Showing posts with label stephen hawking. Show all posts
Tweet Share Share Share Share Share

October 22, 2016
Stephen Hawking

In a lecture at the University of Cambridge this week, Stephen Hawking made the bold claim that the creation of artificial intelligence will be "either the best, or the worst thing, ever to happen to humanity".
The talk was celebrating the opening of the new Leverhulme Centre of the Future of Intelligence, where some of the best minds in science will try to answer questions about the future of robots and artificial intelligence - something Hawking says we need to do a lot more of.
“We spend a great deal of time studying history," Hawking told the lecture, "which, let’s face it, is mostly the history of stupidity."
But despite all our time spent looking back at past errors, we seem to make the same mistakes over and over again.
"So it’s a welcome change that people are studying instead the future of intelligence," he explained.
It's not the first time Hawking has been worried about artificial intelligence.
Last year, he joined Elon Musk and hundreds of other experts in writing an open letter asking the governments to ban autonomous weapons that might one day be able to turn against humans.
He's also previously said that "the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race".
In Wednesday's lecture, he admitted he was still worried about "powerful autonomous weapons" and "new ways for the few to oppress the many", which come with artificial intelligence.
But he said if we can think about and address these issues now, the technology also has the potential to do good.
"We cannot predict what we might achieve when our own minds are amplified by AI," he said.
"Perhaps with the tools of this new technological revolution, we will be able to undo some of the damage done to the natural world by the last one – industrialisation. And surely we will aim to finally eradicate disease and poverty."
The Leverhulme Centre of the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge, where Hawking is also a professor, has received more than US$12 million (£10 million) in grants to run research projects that will enhance the future potential of artificial intelligence, while carefully addressing the risks.
The centre was inspired partly by the university's Centre for Existential Risk, which already offers courses in subjects such as "Terminator Studies", in order to examine future potential problems for humanity.
While that centre focusses on a range of threats - such as climate change and war - the new Leverhulme Centre will look specifically at the issues that could arise from machines that think and learn like humans.
"Machine intelligence will be one of the defining themes of our century, and the challenges of ensuring that we make good use of its opportunities are ones we all face together," said director of the Leverhulme Centre, Huw Price.
"At present, however, we have barely begun to consider its ramifications, good or bad."
With Google already developing artificial intelligence that can learn from its own memory; Elon Musk worrying about humans become the dumb "house pets" of AI in the future; and computer systems already rivalling four-year-olds in IQ tests, it's definitely something worth thinking about sooner rather than later.

As Hawking says, it might end up being "crucial to the future of our civilisation and our species".
Read more »
Tweet Share Share Share Share Share

August 17, 2016
We're closer than ever to proving Stephen Hawking right.
lab-made- black -hole- strongest-Hawking -radiation-9967630063610
Proposed by physicist Stephen Hawking back in 1974, Hawking radiation describes the small amounts of high-energy radiation that could theoretically escape the gravitational pull of a black hole.
The hypothesis goes against conventional wisdom that nothing, not even light, can escape a black hole, and now, for the first time, physicists have finally observed hawking radiation - in a simulated black hole.
Just to be clear, Hawking’s hypothesis will remain just that until we can actually observe hawking radiation near a real-life black hole, but our technology is not nearly advanced enough to do that right now.
Instead, physicists test their hypotheses on black hole simulations created in the lab - based not on light, but on sound.
Proposed in the 1980s, but not actually built till 2009, these acoustic, or 'dumb' black holes are formed by cooling rubidium atoms to within a few billionths of a degree above absolute zero.
At this point, the atoms enter a quantum state of matter, where they start to behave like clones of each other, clumping up to form a 'super particle’, or wave, known as a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC).
Previous research has shown that these acoustic black holes - which also require a bunch of mirrors, lasers, lenses, and magnetic coils - do actually mimic the behaviour of real black holes in some crucial ways, so are considered a pretty good substitute.
Jeff Steinhauer, a physicist at the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, has been working on his acoustic black hole for seven years now, and has finally perfected it to the point where he could accurately simulate how particles would behave on the edge, or event horizon, of his black hole.
Incredibly, when he ran the experiment 4,600 times, what he saw was exactly what Hawking had predicted: pairs of phonons (packets of sound energy) started to spontaneously appear at the event horizon, before one was propelled away from the black hole and into simulated space, while the other was left to fall inside.
In case you need a bit of a refresher on Hawking radiation, the hypothesis is all wrapped up in an infamous problem in theoretical physics known as the black hole information paradox.
Hawking radiation proposes that the Universe is filled with virtual entangled particles that blink in and out of existence and annihilate each other as soon as they come in contact - except if they happen to appear on either side of a black hole's event horizon.
In this scenario, one particle gets swallowed up, and the other radiates away into space.
Thanks to this escaping radiation stealing energy from the black hole, the black hole loses mass over time, and eventually evaporates out of existence - taking all the information about what it swallowed with it.
So the paradox goes like this: according to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, all matter that crosses the event horizon of a black hole is swallowed up forever, and can never be retrieved. But according to our understanding of quantum mechanics, information about that swallowed matter can never be completely destroyed, so which one is correct?
Earlier this year, Hawking published a 'solution' to the information paradox, which hasn’t convinced everyone in the field, but basically suggests that black holes might actually have a halo of 'soft hair' surrounding them, which are capable of storing information, so it’s not lost altogether. You can read more about that here.
So now back to Steinhauer and his team. After running their acoustic black hole experiment for six days straight, the researchers took pictures of the BEC and showed that the phonons escaping were in fact 'entangled' with the ones falling in.
"We saw that high energy pairs were entangled, while low energy pairs were not," he told Sarah Griffths at Wired.
"We observe a thermal distribution of Hawking radiation, stimulated by quantum vacuum fluctuations, emanating from an analogue black hole. This confirms Hawking’s prediction regarding black hole thermodynamics."
Steinhauer added that the particles exciting the event horizon generated so much energy, the simulation also supports the firewall controversy - a separate hypothesis that suggests the breaking of the entanglement between the Hawking particles and their partners generates enough energy to create an actual wall of flames at the edge of a black hole. More on that hypothesis here.
It will take a whole lot more replication and confirmation to prove the results -some doubt that the BEC they've created is actually a true BEC - and only direct observations from real black holes will put Hawking in the running for a Nobel Prize. But Steinhauer and his team could really be on to something here.
"You’re probing this feature of gravity that is very hard to probe experimentally with real black holes," Stephen Fairhurst, a professor at Cardiff University’s school of physics and astronomy, who was not involved in the study, told Tom Chivers at Buzzfeed.
"Quite how these things can teach us about quantum gravity I’m not sure, but that’s surely the next goal - seeing how we can translate this into relativity."

