Hawking Says Scientific Progress Is Major Source of New Threats To Humanity 235
HughPickens.com writes: BBC reports that according to Stephen Hawking most of the threats humans now face come from advances in science and technology, including nuclear war, global warming and genetically-engineered viruses. "Although the chance of a disaster to planet Earth in a given year may be quite low, it adds up over time, and becomes a near certainty in the next thousand or ten thousand years," said Hawking in answer to a question during the BBC Reith Lectures. "By that time we should have spread out into space, and to other stars, so a disaster on Earth would not mean the end of the human race. However, we will not establish self-sustaining colonies in space for at least the next hundred years, so we have to be very careful in this period."
During his lecture Hawking also answered a question on whether his synthesized electronic voice had shaped his personality, perhaps allowing the introvert to become an extrovert. Replying that he had never been called an introvert before, Hawking added: "Just because I spend a lot of time thinking doesn't mean I don't like parties and getting into trouble."
During his lecture Hawking also answered a question on whether his synthesized electronic voice had shaped his personality, perhaps allowing the introvert to become an extrovert. Replying that he had never been called an introvert before, Hawking added: "Just because I spend a lot of time thinking doesn't mean I don't like parties and getting into trouble."
He's Not Qualified (Score:5, Interesting)
The guy is a brilliant theoretical physicist and a celebrity scientist, but this in no way makes him an authority in the social implications of scientific discovery.
Re:He's Not Qualified (Score:5, Interesting)
What does make a person qualified? It seems like it's the sort of thing a layman can think about. I don't need to be an expert in any particular field to have my opinions on the value of nuclear weapons to be justified. Certainly some people's opinions are more valid than others, but you should be able to have views on a field without having a PhD in that particular field.
There are some topics where having a PhD might not help at all.
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It might be better to say that he's as qualified as anyone else to make an assessment, but he's getting time in periodicals to discuss something he's not an expert on because he's perceived to be an expert in something else, and his reputation has bled over.
For instance, I would like to believe that we'll have moved at least some of humanity off the planet in the next 10,000 years, but at this point, nothing suggests that this is actually going to happen. That we have the capability to do so is not really
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The last two thousand years. One thousand. One hundred. Fifty years ago. Twenty. Any layman can see it.
Technology. Population. Global effects. Scale of other effects, including those caused by a single human. Increased communication has sent cultural propagation/drift to shorter and shorter cycles. Most humans lived one way their whole life (not just technologically) and we've had the privilege
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I am qualified. :P
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He didn't say we were doomed because of technology. He said that advances in technology can be abused and that abuse is the causation of the doom. There is a difference. Take splitting the atom. You can produce relatively cheap energy with it or you can use it to destroy entire cities. The technology itself is neutral. It is how humanity chooses to use the technology that determines if there is destruction or not.
Hawking is waving a sign saying the end is near. He is pointing out, however, that we have t
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and why do you have a KEYLOCK on the inside of your door??
shouldn't all of that be knobs and sliders??
Re: He's Not Qualified (Score:2)
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Say what? Next you'll be telling me that belting out catchy ditties doesn't make Bono an expert on agro-economics.
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The guy is a brilliant theoretical physicist and a celebrity scientist, but this in no way makes him an authority in the social implications of scientific discovery.
I don't know. How qualified does he have to be? He just has to be able to detect this pattern:
1. Scientists discover something new and exciting about physics, chemistry, biology, computing, or psychology.
2. Military organizations pounce on the new discovery, ostensibly to further their explicit mission to outcompete other militaries. In doing so, of course, they also kill, wound, displace, or otherwise negatively affect a lot of civilians.
3. Meanwhile, unscrupulous governments attempt to use the advance
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Aren't we all qualified to see where this is going?
In the same sense that we are all qualified to have opinions about the 2007-9 financial crisis or we were all qualified to have opinions about how to respond to the recent ebola outbreak. It's not that he shouldn't have opinions on the subject, it is that he is not worthy of special attention for these opinions.
