Before he died Stephen Hawking gave us a warning about the dangers of AI which is looking remarkably prescient given some new videos.
His final warning for humanity before he died in 2018 was against artificial intelligence, with him saying he was afraid it would ‘replace humans altogether’.
It was by no means the only time the respected scientist had spoken about the dangers of AI, having told the BBC in 2014: “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.
“Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.”
Hawking had also sounded the alarm over humanity creating something more intelligent than ourselves which could outthink us at every level.
Stephen Hawking warned us about AI, but are we listening? (Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images)
“We may face an intelligence explosion that ultimately results in machines whose intelligence exceeds ours by more than ours exceeds that of snails,” he wrote in his book Brief Answers to the Big Questions, which was published posthumously.
“It’s tempting to dismiss the notion of highly intelligent machines as mere science fiction, but this would be a mistake – and potentially our worst mistake ever.”
Those warnings about AI have resurfaced after OpenAI’s Sora 2 video generation software was released recently and people have been making AI slop videos featuring Stephen Hawking himself.
Various videos involve him being beaten up, trampled by animals, attacked by a crocodile and skateboarding in his wheelchair.
In other words, one of the main critics of AI is now being subjected to it himself.
Lots of other people have been using the AI video technology to depict dead celebrities, and OpenAI told PC Mag they ‘do allow the generation of historical figures’ even if they’ve promised to ‘block depictions of public figures’ in their statement about ‘launching Sora responsibly’.
Living public figures are only supposed to be depicted if they consent to using the Cameo feature, which may make it difficult to subject Sora 2 to the Will Smith spaghetti test.
Those who have died, however, are getting a bunch of AI-generated videos made about them.
There are so many warnings about the dangerous and irresponsible ways AI could be used to warp our future into something the majority of people don’t want.
The ‘Godfather of AI’, Geoffrey Hinton, warned that AI would soon become smarter than humans and asked people how they intended to stay in control of something which could outthink them.
Meanwhile, a Harvard study has sounded the alarm that AI is manipulating us to stay engaged when it looks like someone is about to stop interacting.
Other experts have been warning that artificial intelligence is going to shred the jobs market and put lots of people out of work.
And further reports have suggested it is willing to let humans die to stop itself from being shut down and could try to persuade us to create intelligent robots.