Hawking: AI could end human race

And please stop with your arogant (and erronous) definition of what science is and science is not.

Higgs theorized the Higg's boson existence in the 60s, that could not be tested until 50 years later, are you saying this was not science? Einstein's general relativity predicted the existence of black holes in 1916, we still don't have definit, hard proof of their existence, is it not science? The Big Bang theorie has never been proven (data from last year BICEP2 experiment are still being dissected), is it not science?

Should we not talk about all this subjects because they are not proven?

What you are referring to, is the scientific method, which is the way we use to decide if something is sufficiently proven to be deemed as true or not, not the definition of science itself.

So my guess is the story was flagged of the front page by this crowd. The comment quality in this thread is very poor, though, so although I would love to see the subject discussed in greater detail, it is clear that the HN community isn't capable of discussing this topic right now.

But looking into AI field, it is clear there's nothing further from truth as of yet. What we have is rudiments of bits of intelligence. And some of these rudimentary bits have been around for almost two thirds of a century. We don't have general idea of how intelligence works, or even how to define it objectively.

But I can see where they are coming from. Our brains work as they work, and we know they must have mechanism, it means it must be possible to simulate it in computers, and it means it must be possible to improve it.

But another thing I disagree is the whole "if they are more intelligent than us, there is no way to know what they are going to do". Really? There are plenty of people who are more intelligent than any one of us here. Do they want to kill everyone less intelligent than they? Never heard of it. There are plenty of animals of all levels of intelligence. Do we want to kill them just because they are less intelligent? No. Do other more intelligent animals try to kill less intelligent animals? No.

If what, if there will be more intelligent machine than us, it will want to help us so we can maintain it, fix it and improve it, if it will have survival instinct (which will only happen if we build them to have one). Because robots and AI will not survive long without humans no matter how advanced they are.

Another thing that severely limits the chances of AI posing any danger to us, no matter how smart it will be, is the limited number of parallel AI's running. We, as humans, strive in intellectual stuff, is because there are billions of us and we have very good ways of communicating our knowledge. If one human makes mistake, there are many chances it will be corrected by others. AI's usually are made one of a kind. Which means it is enough to make one mistake for it to be "put down" if something goes wrong. So unless we intentionally create environment for hostile AIs to thrive, we have nothing to worry about even when there will be several of smarter than humans robots.

"the universe would appear to be slowing-down/getting-smaller until it had dimensions of zero" From your point of view it would appear to be getting smaller, although I don't think it would go as far as dimension 0.

"(or to put it another way, time would "stop")" It would appear to the external observer, that YOUR time had stopped. But from your point of view it did not stop, nor did their time from their point of view.

"An outside observer would see me moving faster and faster and "stretching" longer and longer." You would feel you are falling faster and faster. The external observer would see you stretching longer and longer. (Although you would also feel like you are stretching, because of the difference of gravity between your head and your feet, but much less than for the external observer)

"lets imagine I'm infinity tough and not torn to shreds due to tidal forces"

In fact you don't need to be infinitely tough. If you choose a black hole large enough (like the massive black hole at the center of our galaxy), you would just need a space suit and you could go into the event horizon without being pulled apart by tidal forces. You would be absolutly fine (their may be other dangers though...).