Stephen Hawking’s Most Dire Predictions for the Future
Stephen Hawking was a
brilliant astrophysicist who inspired and awed. He pushed our understanding of,
curiosity about, and excitement for the universe around us. He made us laugh.
He made us curious. He made us imagine.
He also, at times,
made us afraid.
Hawking, who died
this morning at the age of 76 after 52 years of living with amyotrophic lateral
sclerosis (ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease), will leave behind a deeply important
legacy. But his paranoia about the future of humanity, especially in his later years,
may prove to be one of the most lasting (and pertinent) aspects of that legacy.
These are a few of
his most dire predictions:
AI Takeover
“The genie is out of
the bottle. We need to move forward on artificial intelligence development but
we also need to be mindful of its very real dangers,” Hawking said last
year in a Q&A with WIRED. “I fear that
AI may replace humans altogether. If people design computer viruses, someone
will design AI that replicates itself. This will be a new form of life that
will outperform humans.”
As AI permeates more
of our daily lives, Hawking isn’t the only one to fear a robot takeover.
But there are other
threats.
Self-Destruction
“Our earth is
becoming too small for us, global population is increasing at an alarming rate
and we are in danger of self-destructing… I would not be optimistic about the
long-term outlook for our species.”
Hawking said this in2016 at an event at Cambridge University, attesting his
pessimism in part to the recent referendum for the United Kingdom to withdraw
from the European Union. In a 2017 documentary, he said humanity has just acentury left on Earth, down from the 1,000 years he predicted
the year before.
That’s in part
because of climate change and environmental destruction that, he feared, may
make the Earth uninhabitable. Since he became president, Donald Trump had
become a favorite target of Hawking’s:
“We are close to the
tipping point where global warming becomes irreversible. Trump’s action
[pulling out of the Paris Agreement] could push the Earth over the brink, to
become like Venus, with a temperature of two hundred and fifty degrees, and
raining sulphuric acid,” Hawking told BBC News.
“Climate change is
one of the great dangers we face, and it’s one we can prevent if we act now. By
denying the evidence for climate change, and pulling out of the Paris Climate
Agreement, Donald Trump will cause avoidable environmental damage to our
beautiful planet, endangering the natural world, for us and our children.”
Fortunately, though,
he sees a solution.
Planetary Colonization
“If humanity is to
continue for another million years, our future lies in boldly going where no
one else has gone before,” Hawking said at a festivalin Norway last year.
“We are running out
of space and the only places to go to are other worlds. It is time to explore
other solar systems,” he continued. “Spreading out may be the only thing that
saves us from ourselves. I am convinced that humans need to leave Earth.”
“I hope it would
unite competitive nations in a single goal, to face the common challenge for us
all… A new and ambitious space program would excite [young people], and
stimulate interest in other areas, such as astrophysics and cosmology.”
He laid out a fairly
comprehensive series of benchmarks: nations should send astronauts to the Moon
by 2020 (and set up a lunar base in the next 30 years). And we should get to
Mars by 2025.
If Hawking is even
remotely right, Musk hadbetter hop to it. Via:
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