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The headline takes what he said out of context a little, and makes it seem like some kind of pompous pronouncement. He was answering a question, and while it's not clear from TFA exactly what the question was, it seems perfectly likely that what he said is a reasonable answer. What he seems to be saying is that while in the long term, science and technology will give our species survival advantages by dint of allowing us to spread to other planets or into space, and thus not have all our eggs in one basket,
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It's not that; the statement is so obvious it's stupid. Where else would new threats come from? Aliens? Asteroids? The sun exploding?
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Well, so what? What he's saying should hardly be controversial. As technologies make humans more powerful, it has made them more dangerous to themselves. Why would you expect otherwise?
Note that he's quite vague about what he means by "threat to humanity", which also puts him on fairly safe ground. I personally don't think that humans are quite capable of extinguishing life on the planet yet, given the adaptability of life. In fact given human behavioral adaptability I don't even think we're capable of d
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What? 1% of 2000 years is 20 years. Even my homeowners association has been around longer than that. Not to mention, say, the Catholic Church.
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Typo, should read 200000 years. I should think that's obvious.
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You're obviously too busy being pedantic.
Re: He's Not Qualified (Score:2)
I don't even think we're capable of driving ourselves to extinction
Apparently you're not aware that all it would take to wipe us out would be for us to stop maintaining the cooling systems of a portion of the world's reactors...
People need to hear what he has to say! (Score:3)
The guy is a brilliant theoretical physicist and a celebrity scientist, but this in no way makes him an authority in the social implications of scientific discovery.
Oh, I don't know. I'm sure keen to find out his picks for The Oscars.
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Yes, but "grand invasions" like Mr. Khan's seemed limited to about 10% of the population. Alexander the Great did something similar, I would note.
The geographical limits of communication and coordination technology seemed to put an upper limit on the reach of such invaders. If you are out and about conquering, you had a hard time focusing on political issues to keep your growing empire in check. Family political squabbles ended Khan's control, for example. You didn't have telegraphs and teleconferencing to
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And not one person in Australia, the Americas or I believe Africa.
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... at least some authority over and above the general public by virtue of being a thinker and a genius...
This is *precisely* how the "appeal to authority" fallacy works. Congrats on falling into it face-first.
Being a "thinker and a genius" does not - in ANY WAY - grant him any kind of generic authority over the public.
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Way to miss the point -- the list of replies I listed are mutually incompatible (ergo, I listed them separately).
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Way to miss the point
Oh, I got your "point" - it's just stupid.
...replies ... are mutually incompatible...
You don't seem to know what "mutually incompatible" means.
For instance if "there's no explicit claim he's an authority" (ignore for the moment that an explicit claim of authority is *utterly* unnecessary for a line of reasoning to qualify as an "appeal to authority") and "...comment implies your [sic - "the" maybe?] reasoning is fallacious because you appeal to authority" were mutually incompatible, then it would it would be impossible for both to be true at the sa
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These are incompatible in the sense that one cannot be putting forth all of them together without significant cognitive dissonance. You're thinking of incompatibility on a purely logical level, ignoring everything else, including intent, the very different type of argument each one represents, and the overall frame of conversation. The truth value of each of those statements is completely irrelevant in that context. Of
Disaster to planet Earth (Score:5, Insightful)
Although the chance of a disaster to planet Earth in a given year may be quite low, it adds up over time, and becomes a near certainty in the next thousand or ten thousand years," said Hawking ...
Pretty sure "the planet" will be fine no matter. Humans on the other hand ... It would also be disappointing for the huge, wonderful variety of plants and animals that share this planet with us to suffer because of our carelessness or apathy.
This Was ALMOST Always the Case (Score:2, Insightful)
From the invention to the bow and arrow to the trebuchet (piling on the plague bodies as ammunition) to the first nuclear bomb. Why? Because humanity continually builds tools that extend our reach, to give us abilities beyond our natural and current technological abilities.
