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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: 5, Insightful) by Subsentient on Wednesday October 17 2018, @04:40AM (11 children)
The hyper-conservatives don't realize they're pushing for this future.
Every time you give tax breaks to the rich, oppose minimum wage laws, loosen corporate regulations, you're giving the type of people who will *use this to enslave us* a bit more power and bringing them closer.
I'll be honest. I hate the super rich. I hate them, not because of their money, that while undeserved and often irritatingly unfair (inheritance, never will have to work a day in their lives) doesn't say anything about their character in and of itself, and I can otherwise honestly overlook. I hate them because they behave like monsters with no concern for anyone else. There's studies that show the rich tip delivery drivers and waiters much less than the poor. I tip because I know these people are trying to survive. The super rich don't care.
At the end of the day, we're already too late. Technology has advanced too far and the masses have wisened too little to put a stop to this before it becomes reality.
Corporatocratic police state awaits us, and after that, dystopian genocide of the masses. We won't be enslaved, they'll have robots to do the work.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday October 17 2018, @06:24AM (1 child)
"I See Pitchforks" [warplife.com].
That I stated that Hitler was "a gifted writer" is due to my only having read his introduction to "Mein Kampf". Those that have read the whole book pointed out to me that Hitler's writing quality proceeds steeply downhill from there.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Subsentient on Thursday October 18 2018, @03:44AM
I read the beginning of Mein Kampf, I hated it. I hated his entire ideology and world view. My dad would not be pleased at my reaction.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Wednesday October 17 2018, @09:48AM (2 children)
> There's studies that show the rich tip delivery drivers and waiters much less than the poor. I tip because I know these people are trying to survive. The super rich don't care.
A rich man once told me, "Nobody ever got rich by spending money". While succinct, it is the truth, although it is a bit more nuanced.
Half the battle to becoming well off is to earn the money, but the other half is to not let it slip out of your fingers afterwards. Some of the most miserly people I have ever met were rich, while some of the most generous were poor.
The rich would rather invest the money then spending it. The difference is an investment offers a return to the investor. Most rich people I know would rarely spend their earnings, rather they would invest their earnings, and then spend the returns from that investment. For example, they would take their earnings, and buy property, then rent it out. They would spend the rent money, because that is being earned by someone else (the renters, who pay the rent). The ownership of the asset stays with the person who bought it, and if they sell it they will get their earnings back, all the while getting an income for little to no work.
While most people would just spend the money they earned directly. When they see rich people not wanting to spend their money, those rich people get called greedy, miserly, etc...
> Corporatocratic police state awaits us, and after that, dystopian genocide of the masses. We won't be enslaved, they'll have robots to do the work.
I am not so sure, those who are psychopaths/sociopaths and who are in positions of extreme wealth and power, those who like to lord over others, need underlings. If all the peasants are wiped out, who will they be able to lord over? Robots are not quite the same.
I don't know what the future will hold, to be honest, if robots and basic AI become ubiquitous, they would inevitably be used for warfare. I can imagine that future rich people would have their own personal "Droid armies", and in many ways become as powerful as nation states. I guess a return to the old days of small kingdoms ruled by their families would ensue.
On the flip side, we might finally be able to unlock space resources with robots and AI. It is much easier to send semi-disposable automatons into space to do mining, especially if we can design them to survive in the space environment for extended periods of time.
Either way, the future would be a very interesting place.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 17 2018, @10:17AM
... and unless things turn around, pretty soon, Lunch.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 17 2018, @12:40PM
So, Trump got rich by his daddy giving him all the money while it was slipping pretty fast through Donnie's fingers.... how does that work again? You avoid paying taxes on the first billion and then you write off the next 5 while rolling the capitals gains?? Like that??
Maybe the most important part of getting rich is fucking the right cock? Just ask Melania. Oh, the truth maybe a little brutal, but seems to have the same recipe for the last thousands of years.
https://toomuchonline.org/the-self-made-myth-our-hallucinating-rich/ [toomuchonline.org]
Oer 60% of rich inherited it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 17 2018, @11:52AM (1 child)
If the super rich can devise a method of genetic engineering that results in they themselves producing children who are worth pissing out when on fire, then I'm actually all for it.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday October 17 2018, @12:18PM
Evacuation of a stream of worthy children from ones bladder when on fire?
Quite some "el sueño de la razón" imagery here. Certainly beats being able to fly, agile as a monkey and a totally hot chick magnet [tvtropes.org]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 18 2018, @01:53AM (3 children)
Except of course, for the many, many times that doesn't happen. I oppose tax breaks for the rich, but the other two you mention are desperately needed through large parts of the developed world.
And I don't hate the "super rich" because that's just a pretty bit of fiction.
Let us note that there are studies [foxnews.com] that reach different conclusions on tipping behavior.
Moving on:
Put a stop to the biggest improvement of the human condition ever [soylentnews.org]? Why would we want to?
Did you run that by the NSA before you posted it? Remember the governments of the world also tend to be the biggest corporations of the world with the most secure revenue streams!
(Score: 2) by Subsentient on Thursday October 18 2018, @03:29AM (2 children)
>studies
>posts link to Faux News
lol
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 18 2018, @04:33AM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Thursday October 18 2018, @08:57AM
Yes. Fullstop. Or it was completely fabricated. Fairly unbalanced. Why are you such a naif, khallow? Consider the source! (Does your dictionary have "faux" in it? I know it's a French word, but apropos in this case for the entrepreneurs that the French do not even have a word for. [wordpress.com] )