[alicebot-aiethics] Interesting Article

[Noel Bush]

> Well, actually I am a bit disappointed that even Stephen 
> Hawking has joined the club of technophobics... There might 
> be a chance that AI will outsmart the human race in a very 
> distant future, but whether this will be to our disadvantage 
> or even a danger to us is questionable in my opinion...and I 
> also would not consider engineering the human DNA to increase 
> our IQ a valid solution, if it is a solution at all...

I am not sure if this makes him a technophobe...maybe someone who reads
German and can find the article mentioned can tell us about what it
says.  The short article here would seem to be at least a sixth-hand
account -- an interpretation by a journalist of a translation of an
article which is itself an interpretation of a translation (from English
into German) of some things that Stephen Hawking said.  If you do proper
allowance for the journalist factor you might as well add in a few more
"hands" just to account for the need to sensationalize, simplify,
misquote, etc.  So let's say this is a tenth-hand account of something
that Stephen Hawking might have said.  Then there's the question of what
he was really thinking when he said it..... ;-)

Personally I think Hawking is just trying to jump on the bandwagon and
say something provocative about bots.  He probably saw the wildfire
success of our "Bot Conspiracy" press release and decided he had to grab
some of the attention.  Probably a new book coming out.  Hee, hee.