Still, I think we will end on the mundane, the species exhausting resources on earth, rather than an extraordinary bang. Bangs we can survive, and even thrive. The exhaustion, otoh, comes from lack of planning and foresight. If anyth
Slashdot quote (Score:2)
Completely off topic, but am I the only one annoyed by the Slashdot quote today at the bottom of the page? Are they trolling, or did they purposely print that misquote? lol What would Ash say about this? ;-)
"Gort, klaatu nikto barada." -- The Day the Earth Stood Still
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"Threat to Humanity" (Score:2)
I am perplexed by some of the responses to this article. Steven Hawkins is "unqualified to comment" on the future of our species? Why? Because "no one would care if he weren't in a wheelchair'?
Would that there were an automated Moron Filter. (Chrome/Firefox snap-in, anyone?)
I too am hopeful for the future of our species on this planet, but not optimistic. I agree with the expressed opinion that this is a partic
"at least the next hundred years"? (Score:2)
"By that time we should have spread out into space, and to other stars, so a disaster on Earth would not mean the end of the human race. However, we will not establish self-sustaining colonies in space for at least the next hundred years, so we have to be very careful in this period."
Establishing just one colony in space that is self-sustaining and able to expand without Earth in the next century is extremely optimistic, even if humanity decided to focus its productive power on it like a global Apollo program. Given the scope of the task, I think millennia is a more reasonable timescale for such an endeavor. And as an aside, if we are able to focus on just one task, maybe world peace or an end to global warming would be better tasks?
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No. The primary limiting factor for building a self sustaining colony in space is the extreme price tag on getting anything out there - $10,000 per pound. Unless we solve that, space colonization is going to be somewhere between extremely slow and research only. Given the physics involved, prices are unlikely to drop low enough for regular people to be able to leave Earth without a wealthy benefactor. While we certainly do not need to get billions of people into space, I don't think that we are going to be
It's our own fault (Score:4, Funny)
To quote the late, great Bill Hicks, "We're a virus with shoes"
Introvert/Extrovert (Score:5, Insightful)
Both introverts and extroverts like being around people and doing interesting things. The main difference between introverts and extroverts is the way they recharge. Introverts recharge by being alone while extroverts recharge by being with people. This is a general statement that applies to most people.
Galantai Scale focuses on human survivability (Score:3, Interesting)
Nothing new: Slaughterhouse-Five (Score:2)
Extrapolate far enough into the future fantastic technologies, which become more and more potentially dangerous and eventually you can say it will blow up X.
House/Village/City/Country/World/Solar System/Galaxy/Universe/etc...
spikes vs sustained (Score:2)
Scientific progress may provide the big new threats to humanity, but it's also provided more or less all the ADVANCEMENTS enjoyed by humanity as well, such as most of your kids not dying before age 2, or being able to survive that paper-cut infection. Dentistry.
I have no doubt that if you could mass the ongoing, sustained (and really compounding) science benefits to humanity vs the new dangers it's created, the benefits win handily.
In fact, taking the population as a handy shorthand, just now benefits outw
Well ... yeah. (Score:2)
Did he also speculate that water is wet? Or that fire is hot?
Nothing against Steve here, but his observation is obvious knowledge. The more we progress in tech, science, etc. the more new and creative ways we'll find to kill each other. It's been that way since cavemen first discovered that you can sharpen a stick, and I don't expect it to change anytime soon either.
That said, we're finding equally new and creative ways to survive as well. From advances in medicine to sanitation and energy production, we'
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Yes, that's a key thing, whether the benefit has outpaced the elevated risk. Considering how much better nutrition, medicine, shelter/climate control, food production, transportation, commucation are, it's pretty good in aggregate.
Global warming is the most likely critical risk. More progress is helping us be able to potentially turn things back, if we are aggressive enough.
For nuclear weapons, it's easy to see how much higher the stakes are, and how terrible the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was.
Why is the human race so important (Score:4, Insightful)
Why is it so important to preserve the human race? We keep wiping ourselves out: many great civilizations have perished because all the available land was used up for food. Now we are able to make our whole planet uninhabitable for ourselves, and quote a long way on our way to doing exactly that. We are unsustainable and we should therefore die out. And besides, after you're dead, what does it matter to you what happens to humanity?
