Stephen Hawking had eye-opening final warning for humanity before he died

Physicist Stephen Hawking had a chilling message for humanity before his death in 2018.

Back in 2018, we had yet to see the likes of ChatGPT and Midjourney become an increasingly influential part of our lives.

Understandably as their popularity rises, many people are becoming increasingly concerned about the development of these artificial intelligence tools.

Actors' union SAG-AFTRA and the Writers' Guild of America even included a clause about AI during their months' long strike, demanding assurances it would not be used to replace humans in the film industry.

And it seems that they were not the only people who are worried about the technology.

In 2014, Stephen issued a stark warning in an interview with the BBC about the dangers of AI.

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He said, bluntly: "The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race."

The physicist added that the AI could end up snowballing out of our control, saying: "It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate."

You have to admit, given the enormous amount of science fiction which has specifically warned about the dangers of artificial intelligence, it's a little disconcerting just how little heed its developers appear to be paying to those warnings.

Whether it's Terminator or The Matrix, things tend not to end well for humanity when AI gets involved.

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These aren't the only sci-fi works to deal with it either - Frank Herbert's Dune includes a whole piece of fictional history called the 'Butlerian Jihad'.

The result of this is that in the Dune universe, the 'duniverse', the design and building of AI is actively prohibited.

Now, it's probably worth mentioning that what we have at the moment is not 'true' AI in the sense that it's conscious.

At present the AI systems we use use huge databanks to assemble images or words.

So if you asked a programme like Midjourney to make an image of Joe Biden in the style of Vincent Van Gogh, it would draw on its database of Van Gogh paintings and pictures of Joe Biden and combine them.

Midjourney

While this isn't The Matrix level AI, it's still hugely dangerous as it makes it much easier to create fake images of someone, which can be very convincing even if you know what to look for.

It's not without limitations though. The flood of AI-generated images onto the internet has already started to lead to 'inbred' images, where software draws on images generated by AI rather than original images, resulting in poorer output

Nonetheless, the speed of development still leave many just as concerned as Hawking about what AI might mean for the future.