Hawkings: Khan is real!

[I_am_not_mafia]

Can't believe I also called him Hawkings. I blame Beta for putting the name in my head!  

And to think that last time I posted about him, I googled to check whether it was Steven or Stephen.

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Complexity may be a major hurdle to achieving safe, consistent, predicatable results.  It may also be a major hurdle to making the process affordable and accessible.  

It is not necessarily a nearly as serious a hurdle to achieving some significant but opportunistic results by those who are willing to gamble their own or other people’s health and safety in a processed too expensive to apply to but a few.

I think Hawkin is right.  It is th second category we should fear.

Stephen Hawking may have been right, I don't know. But then neither did he. That was my only point.

It's worth pointing out though that we do genetic engineering all the time. Whether it's by selecting a mate based on specific criteria, some of them we aren't even aware of such finding some body smells more attractive because of the owner's immune system. Genetic engineering would just be a more direct route. And in the same way we don't know all the different ways a gene can affect the phenotype, we rarely recognise all the advantages and disadvantages of certain features of a body or mind.

But like with AI, I am sure that there are certain things that we should be wary of. But it's probably not the long term sci-fi trope inspired alarmist predictions.

[Fake Messiah]

You get it guys! Because Hawking (but in this topic he is re-named Hawkings because after all beta fail is dumb as shit) said something that is obviously from Star Trek he was being silly and if Hawking was silly (read: wrong) then he must have been silly about everything including universe that is billions of years old and evolution of life, thus fairy tale stories that beta fail takes for granted must be right!

LMAO - dude, I'm just joking around. Want me to send you a quarter so you can buy a sense of humor?

Maybe because you weren't joking and you didn't post it in humor section and are now trying to backpedal from an embarrassment that you tried to banter Stephen Hawking and yet failed even to read his name properly.

Now, when it comes to subject itself article is more reminiscent of the movie Gattaca than Star Trek. As, for instance can be seen in this video.





But even that kind of society is hardly likely to crop up because although people will change genetic disorders in emerging humans they won't make them 'superior' because there is no such definition as what is superior human. Even in that movie "Gattaca" they didn't have much of an idea what that superiority could be and thus you had people with six fingers on each hand as some sort of superior pianists.

Or even when it comes to higher intelligence it is also something undefined. Yes, there are people that do complicated science, but that also probably doesn't rest so much on some genetic predispositions but rather motivation, upbringing and their surroundings because most people are somewhere same with intelligence quota.

I mean sure if you look today there are many so called stupid people but it is yet to be determined if it is mostly because of genetic reasons and not because of lack of proper education and motivation and religious surrounding.
I myself know of couple of cases where individuals weren't much educated and or lazy but when they moved to different parts of world where they had more opportunities to make money they suddenly took classes to learn more and worked much harder.

But I guess my true grudge on Stephen Hawking about this is how much this problem is trifle compared to truly compressing problems for humanity like pollution and climate change. If anything people should press politicians to work on solving these problems. Not to mention that Hawking should have worked that smarter people, like him, have more important role in today's politics, because what does it mean to be smart scientists today? - Almost nothing.

Or another so called problem that Hawking and some other prominent people worry is AI. I mean really? Even today if there was some real war it would be brutal with devices like drones that the enemy would truly seem invisible and deadly.

[Amarok]

LMAO - dude, I'm just joking around. Want me to send you a quarter so you can buy a sense of humor?

Or maybe we know you an the kind of bullshit you pull 

[I_am_not_mafia]

But I guess my true grudge on Stephen Hawking about this is how much this problem is trifle compared to truly compressing problems for humanity like pollution and climate change. If anything people should press politicians to work on solving these problems. Not to mention that Hawking should have worked that smarter people, like him, have more important role in today's politics, because what does it mean to be smart scientists today? - Almost nothing.

Or another so called problem that Hawking and some other prominent people worry is AI. I mean really? Even today if there was some real war it would be brutal with devices like drones that the enemy would truly seem invisible and deadly.

This is my gripe as well. People extrapolate the curve and expect the future to be what it is now but more so. But they don't take into account that any exponential curve will eventually hit a limit on resources and look more like a sigmoid function.

Moore's law is an excellent example of this. The cost of building each new factory goes up exponentially. The resources required for the chips, the rare earth materials, are being depleted exponentially while demand from for them from other parts of the economy are increasing exponentially.

Moore's law is already flattening out and the exponential curve is starting to look more like an S. Not mention that Intel themselves have said that it is not economically viable to continue beyond something like 5mn (we're currently at 14nm). Apparently we're supposed to be able to buy PCs with the processing capacity of the human brain next year according to the early predictions made by Ray Kurzweil., oh and AI will be demanding equal rights with humans in just over 10 years time.

Yeah right. Yet people still listen to self publicising hacks like this.

