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Humans, super humans, and super humanoids: debating Stephen Hawking’s doomsday AI forecast

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Abstract

This manuscript examines prominent English theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking’s doomsday AI (Artificial Intelligence) predictions, in which he claims that once AI becomes sophisticated enough to outsmart humans in the future, it may pose existential threats to ordinary humans. He felt that ordinary people might feel outmoded, putting their entire survival in jeopardy. Hawking’s forecast of doomsday AI is compared to another widely accepted basic concept, according to which neither the most intelligent nor the strongest will survive, but only those who can adapt to change will survive. This phrase on adaptability is frequently misattributed by Charles Darwin. Although, when we examine Darwin’s work, we discover that one of his letters reveals that Darwin believed adaptability to the environment to be one of the fundamentals of survival. While AI may represent an astringent threat to humanity’s survival in the future, this viewpoint ignores the reality that it is the ability to adapt to change, resilience, and self-awareness that distinguishes humans as a distinct species. This research additionally claims that due to AI’s addictive nature, and the potential to render humans overly reliant on it, AI would cause them to lose their extremely unique ability to adapt. According to the research, while AI can engender culturally smart humans, it additionally has the potential to adversely impact the intelligence of a human race that will be plenarily reliant on AI for its basics. It is also important that we consider the dangers to AI from humans as well, rather than starting a one-sided debate about perceiving AI as a threat to humans. This research is unique in the sense that it invokes a very interesting debate related to the uncertainties raised for humankind after the advent of artificial intelligence.

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Acknowledgement

Special thanks to Morten Sestoft, Theodore Modis, Raffaella Aghemo, Luigi Antonio Pezone, Gabriel Rico, Manuel Ortega-Rodriguez, Noam Lemelshtrich Latar, for helping in improving this work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty, Sikkim Central University, Gangtok, Sikkim, India

    Shailendra Kumar

  2. Bodoland State University, Kokrajhar, Assam, India

    Sanghamitra Choudhury

  3. Post-Doctoral Senior Fellow, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Sanghamitra Choudhury

  4. Charles Wallace Fellow, Queen’s University, Belfast, UK

    Sanghamitra Choudhury

  5. UN International Law Fellow, Hague Academy, The Hague, The Netherlands

    Sanghamitra Choudhury

  6. Junior and Senior Research Fellow, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India

    Sanghamitra Choudhury

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Kumar, S., Choudhury, S. Humans, super humans, and super humanoids: debating Stephen Hawking’s doomsday AI forecast. AI Ethics 3, 975–984 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43681-022-00213-0

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