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We might be only intelligent beings in universe. There is a reasonable probability there won't be a second chance for developing high technology civilization on Earth, even if new intelligent species will evolved in hundred million years, due to available of easy accessible metals and fossil fuels. It would mean that when humanity dies out, there won't be a sentience ever again in universe.
This is depressing thought. Indeed, if you are strong subscriber to "après nous, le déluge", it doesn't matte
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It is your gene pool, even these are not your descendants. Helping your brother to have 4 children will contribute more to 'spreading' your gene pool than having 1 child yourself.
In any case, you should care more about your memes (not the internet kind) and these are hard to pass down if humanity goes extinct.
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Science is a source of options,
some are rather dangerous,
but doing nothing,
in the end,
guarantees our annihilation.
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Burma Shave
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By that principle, we are going extinct even if we learn interstellar travel.
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This isn't how you are programmed to work.
Biologically nothing makes any sense. I mean this in the full nihilistic sense, nothing matters to cells and DNA and enzymes, they just follow the rules of physics and chemistry and nothing is better or worse, it's just a bunch of atoms bumping together.
However, evolution has programmed you to care *a whole lot* about your own children, and their children, and so on (but really it's just words past grand children for the most part, there is no biological programmin
Re:Why care? (Score:5, Interesting)
the planet and in extension the universe is better off without human.
The problem is that humans compete with other life forms for food, light, warmth, moisture, etc. But computers need none of those things, and do best in a cool, dry, dark environment. So we should migrate our consciousnesses to silicon. AI is not the problem, it is the solution.
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the planet and in extension the universe is better off without human.
The problem is that humans compete with other life forms for food, light, warmth, moisture, etc. But computers need none of those things, and do best in a cool, dry, dark environment. So we should migrate our consciousnesses to silicon. AI is not the problem, it is the solution.
True, but they need electricity, cooling, and lack of moisture, etc. Does that make them better, or just a different platform? We don't get replaced as frequently. We have opposable thumbs. And, for you tin-foil hat types, humans are more resistant to government monitoring than computers. Oh, and don't forget computers can't have orgasms!...yet.
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Good luck with that, never going to happen within several generations.
Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk think it will happen much sooner than that. However, for some reason, they see it as a bad thing.
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Who cares what they think? If they're so smart, why ain't they rich?
Oh wait...
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The problem is that there may not be enough time for that to happen on this planet as its useful life for supporting complex life is mostly over. That is, in 800 million years this planet will not be capable of sustaining multi-cellular life due to eventual loss of carbon dioxide. This will happen whether humans are here or not.
We've got a very stable period from a geology, astronomy (that is, no ongoing nearby nova or other event that makes space totally uninhabitable,) and climate perspective right now, s
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Re:Why care? (Score:4, Funny)
What if we aren't an intelligent species?
Re:Why care? (Score:5, Funny)
But what if being intelligent enough to realize you aren't an intelligent species makes you an intelligent species?
<//
Re:Why care? (Score:4, Interesting)
That's a HUGE assumption. Heck, picture a species virtually identical to us, except that they reproduce much more slowly. Their pharmaceutical and industrial revolutions would go VERY differently without the rapid population explosion we experienced as a result. In fact, we're seeing today that well-to-do nations tend to fall to roughly zero population growth (discounting immigration), so there's a fair chance their global population might stabilize at far below a billion, something easily sustainable without stressing the planet's carrying capacity, eliminating or at least greatly simplifying virtually all of the problems we've created for ourselves, from war, to pollution, global warming, etc.
Re:Why care? (Score:5, Interesting)
That's a HUGE assumption. Heck, picture a species virtually identical to us, except that they reproduce much more slowly. Their pharmaceutical and industrial revolutions would go VERY differently without the rapid population explosion we experienced as a result. In fact, we're seeing today that well-to-do nations tend to fall to roughly zero population growth (discounting immigration), so there's a fair chance their global population might stabilize at far below a billion, something easily sustainable without stressing the planet's carrying capacity, eliminating or at least greatly simplifying virtually all of the problems we've created for ourselves, from war, to pollution, global warming, etc.
