'We have to be careful': When Stephen Hawking warned about 'certainty' of world ending

Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, who often stepped outside his own field of research and used his recognition to highlight what he saw as significant challenges, has also warned of a “near-certain” calculation for the end of the world. Before passing away in 2018 when he was the director of research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at the University of Cambridge, Hawking had made several future predictions including artificial intelligence, climate change, GM viruses and nuclear war.

While talking to BBC in 2016, Hawking had said that although the chance of a disaster to planet Earth in a given year may be "quite low", it adds up over time, and then it eventually "becomes a near certainty in the next thousand or 10,000 years.”

The cosmologist further expressed confidence that the humans would spread out into the cosmos by the time earth was set to be doomed and said humans "will not establish self-sustaining colonies in space" for at least the next hundred years. Therefore, he warned to "be very careful in this period."

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Hawking’s views dovetailed with Elon Musk’s

While Stephen Hawking predicted that humans will not be able to make establishments on another planet, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk alarmed about the extinction of humankind being “inevitable”. Dovetailing from Hawking, Musk told a conference in 2013, “Either we spread Earth to other planets, or we risk going extinct. An extinction event is inevitable and we're increasingly doing ourselves in." Meanwhile, in line with Hawking’s thoughts on the matter, the theoretical physicist had also attached his name to a project researching technologies for interstellar travel called the Breakthrough Starshot initiative.

Apart from the prediction of disaster on Earth. Hawking has also told BBC that “the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race". He said that the primitive forms of artificial intelligence developed till now had already proved ‘very useful’. However, as per the report, Hawking feared the consequences of advanced forms on machine intelligence that could either match or surpass humans. 

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