI, we could either summon its devils or take the side of its angels. While robots could be capable of producing an apocalypse, it would not be of their own will. The debate about whether robots are savages or civilized souls is bogus.
In any case, deforestation, poverty, famine, epidemics, nuclear and biological weapons, and especially climate change, is more likely to spell the end of the human race.
Sir Stephen Hawking died exactly one year ago. It is time to let our fears of AI also rest in peace.