The industrial revolution might play out even more differently that what you are imagining. Our rapid growth is one of the things that spurred the industrial revolution. A longer life cycle would make cultural changes much slower. Also, without a high demand on resources, it becomes unnecessary. Look at the native americans. They had plenty of resources for a small population and therefore didn't progress to the large seafaring boats necessary to get more resources from afar (among other things). We might not have arose at all as resource scarcity is responsible for the growth of intelligence. Even if we would have made it to the industrial revolution, with a small population it becomes much more difficult to fund billion dollar projects like the space program as it's harder to skim that much money off the top. Basically, although there are disadvantages of a large population, there are also certain advantages like the ability of everyone to donate $1 and have enough money to fund huge enterprises as well as other indirect advantages like forcing innovation in order to survive.
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And if you've read Jared Diamond, there are other reasons for their lack of large empires and technological progress.
Many of his reasons like "division of labor", specialization, balkanization, domestication and even agriculture support what I was saying that with a slower life cycle we would likely see technological advances unfold very differently. Agriculture and domestication of animals likely wouldn't have even been necessary if our population stayed small enough to live off the land without improving it.
Re:He's not wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
While I agree with your first point, as to the second point, I'd say the break between weapon and action began centuries ago with the development of artillery. Drones are really just part of a long chain of innovations that started with the invention of gunpowder. In fact, there were many who felt that firearms and cannon were dishonorable weapons, and a battle should be fought man to man on a field of battle, sword matched to sword.
At any rate, that robots would become our warriors was foreseen decades ago, and every advance in remote probes; whether they be in space, on land or in deep water, has always been as much about developing weapons technology as it has been about exploration. That is the way of science, discoveries that can benefit humanity greatly can also all too often be used as weapons.
Re:He's not wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
Velcro?
Re:He's not wrong (Score:5, Funny)
The most dangerous of them all...
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Maxim 24: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a big gun.
Re:He's not wrong (Score:4, Funny)
yes and of course
6. If violence wasnâ(TM)t your last resort, you failed to resort to enough of it.
8. Mockery and derision have their place. Usually, it's on the far side of the airlock.
12. A soft answer turneth away wrath. Once wrath is looking the other way, shoot it in the head.
14. "Mad Science" means never stopping to ask "what's the worst thing that could happen?"
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robot army only makes sense if only one side of the conflict has it. otherwise, it's easier to just start a big bonfire and start throwing bucketfuls of money into it. he who runs out of money first, loses.
Re:He's not wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
Advances in computing have enabled oppression that would have been unimaginable not even a few decades ago.
Yes, because slaves in ancient Egypt or early USA were not really 'oppressed'. Nobody was monitoring their tweets, nobody was invoking 'protection from terrorists' while bodypatting them before they boarded their business class flights for holiday trips, they haven't to copy with uncertainty of their routers having hardware embedded backdoors done by NSA and there was no risk of them being caught in the city because of CCTVs monitoring.
Every time I hear people claiming how bad contemporary freedoms are, I really wish them being sent to middle ages or earlier and put into non-ruling class shoes. Spending few years as serf, not being allowed to own anything, move more than few miles from your place of birth, reading anything except Bible (if you even knew how to read in first place) and having your relatives raped by local lord on the whim without any chances of going to the court would probably put things into perspective.
Re:He's not wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
And every time I hear about people comparing "how good we have it now" to how bad it used to be, I really wish that they'd just admit that they've given up at being the best and that they've settled for "well, at least we're not North Korea".
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I really wish that they'd just admit that they've given up at being the best
We don't live in a fantasy world. There are many hard limits keeping us from getting that perfect society. Not least of which is that we're a bit far from perfect ourselves.
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We don't live in a fantasy world, but there is no reason that we should stop trying to improve our world, just because it is a lot better than 100 years ago.