When the reality is we are likely in peak oil right now. Narrow AI is being abused by governments and corporations. Strong AI probably won't ever exist because society will collapse before then. The same is probably true for genetic engineering. The threat probably lays with the insurance industry, governments and corporations abusing data about us rather than super-humans being created.

Climate change, sea level rise, pollution and resource depletion are very real problems that we need to concentrate on now rather than something imaginary.

We have one chance at making the transition to a sustainable society and we're not working on it fast enough.

[Fake Messiah]

This is my gripe as well. People extrapolate the curve and expect the future to be what it is now but more so. But they don't take into account that any exponential curve will eventually hit a limit on resources and look more like a sigmoid function.

Or if we look at society today we see it doesn't even reward smart people, so why would we expect that they will in the future? I would much rather take my chances in the world governed by upgraded Richard Feynman, Paul Dirac, Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, Alan Turing than the one today which is governed by Jared Kushner, Rick Perry, Ivanka, Ben Carson, Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump.

You know Donald Trump could use some genetic engineering on his brain.

Strong AI probably won't ever exist because society will collapse before then.

And we don't even need AI to make wars unfair or inhuman or whatever they think robots will contribute to warfare. All you need is some guy with a joystick sitting in some shack and piloting a silent deadly drone thousands of miles away.

[Anomalocaris]

But I guess my true grudge on Stephen Hawking about this is how much this problem is trifle compared to truly compressing problems for humanity like pollution and climate change. If anything people should press politicians to work on solving these problems. Not to mention that Hawking should have worked that smarter people, like him, have more important role in today's politics, because what does it mean to be smart scientists today? - Almost nothing.

Or another so called problem that Hawking and some other prominent people worry is AI. I mean really? Even today if there was some real war it would be brutal with devices like drones that the enemy would truly seem invisible and deadly.

I don’t agree this problem is trifling.  

I think for people who care somewhat for the rest of humanity and it’s posterity, it is easier to focus a large scale predictably evolving problem that indisputable effects many and stress the social and economic system we have in place, such as pollution and climate change, and harder to to take preventive measures against black swan developments that may exhibit few clearly recognizable leading indicators or proof of its approach, but which subvert the ability of existing and hitherto somewhat reliable mode of operation of social and economy and replace it diversions and internal strife designed to enlarge the influence of a few at the gross expense of the many, such as 9/11, Brexit and trump.

I think Stephen Hawking is perceptive in his assessment that black swan events may in the long run excert a greater destructive influence on the course of human society than steady evolving stresses of pollution, climate change and population, and part of the challenge of establishing a regime able to deal in the long run with large scale predicable stresses is to prevent the development of unpredictable but destructive black swan events.

I find it particularly concerning that not only is the ascendant lunatic right wing fring in the US, which remains the leader driver of both basic and applied science, anti-science, but it is systematically seeking to remove basic science from the list general public good that needs to be promoted with public funding and made generally available as basis of common understanding of reality, and relegated it to privately funded gamble for private enrichment and advancement.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

In his final book, Hawking also flatly stated, 'There is no God.  No one directs the universe.'  Funny how we never see conservatives praising that bit.

Boru

[Anomalocaris]

In his final book, Hawking also flatly stated, 'There is no God.  No one directs the universe.'  Funny how we never see conservatives praising that bit.

Boru

I frequently hear intellectually honest, non-opportunistic, thoughtful, even handed conservatives praising intellectually honest arguments after each sunrise in the west.

[Dr H]

Not this shit again.

Star Trek didn't invent shit. It was a FUCKING TV SHOW, not a lab.

Heh.

Back when Bush II was preparing to take us to war in Iraq, I was hanging out in a discussion group that included skeptics, atheists, paranormalists, and a few Christian apologists.  There was a physician there who was a hard-core skeptic, disdainful almost to the point of viciousness when it came to dismissing anything that smacked of the paranormal, supernatural, or religious.  

He and I got along pretty well until the inevitable debate came up over whether we should invade Iraq.  I maintained that the reasons being given -- WMDs, etc. -- where all agenda-driven rhetoric, with no supporting evidence.  He insisted that there WAS evidence that Saddam was on the verge of overthrowing western civilization, and pointed me to a book, The Fist of God, by Frederick Forsyth.  Not the kind of book I would usually pick up, but on his recommendation I did, and it was a pretty good read.

When I pointed out to the Doc that Fist of God was fiction, he was undeterred, and continued to argue the hawk's side of the issue, and continued to point to that book as evidence of the kind of thing we needed to be very worried about if we didn't invade Iraq.  I couldn't help but lose a bit of the respect I had for him at that point, but I was mystified, too.  I had no problem with him taking a contrary political position to mine, but I would have expected a hard-headed skeptic to present better evidence to support that position than a thriller novel.

People are weird.