Stephen Hawking on AI and our future...

Please let me digress a moment, to explain that I'm trying out Project Spartan, and I grabbed a screen of it for this piece, but it didn't include the full image of Stephen Hawking, so I grabbed a second screen a bit lower, and then spliced these with Image Composite Editor. That's why some of the edge details are duplicated along its margins. It's not an indication of any problems, it's just the best match we can have of the two images, spliced vertically. And now let me add that I love Image Composite Editor. If overlapping images can be nicely spliced, in any direction, vertically, horizontally, or diagonally, this can and does do it. It's amazing! You can get yours here!

And now, back to the Stephen Hawking story...

I'm processing what Professor Hawking says here along with what we know of Global Warming, and for that matter, human nature and our emotional disputes with one another, both familial, tribal, national, and international, ever since those two intrepid cavemen, Ug and Mug, climbed down from their trees and began to "go forth and multiply" - and all of this leaves me very pessimistic on mankind's future. A saying attributed to Old Uncle Albert goes: "The commonest element in the Universe is not Hydrogen, but rather Stupidity."

And that about sums it up, really. Our technology has advanced amazingly in a relatively short span of time. And it's increasing exponentially. Just in my own lifetime, world population has tripled, and we've gone from radios and newspapers and telephones as our main means of communication to things like television, and satellites, and computers, and a whole range of mobile devices.

This former delivery boy for the Toronto Daily Star, with his bike and his bundle of papers, delivering to less than a hundred households back in the early morning hours in the early 1940s, is now sitting here with his computer, looking at his 30-inch flat screen TV used as a monitor as well as a functioning TV, and writing this blog using Microsoft's as-yet-unfinished next operating system, and this is going out over the Internet to a potential readership of millions around the world. Talk about your 'science fiction' -  this beats the hell out of that! And all within just a little less than one kid's lifetime. Time really does march on, trampling everything underfoot.

Will we kill ourselves all off in some hellish nuclear war, or poison ourselves into oblivion from uncontrolled pollution? Will Climate Change bring on another Ice Age that wipes out large parts of the globe's civilization? Or, as Stephen Hawking postulates, will our Artificial Intelligence do it to us before that could happen? I don't know. I don't have a crystal ball, and my 'abracadabra' isn't working very well either.... But seriously...... I pray we somehow manage to control our childish emotions, and save ourselves from impending doom before it's too late. In case it isn't too late already. I want to believe we were put here for some higher purpose than we've yet achieved.