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Essays reveal Stephen Hawking predicted race of 'superhumans'
The late physicist and author Prof Stephen Hawking has caused controversy by suggesting a new race of superhumans could develop from wealthy people choosing to edit their and their children's DNA. Hawking, the author of A Brief History of Time, who died in March, made the predictions in a collection of articles and essays.
[...] In Brief Answers to the Big Questions, Hawking's final thoughts on the universe, the physicist suggested wealthy people would soon be able to choose to edit genetic makeup to create superhumans with enhanced memory, disease resistance, intelligence and longevity. Hawking raised the prospect that breakthroughs in genetics will make it attractive for people to try to improve themselves, with implications for "unimproved humans". "Once such superhumans appear, there will be significant political problems with unimproved humans, who won't be able to compete," he wrote. "Presumably, they will die out, or become unimportant. Instead, there will be a race of self-designing beings who are improving at an ever-increasing rate."
Stephen Hawking's last paper on black holes is now online
Stephen Hawking never stopped trying to unravel the mysteries surrounding black holes -- in fact, he was still working to solve one of them shortly before his death. Now, his last research paper on the subject is finally available online through pre-publication website arXiv, thanks to his co-authors from Cambridge and Harvard. It's entitled Black Hole Entropy and Soft Hair, and it tackles the black hole paradox. According to Hawking's co-author Malcolm Perry, the paradox "is perhaps the most puzzling problem in fundamental theoretical physics today" and was the center of the late physicist's life for decades.
Black Holes and Soft Hair: why Stephen Hawking's Final Work is Important:
[Black holes] have a temperature and produce thermal radiation. The formula for this temperature, universally known as the Hawking temperature, is inscribed on the memorial to Stephen's life in Westminster Abbey. Any object that has a temperature also has an entropy. The entropy is a measure of how many different ways an object could be made from its microscopic ingredients and still look the same. So, for a particular piece of red hot metal, it would be the number of ways the atoms that make it up could be arranged so as to look like the lump of metal you were observing. Stephen's formula for the temperature of a black hole allowed him to find the entropy of a black hole.
The problem then was: how did this entropy arise? Since all black holes appear to be the same, the origin of the entropy was at the centre of the information paradox.
What we have done recently is to discover a gap in the mathematics that led to the idea that black holes are totally bald. In 2016, Stephen, Andy and I found that black holes have an infinite collection of what we call "soft hair". This discovery allows us to question the idea that black holes lead to a breakdown in the laws of physics.
Stephen kept working with us up to the end of his life, and we have now published a paper that describes our current thoughts on the matter. In this paper, we describe a way of calculating the entropy of black holes. The entropy is basically a quantitative measure of what one knows about a black hole apart from its mass or spin.
So if black holes have soft hair, is it possible to give them a hair cut?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 17 2018, @01:34AM (5 children)
The true struggle is not between the oppressed and the oppressor; rather it is between these 2 groups:
Here is the alternative to Hawking's feared self-improvement:
HARRISON BERGERON by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. [tnellen.com]
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 17 2018, @01:57AM
Thanks for posting that Vonnegut story. Vonnegut's prescience is all the more striking in light of the climate of politically correct garbage-think that is so pervasive
these days.
Jordan Peterson has railed against forced "quality" for a while now, and his arguments are well-reasoned and quite solid. People who attempt to argue against Peterson invariably come off looking like fools, which of course they are, and Peterson exposes their true nature.
Anyone who is capable of thinking for himself understands that the notion that all humans are equally capable is utter bullshit. It is a form of intellectual poison. Don't allow yourself to be sucked into such wrongheaded ideas.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 17 2018, @04:06AM (3 children)
you mean "capitalist want others to build for them whilst not paying what the builders work is worth"?
very few capitalist want to build for IMPROVEMENT. rather it is for profit and for growth ... not sustainabilty.
ofc the following debate on what IS sustainable and its non-decidability, is a cornerstone of capitalism.
in the end a hard cold number colloquially refered to as "profit" wins out.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 17 2018, @04:44AM (2 children)
You have to test it in the real world; you have to grow your solution through evolution by variation and selection.
That's the only way, and that's why socialism will NEVER work: Central Planning is inherently impossible.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by acid andy on Wednesday October 17 2018, @09:13AM (1 child)
A corporation can and does do that, certainly. We just have a problem with it when the only selective pressure is for maximum profitability. There will never be much pressure from the market to be sustainable to the same degree that there's a pressure to be competitive and profitable. This is why we need regulation and for regulations to be consistent, the simplest system we know of is one that is centralized.
Heaven forbid that there might be a third option! Something like--I don't know--a compromise between those two extremes? To dismiss everyone that wants some checks and balances to be instilled on capitalism as the most extreme kind of socialist is to throw the baby out with the bathwater. If you don't like central planning then show us a decentralized economy when corporations pay directly for all environmental damage and ethical harms they cause.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 17 2018, @05:51PM
Your reasoning makes no sense, because it depends on the "regulators" being men of finer clay. They are not; in fact, I bet they're coarser.