Stephen Hawking’s Reddit AMA to Focus on Artificial Intelligence

If you’ve ever wanted to talk to Stephen Hawking about the future robot uprising artificial intelligence, here’s your chance: he’s doing an AMA on Reddit. The mods are gathering questions all week starting today. The question phase closes next Tuesday, August 4th.

The AMA is going to be a little different in that it’s going to be done over the next few weeks to give Hawking enough time to answer each one in full. So because it’s not happening live, the mods are asking folks to upvote the questions they most want to see answered. Then, they’ll gather up those questions and present them to Hawking.

Hawking’s post on Reddit’s /r/science board frames the coming conversation. He writes:

I signed an open letter earlier this year imploring researchers to balance the benefits of AI with the risks. The letter acknowledges that AI might one day help eradicate disease and poverty, but it also puts the onus on scientists at the forefront of this technology to keep the human factor front and center of their innovations. I’m part of a campaign enabled by Nokia and hope you will join the conversation on http://www.wired.com/maketechhuman. Learn more about my foundation here: http://stephenhawkingfoundation.org/

To him, as we make our growth and radical strides towards improving technology, it’s important that we remember why we do so: to improve humanity and our condition. Definitely give the thread a look-see, if only to check out the incredibly intriguing questions being asked.

(via LiveScience)

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