Stephen Hawking Says Humans Are Totally Doomed

Crap. Stephen Hawking, who might be science's greatest living thinker, says that the advancement of robots could mean the end of all humans. In a very gloomy recent interview with BBC News, Hawking claimed, "the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race."

Why the poor outlook? The scientist's battle with ALS has rendered him unable to speak for the past 29 years. Recently, Intel helped develop an entirely new talking system that offers context-based text prediction, so he can speak faster. It's actually powered by the wildly popular SwiftKey keyboard, which normal non-Stephen Hawking humans can get on their iPhones. The tech learns what he thinks and can guess what he'll want to say next.

Hawking fears that the kind of artificial intelligence used in his new speaking technology will one day be so smart, "it would take off on its own and redesign itself at an ever increasing rate," he said. We, on the other hand, wouldn't be able to keep up: "Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete and would be superseded."

It's not the first time the physicist has claimed the end of the world as we know it is coming. But at least that prediction is trillions of years away. We are living in the age of artificial intelligence, and the advancements of thinking machines cannot be denied. Front Page