What are these hard limits you speak of? I don't know any, is there a reason we cannot evolve to be perfect. Will we ever get to a perfect world (whatever that is, I don't even have a definition of that) probably not, should we stop trying to improve our lives, just because we can't attain perfection, NO.
I agree with grandparent, that complaining techn
Re:He's not wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
Technology has not made our lives worse, but it hasn't necessarily made them better. Longer, perhaps, but longer does not always mean better.
A lot depends on what you value and your perception of the world. There are people living today who would commit suicide over having to live at a 19th Century level, let alone a 10th Century level of technology or culture. However, as we know, millions and billions of people lived in those periods over time, the great majority of which did not kill themselves.
There is nothing that describes how science does not necessarily improve our lives like the term "first world problems". People live and die, and feel miserable about not having things that 99.99999% of humans have never had or even known existed.
Ultimately, your attitude and ability to maintain perspective is probably your best chance at really feeling happy in this world. There *are* marvels and wonders out there, but we're so used to them, that you probably need to study history to really understand how good we have it.
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We are better off than 100 years ago, but are we better off than 50 years ago?
Depends on definition of 'we'. I think, that, weighted by population, world is a lot better than 50 years ago. Enough to look at China - while it has its great firewall right now and monitors its citizen lives extensively, I still don't think it in any way compares with Cultural Revolution times in terms of 'oppression'.
Same for Eastern block - life under USSR directorate was a lot more oppressing that what is happening right now.
If we focus on Western countries in particular (so limiting ourselves to 20% o
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What are these hard limits you speak of? I don't know any, is there a reason we cannot evolve to be perfect. Will we ever get to a perfect world (whatever that is, I don't even have a definition of that) probably not, should we stop trying to improve our lives, just because we can't attain perfection, NO.
An obvious one is our individuality. No matter how "perfect" we become, as long as we're separate from each other in thought, then there will be conflict of interests between us.
Another is our ignorance, especially of future consequences of complex actions and systems. I think we'll get much better at it, but it will still be possible to be surprised by things not working to expectations.
As a side note I personally wouldn't like to live in a world where the are no problems, everything get all that they want, how boring, what would you have to live for. That would not be my definition of a perfect world.
Doesn't sound that bad to me. I think I could make it work.
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What makes you think we cannot evolve that individuality away?
Sure, but then you're not human any more.
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Why not? I see no reason that individuality is inseparable from being human.
I do.
Again, from the wonderful work of communism and fascism, we know that people can be detached from their individuality. Does that mean those people are, at that point, not human?
Yes.
If they are not human, would that not mean we can deny them human rights?
Remove the individuality and you already removed almost all human rights.
Going at it from another angle: how much individuality do you need to be classified as human? It's easy to say that if somebody doesn't have it, they aren't. But what if two people each have some individuality, but one has "more" individuality (however that is measured)? Would that mean the other person is "less human", and from there we can do the same thing as if he was a non-human - deny him rights?
We already have this figured out legally because there's a fair number of ways happenstance can do this via illness or injury. In the US, it can happen by being judged legally incompetent, which can happen due to mental illness or dementia. As a result, the subject loses some rights and has assigned another party to act on their behalf. Legally, they are still considered human, but they don't have rights or privileges associat
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You and I apparently come away with very different views of that phrase. I don't see it as an argument for standing pat, I see it as evidence of progress.
Things are generally better now in terms of peace, civil and human rights world wide than they've ever been before. Could they be even better, absolutely but at least the trend is positive.
If you based your view of the world on the news, trending topics or political vitriol you'd be convinced that we're headed to hell in a hand basket, that WWWIII is pr
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No one is saying that these things are worse than shackle-and-chain slavery.
We're just a bit concerned that after all this awesome forward progress, we seem to be setting up all of the pieces to slide back and then be locked in.
If you can't see how this can be used against the things we take for granted in the west then you are blind.
It's not that it's bad now, but when you need a data mined facebook to login to a Govt. website and all financial transactions are under the Govt. eye and the Gov't. is militar
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However, science is generally logical enough to recognize that such uses of technology are counterproductive.