The results have been published in Nature Physics.

Read more »
Tweet Share Share Share Share Share

October 14, 2015
Stephen-Hawking-scientist-new-image-in-chair

Stephen Hawking has been outspoken in recent years about the catastrophic dangers humanity faces in the 21st century. He said we should be cautious in attempting to contact aliens, warning that advanced extraterrestrial life may not be friendly toward us and could destroy the human race. He also stated we should be cautious in creating strong artificial intelligence. The renowned physicist joined Tesla’s Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, and Google executive Demis Hassabis in signing a letter that warned against a military artificial intelligence arms race.
Hawking even issued a warning to the scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) about the dangers of the Higgs Boson “God Particle,” claiming it could initiate “catastrophic vacuum decay” — a quantum bubble that expands at the speed of light and wipes out the universe.
Recently, Hawking addressed the threat he says may be more far more dangerous to the future of human civilization than robots, aliens, or quantum particles: capitalist greed. During a Reddit AMA, he argued that the future is wrought with the peril of rampant inequality expedited by an automated machine-based global economic system.
“If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed.” Hawking continued, “Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.”
Predictably, a dramatic response thread followed. Many commenters agreed with Hawking and denounced the globalist oligarchy that is currently consolidating wealth at an unprecedented rate. Responses ranged from calls for a “bloody revolution” to references to the recent films Elysium, Wall-E, and Zeitgeist 2: Addendum. One commenter invoked the anarcho-syndicalist political views of linguist Noam Chomsky.
The main theme of the discussion centered around the automation of labor and how that would affect the human workforce and the global economy. Hawking seems to believe that our current trajectory will make such automation a death knell for the working classes, with thebourgeoisie machine owners exerting total economic control over human civilization.
One commenter strongly disagreed with Hawking, referencing recent Journal of Economic Perspective articles and claiming “technology has never, will never, and simply cannot result in structural unemployment.”
The comment thread is a treasure trove of wide-ranging ideas that include:
~The efficacy, or lack thereof, of voting
~A “universal basic income”
~Microeconomics
~Techno-socialism, with “an open source decentralized consensus algorithm for the masses”
~A post-scarcity society run by strong artificial intelligence

This article is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Jake Anderson and theAntiMedia.org.
Read more »
Tweet Share Share Share Share Share

September 08, 2014
British theoretical physicist and Professor Stephen Hawking has recently warned that the "God" particle could destroy the universe. He says that the Higgs boson could cause a ''catastrophic vacuum decay'' that undermines space-time and destroys the universe.In a preface to a new book called "Starmus", he wrote:  "The Higgs potential has the worrisome feature that it might become meta stable at energies above 100bn
gigaelectronvolts (GeV)."

This means that the (Higgs Boson) elusive 'God particle' discovered by scientists in 2012, who
''believes that this gives shape and size to everything that exists - could cause a 'catastrophic vacuum delay' if scientists were to put it under extreme stress''. However, he adds, that under the present economic climate, it is very unlikely that the excited scientists would be funded such extravagant amounts of money to create a particle accelerator that reaches 100bn GeV.
But if the money did come rolling in, 'this could happen at any time and we wouldn't see it coming.'Starmus is due for release in early November 2014.

Source -zeenews
via - cnet

Read more »
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)
Powered by Blogger.