We have talked a whole lot over the course of this semester about artificial intelligence; what it means, what it doesn’t mean, where it is, where it’s going, and it’s that last one that has caused us the most uncertainty. Remember, we don’t want a toaster that decided for us whether it will make our toast or not.

Now, writing in British publication The Independent, Hawking uses the current Johnny Depp film Transcendence as a jumping off point for his view that AI could be the biggest mistake humanity has ever made.

He worries that as we rush to create technology that can adapt to its environment, analyze gargantuan amounts of data in fractions of a second, and become self-aware, they will begin to form their own identities, their own societies, and their own needs for survival, of which humans may not play a part.

We have seen this theory played out countless times in many movies and works of fiction including I, Robot, I have No Mouth and I Must Scream, System Shock, The Terminator, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and many, many others.

Hawking doesn’t deny that there is some good in all of the developments we’re seeing, but he worries that things like Microsoft’s  Cortana and Apple’s Siri are just the beginning of an AI arms race that we will all lose.

There is an interesting sidebar in this article at DailyMail about the Hawking post, in which one of the founders of DeepMind, the company formed by a neuroscientist to develop machines that can think and was recently acquired by Google, stated that he feels “human extinction will happen and technology will likely play a part.” Google actually had to set up an ethics committee to monitor what Deep Mind is doing, although I suspect they will not be limited in any way.

I for one welcome our new toaster overlords. I hope they heard me. I love toast!