How long did it take to recognize that lead in gasoline was a bad idea? More seriously for existential risks like the sort under discussion, it doesn't take science collectively as a whole to do something stupid, just a handful of people might engineer a bad virus. Or a pollution problem could arise that is a collective action problem like climate change. The Fermi Paradox is a real problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox [wikipedia.org] and one of the easiest explanations for it is that civilizations wipe th
Re:Science or religion? (Score:5, Insightful)
Science may recognize it, but scientists rarely have a say in the actual application of new technologies. At that point we have to put our faith in our governments and commercial interests, and neither of these groups have proven all that reliable at using technology responsibly.
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First of all, in Total War, there are no innocents. The US Civil War, where Total War was essentially invented, demonstrated that in modern warfare, every member of society becomes a part of the war machine.
As to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, the Allies caused just as many death with conventional bombs. People concentrate on the nuclear devices dropped on those two cities, but don't seem to be aware of the massive conventional bombings of Japanese targets, in particular Tokyo, where somewhere between
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What, Total War was essentially invented during the US Civil War ?
We go to great lengths to claim we invented pretty much everything under the sun but there's a few thousand years of warfare that predates the Civil War that suggests humans were quite aware of how to engage everyone on both sides indiscriminately. About the best you can do is suggest that the late 1700s and early 1800 showed Europeans giving up on their brief dabbling in nice friendly fights and returning to what we as a species do best.
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Is that why Japan signed a surrender treaty with the USSR? Oh wait, they never did.
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Please site where Republicans are more interested in collecting information and preventing dissenters than Democrats.
I guess you haven't heard of the Supreme Court case being discussed right now in which the unions (they're Democrats from what I've been told) have been oppressing their members and making arguments that suppression of dissent gives them the ability to do more "good". Sweet.
Again, please give sources.
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Really? And the Dems are not?
Please site where Republicans are more interested in collecting information and preventing dissenters than Democrats.
I guess you haven't heard of the Supreme Court case being discussed right now in which the unions (they're Democrats from what I've been told) have been oppressing their members and making arguments that suppression of dissent gives them the ability to do more "good". Sweet.
Again, please give sources.
I don't know about the republicans or the democrats, but I am pretty sure that whatever unions do, they aren't the government.
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- Genetically engineered airborne supervirus (think 12 Monkeys movie plot)
- Self replicating nano-bot swarm / grey goo
- Actual AI replacing humans
- Nukes
- New type of super-weapon (like a hydrogen bomb) that requires significantly less effect or difficult materials to create
This concept really isn't new; it's one of the ideas of why we haven't seen any evidence of life outside Earth (fermi paradox); that civilizations eventually destroy themselves via technology before th
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The thing is when you look past the clickbait, it's actually a reasonable opinion not on the dangers of technology, but on the dangers of trying to keep our current social models without adapting to or acknowledging disruptive technology.
for example, the "OMG Hawkins fears skynet" was just clickbait for "Hawkins is worried that if we don't do anything about current inequality trends, most of humanity will be treated as disposable garbage when automation renders human labour obsolete"
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Every time I see a report about Stephen Hawking talking about the end of the human race because of this or that all I can picture is that he is now a senile old man bitching about kids these days and the world going to hell in a hand basket. It's just less apparent because of his physical situation / appearance.
Professor Hawking is somebody who has spent a lot of time thinking about things and has a very solid track record in doing it well, so I would say, on balance, that it is worth taking note of what he says. It doesn't mean that he is necessarily right, but compared to the words of the average AC on slashdot, I know whose opinions I am more likely to dismiss with a shrug.
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Let's all drop everything and listen to what this person on the Internet has to say because this person is obviously smarter than someone who figured out how to apply Quantum Mechanics to a Relativistic problem!
The guy is super smart to be sure but that doesn't mean he's a font of all knowledge. None of his recent 'predictions', that AI might not be the best thing ever etc don't take a genius to realise but because hawking said it some people seem to want to take it as fact.