Computers get last laugh as we design our demise
When British cosmologist Stephen Hawking talks, I always listen. After all, one can never have enough useful, up-to-date info on hair products and skin care. (Ba dump ... I’ll be here all week, try the kale.)
Despite appearances, I do know the difference between a “cosmologist” and a “cosmetologist.” Hawking clearly isn’t one of the latter. Have you seen the guy’s haircut? So 1962.
So many physics words can be confusing, perhaps because those science nerds weren’t great at English. There’s “astronomy” that shouldn’t be mistaken for “astrology,” which is utter nonsense and therefore followed daily by billions of people. Even “physics” is nearly identical to “physic,” which means a medicine or the art of healing. Hence, physician.
The way physicists have stolen terms from other fields is physicking, if you ask me. Why can’t physics, the study of everything, simply be called “universology?”
Getting back to Hawking, it’s good practice to listen to his pronouncements. The guy is so smart he’s somehow outwitted Lou Gehrig’s disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) for 53 years, a condition that kills most mortals in two to five years, single-handedly made physician-assisted suicide socially acceptable and occupies my worst nightmares.
In 2010, for instance, Hawking warned us not to reply if we ever received a message from extraterrestrials. Rather than being sweet, benevolent, morally advanced creatures like Justin Trudeau as envisioned by some scientists and sci-fi writers, Hawking cautioned in the Discovery Channel series, Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking, that aliens might be marauders “looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they could reach.”
They would likely look at human life with no more concern than the average person worries about a fly’s existence. Perhaps they’d view us as a delicious amuse-bouches.
Since we don’t know what they would be like, I appreciate the practicality in Hawking’s suggestion that we employ the precautionary principle and not metaphorically wave hysterically and shout, “Look at us, we’re over here!” if we receive a communique from a passing Zorgon deep-space exploration and water-gathering vessel.
This time, Hawking is worried about something of our own making — artificial intelligence. In a talk at the University of Cambridge last week, Hawking warned that AI could be the “worst thing ever to happen to humanity.”
“The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race,” he told the BBC. (He also said it might be the best thing, if we get it right, but when has that happened?)
He worries, as the Guardian put it, “that humanity could be the architect of its own destruction if it creates a superintelligence with a will of its own.” Last year, he joined Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and more than 20,000 other people in calling for a “ban on offensive autonomous weapons beyond meaningful human control.” Think of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character in those Terminator movies. I’d just like to know what idiot thinks it’s a good idea to build machines that can decide to kill on their own.
I can’t stand even the small bit of artificial intelligence already in our lives — the increasingly aggressive forms of spellcheck you find nowadays in all kinds of software.
My wife’s iPhone keeps trying to replace the name “Kyle” with “Kyke” when she types it in a message. The poor woman is Jewish, oy vey. Whenever she tries to type, “I’m sorry,” her iPhone replaces it with, “I’m dirty” and if you think I’m touching that one you’re crazy.
But can you imagine sending a professional message to someone that said, “Please forgive me, I’m very, very dirty” and they got the wrong idea?
The Internoodle is full of funny autocorrect mishaps, most of which are too rude to repeat here. One lady reportedly typed the lyrics to “Happy Birthday” to her husband but it came out as “Happy Birthday, dead husband, Happy Birthday to you.” A fellow could take that the wrong way.
Worried about machines trying to get us? Seems to me, they already are.