Hawking's Brief Answers to the Big Questions: Artificial Intelligence

Summary: Artificial intelligence takes ninth place in 10 queries that theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking turns into Brief Answers to the Big Questions.

Multiple exposure image shows Puma (Programmable Universal Machine for Assembly, or Programmable Universal Manipulation Arm) industrial robotic arm in action, used for virtual reality development and studies at NASA Ames Research Center, Mountain View, California; April 2, 1990: NASA/Dominic Hart, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

An acknowledged last work by a world-renowned theoretical physicist for posthumous publication by Bantam Books Oct. 15, 2018, assures artificial intelligence ninth place among 10 asked and answered questions for general readers.

Stephen Hawking (Jan. 8, 1942-March 14, 2018) builds the ninth chapter to Brief Answers to the Big Questions around the query, "Will artificial intelligence outsmart us?" The founder of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge, England, in October 2018 correlates intelligence with adaptability and consciousness. Chapter 4 on extraterrestrial intelligence describes living beings, including humankind, as genes and metabolism and human-derived computer virus life forms as gene-like instructions and metabolism-like performance.

Chapter 3 encounters human-like life in carbon atom chains and non-human life forms in silicon atom chains and electro-magnetic, non-DNA-based, non-macromolecular machines that establish machine-engineered descendants.

The Future of Life Institute scientific advisory board member fits artificial intelligence among life and life-like forms that favor humankind or function fiendishly like computer viruses.

Chapter 9 gauges no qualitative, significant difference between computer memories and animal minds that generate information-processed outputs from information-gathered sight, smell, sound, taste and touch sensors. Moore's Law has computer memory capacity and maximum speed doubled every 18 months and therefore hints of computers as more intelligent than humankind within 100 years. Artificial intelligence that is so intelligent that it improves itself without human intervention is intimidating if its goal-oriented, task-completion itinerary is misaligned with that of humankind.

Artificial intelligence juggles autonomous vehicles, image classification, machine translation, question-answering systems and speech recognition against target-selecting autonomous weapons systems and the 2010 computer-triggered stock-market Flash Crash.

Irwin Good (Dec. 9, 1916-April 5, 2009) knew back in 1965 that no physical laws keep artificial intelligence from knowing particle arrangements superior to human brains.

The Future of Life Institute open letter January 2015 laments lack of immediate and long-term controls against artificial intelligence competitively, non-maliciously out-inventing, out-manipulating, out-smarting, out-weaponing humankind. A report to the European Parliament mentions legal rights of electronic personhood, like business's corporate personhood, for robots whose humankind-serving, non-menacing designs practically mandate kill switches. Thirty mega-cities, each with 10-plus million inhabitants by 2025, perhaps necessitate digital surrogates in two-plus places at once and robotized commerce of same-day purchase and receipt.

Artificial intelligence occasions automated voices for public announcements and telephone systems and perhaps digital actors for entertainment and interactive tutors for mass open online courses (MOOCs).

Artificial intelligence presents a computer winner of the game Go, self-driving cars, touch screens 150 years after invention of typewriters and imminently interacting, intuitive smart-home products.

Artificial intelligence perhaps queues up human mind amplification with silicon chip implants and wireless electronic interfaces for brain-controlled body movements and reverse paralysis in spinal-cord injuries. It ranges from brain-computer interfaces, as high-performing implants that risk infection and lower-performing electrodes, to quantum computing for genome-edited genetic engineering of Hawking's motor neurone disease. Temporal stretches sufficed between invention of fire and fire extinguishers even though artificial intelligence, nuclear weapons and synthetic biology suggest no second chances for human slip-ups.

Hawkingesque treatments for an overcrowded, overused Earth in a solar system and universe with respective 10-billion- and 27.6-billion-year shelf lives team artificial intelligence and space colonization.

Stephen Hawking emphasizes a robot's kill switch, which did not help Discovery One spacecraft scientists in controlling malfunctioning HAL in director Stanley Kubrick's 1968 science fiction film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, but, Hawking notes, "that was fiction;" replica of HAL 9000 (Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic) in Robot Hall of Fame, Carnegie Science Center, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Photojunkie, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Acknowledgment

My special thanks to talented artists and photographers/concerned organizations who make their fine images available on the internet.

Image credits:

Multiple exposure image shows Puma (Programmable Universal Machine for Assembly, or Programmable Universal Manipulation Arm) industrial robotic arm in action, used for virtual reality development and studies at NASA Ames Research Center, Mountain View, California; April 2, 1990: NASA/Dominic Hart, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons @ https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Puma_Robotic_Arm_-_GPN-2000-001817.jpg

Stephen Hawking emphasizes a robot's kill switch, which did not help Discovery One spacecraft scientists in controlling malfunctioning HAL in director Stanley Kubrick's 1968 science fiction film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, but, Hawking notes, "that was fiction;" replica of HAL 9000 (Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic) in Robot Hall of Fame, Carnegie Science Center, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Photojunkie, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons @ https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL_9000.JPG

For further information:

Hawking, Stephen. 2018. "[Chapter] 9: Will Artificial Intelligence Outsmart Us?" Brief Answers to the Big Questions. New York NY: Bantam Books.

Marriner, Derdriu. 18 October 2018. "Hawking's Brief Answers to the Big Questions: Scientific Literacy." Earth and Space News. Thursday.
Available @ https://earth-and-space-news.blogspot.com/2018/10/hawkings-brief-answers-to-big-questions.html

Marriner, Derdriu. 25 October 2018. "Brief Answers to Big Questions: Divine Creation, Scientific Creation?" Earth and Space News. Thursday.
Available @ https://earth-and-space-news.blogspot.com/2018/10/brief-answers-to-big-questions-divine.html

Marriner, Derdriu. 1 November 2018. "Cosmological Beginnings in Hawking's Brief Answers to Big Questions." Earth and Space News. Thursday.
Available @ https://earth-and-space-news.blogspot.com/2018/11/cosmological-beginnings-in-hawkings.html

Marriner, Derdriu. 8 November 2018. "Intelligent Life in Stephen Hawking's Brief Answers to Big Questions." Earth and Space News. Thursday.
Available @ https://earth-and-space-news.blogspot.com/2018/11/intelligent-life-in-stephen-hawkings.html

Marriner, Derdriu. 15 November 2018. "Hawking's Brief Answers to the Big Questions: Predictable Futures?" Earth and Space News. Thursday.
Available @ https://earth-and-space-news.blogspot.com/2018/11/hawkings-brief-answers-to-big-questions.html

Marriner, Derdriu. 22 November 2018. "Hawking's Brief Answers to the Big Questions: Black Hole Interiors." Earth and Space News. Thursday.
Available @ https://earth-and-space-news.blogspot.com/2018/11/hawkings-brief-answers-to-big-questions_22.html

Marriner, Derdriu. 29 November 2018. "Hawking's Brief Answers to the Big Questions: Is Time Travel Possible?" Earth and Space News. Thursday.
Available @ https://earth-and-space-news.blogspot.com/2018/11/hawkings-brief-answers-to-big-questions_29.html

Marriner, Derdriu. 6 December 2018. "Hawking's Brief Answers to the Big Questions: Doomsday Earth?" Earth and Space News. Thursday.
Available @ https://earth-and-space-news.blogspot.com/2018/12/hawkings-brief-answers-to-big-questions_6.html

Marriner, Derdriu. 13 December 2018. "Hawking's Brief Answers to the Big Questions: Space Colonization." Earth and Space News. Thursday.
Available @ https://earth-and-space-news.blogspot.com/2018/12/hawkings-brief-answers-to-big-questions_13.html