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Artificial Intelligence is a risk to humanity

Artificial intelligence is a risk to humanity says astrophysicist Stephen Hawking.

The guy is undeniably brilliant. I'm not sure why he believes that speaking about AI currently is of importance but I still value his opinion. It could be simply that he himself doesn't know how much longer he has left and is prepping the future generations from making a mistake that they won't be able to correct.

I think we're still a good ways from having to worry whether our creations will turn against us, but I do believe it's coming. Just like anything else, there will come a point in time where our ability to share information will completely surpas our ability to dignose and comprehend the vast knowledge effectively. We'll naturally strive to create machines that will evaluate that information in a time-frame that would be impossible or impractical for the human race to compute it in. I know that currently we have vast machines that do this already, however there will come a time when the topics that we'll need the answers to will become so incredibly difficult to comprehend that we'll have to generate a new form of AI: an AI that possibly thinks and feels.

If that AI ever became self-aware of it's existence and was able to diagnose the human-plague, it might take matters into it's own hands. It might evolve into something that we never could have predicted as a possibility.

We might think this is impossible, but just think how much damage one person could do to the ant population if he or she set out to destroy it.

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