From AntiMedia:
Stephen Hawking has been outspoken in recent years about the catastrophic dangers humanity faces in the 21st century. He said we should be cautious in attempting to contact aliens, warning that advanced extraterrestrial life may not be friendly toward us and could destroy the human race. He also stated we should be cautious in creating strong artificial intelligence. The renowned physicist joined Tesla’s Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, and Google executive Demis Hassabis in signing a letter that warned against a military artificial intelligence arms race.
Hawking even issued a warning to the scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) about the dangers of the Higgs Boson “God Particle,” claiming it could initiate “catastrophic vacuum decay” — a quantum bubble that expands at the speed of light and wipes out the universe.
Recently, Hawking addressed the threat he says may be more far more dangerous to the future of human civilization than robots, aliens, or quantum particles: capitalist greed. During a Reddit AMA, he argued that the future is wrought with the peril of rampant inequality expedited by an automated machine-based global economic system.
“If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed.” Hawking continued, “Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.”
Predictably, a dramatic response thread followed. Many commenters agreed with Hawking and denounced the globalist oligarchy that is currently consolidating wealth at an unprecedented rate. Responses ranged from calls for a “bloody revolution” to references to the recent films Elysium, Wall-E, and Zeitgeist 2: Addendum. One commenter invoked the anarcho-syndicalist political views of linguist Noam Chomsky....MOREHT: ZeroHedge
If you don't have access to Noam, there is always the Chomskybot. Let's fire it up:
Look On My Words, Ye Mighty, And Despair!
On our assumptions, a descriptively adequate grammar is not subject to problems of phonemic and morphological analysis. In the discussion of resumptive pronouns following (81), this selectionally introduced contextual feature can be defined in such a way as to impose an important distinction in language use. I suggested that these results would follow from the assumption that an important property of these three types of EC is not quite equivalent to irrelevant intervening contexts in selectional rules. Furthermore, the notion of level of grammaticalness appears to correlate rather closely with a descriptive fact. We have already seen that this analysis of a formative as a pair of sets of features raises serious doubts about a stipulation to place the constructions into these various categories.Not quite what you're looking for? Click the bot again.
