Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking (1942–2018) was a British theoretical physicist and cosmologist whose work on black holes and the origins of the universe, together with the best-selling “A Brief History of Time,” made him the most recognizable scientist of his era. Diagnosed with motor neurone disease at 21 and given a few years to live, he worked for more than five decades and communicated through a computerized speech synthesizer that itself relied on predictive text.

The warning on AI

In a December 2014 BBC interview — prompted, fittingly, by a question about his AI-assisted speech system — Hawking delivered one of the most quoted warnings of the AI age. He argued that a fully autonomous AI “would take off on its own and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate,” and that humans, “limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.”

Hawking’s position was not simple technophobia. In 2016 he helped launch Cambridge’s Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, calling AI potentially “either the best, or the worst” thing to happen to humanity, and he co-signed open letters urging safety research and a ban on autonomous weapons. He wanted the field to proceed — carefully, and with the risks studied before they arrived.