Stephen Hawking Opens Artifical Intelligence Research Unit

In light of many thought leaders and well known scientists around the world who have been vocal about the future dangers of artificial intelligence (Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking). A new research centre has opened at Britain’s Cambridge University called the The Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI).
A project which in conjunction with Oxford University, Cambridge University, Imperial College London, and Berkeley, California, is aimed at exploring the far ranging implications of AI and its threat to the public.  From job automation to Terminator scenario’s of the future to the domestic smart phone.
A centre with similar ambitions to Nick Bostrom’s Future of Humanity Institute, both are serious about the unchecked consequences of artificial intelligence.

Whilst there is a lot of speculative anxiety about where the emergence of artificial intelligence is heading, Stephen Cave, the director of the centre said in a statement, “We don’t need to see AI as replacing us, but can see it as enhancing us: we will be able to make better decisions, on the basis of better evidence and better insights.”

Funded to the tune of about £10 million, Hawking who christened the centre said: “Surely we will aim to finally eradicate disease and poverty. Every aspect of our lives will be transformed. In short, success in creating AI could the biggest event in the history of our civilisation. 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 — industrialization.”
This comes at a time when major corporations like Google, Apple and Sony are all utilizing and developing new artificial intelligent technologies for the public.

We recently spoke to environmentalist and free-thinker James Lovelock about the future threat of technology and artificial intelligence and he said – “I won’t be surprised if in 100 years’ time artificial intelligence is running the whole planet and displacing us.”