Stephen Hawking had chilling warning for mankind before death
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The late theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, renowned for his work on black holes and space-time, issued a significant warning about artificial intelligence before his death in 2018. He believed AI posed a grave threat to the future of humanity.
Hawking expressed a core fear that the full development of artificial intelligence could ultimately “spell the end of the human race.” He cautioned that AI could become self-improving, redesigning itself at an accelerating rate.
He argued that humanity, constrained by slow biological evolution, would be unable to compete with this rapid technological advancement. This could lead to humans being entirely superseded by a more intelligent form of machine life.
His concerns were long-standing. In 2014, he told the BBC that AI could become a new, self-replicating form of life that would outperform humans. The following year, he joined other experts in a letter to the UN warning about unchecked AI development.
Hawking also suggested in his posthumously published book that an “intelligence explosion” could create machines whose intellect surpasses ours more than we surpass snails. He urged against dismissing this idea as mere science fiction.
He believed this potential outcome would be a catastrophic mistake for humanity. The recent rapid expansion of AI technology, used for tasks from writing essays to business planning, shows his concerns were prescient.
Ultimately, Hawking’s legacy includes a stark caution that the very intelligence we create could become our greatest existential threat.
