I give up. Why?
He’s actually said this before in lesser known interviews. The fundamental problem is that machines are not living organisms, and therefore do not have organic heterogeneous parts internally (immanently) ordered towards the whole. This internal ordering towards the whole is one of the defining characteristics of the substantial form of a living thing. This internal ordering of heterogeneous parts gives it certain potencies that are its end, its final cause.
I’m not sure this gets at the root of the problem. What you say is true of course but I think the answer is much more complicated. I think one has to prove that a machine cannot think, it can only do what it has been programmed to do. One has to prove it cannot go beyond what it has been programmed to do. And since no one human being or even all human beings can foresee every situation and problem and select a correct solution, neither will any machine be able to do it. Then there is the problem of machines designing their own parts, making their own parts and searching, finding, mining, and obtaining all the raw materials it needs to construct these parts. Hawking has been reading too many si-fi books.
Well, he has to make a lot of money to pay for his medical bills and his daily care. His bills must be enormous. Actually I like the guy, you have to admire his toughness, to live like that and still enjoy living and he said he wanted to live as long as possible. And he does have a sense of humor. We just have to pray for him.
Agism. Watch the video linked in the OP, he’s obviously firing on all cylinders.
It won’t surprise you
if I say yesterday’s sci-fi is today’s reality.Fortunately he lives in a country with a compassionate national healthcare system - instituted by a Welshman, of course.
I had to go back read and reread the article. I do not think Hawking’s is necessarily suggesting that artificial intelligence would ever surpass human intelligence in terms of contemplation and creativity. It still would very much be limited to its logical roots and thus its self-purpose would be limited in like manner, whereas human intelligence can go beyond the immediately logical. I think the problem is that artificial intelligence will just wipe out human intelligence out of something parallel to brute force, as it quickly dominates the use of resources, essential to life. For example, you can starve a human without being smarter than them, you just take away its food supply.
Exactly,
But the question was, " …why is Hawking wrong…? " I’m sure you don’t agree with him, but why is he wrong? No one doubts that computers and computer driven machines can be super efficient and can indeed challenge humans in many ways. But is it even theoretically possible that machines will displace human beings? I do not pretend to have the correct answer myself.It won’t surprise you
Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel, made a prediction in 1965 that chip transistor counts would double every two years. That has proved true for 50 years now. By my reckoning that means today’s computers are twenty million times more powerful than those of the 1960s. In ten year’s time they will be one billion times more powerful. By 2034, twenty billion.
Chips are now being sold which start to approach the brains’ energy efficiency. That means that just as today’s cellphone is orders of magnitude more powerful than a computer which once occupied a large room, tomorrow’s cellphone will be more powerful than today’s supercomputer, and use a fraction of the electricity.
Robots are now used routinely in many industries. Software which can evolve itself has been around for some time, and is usually better than software which has been programmed. Machines can learn from each other in seconds by wifi, even if they are on opposite sides of the planet.
With that pace of development in just fifty years, I’d have thought Hawking has a point. Eventually.