Saturday, August 05, 2006
People still too human for Stephen Hawking
Or so claims "The Register", URL at www.theregister.co.uk/2006/08/04/hawking_regrets_being_human/
Hawking's original query was "How can the human race survive the next hundred years?"
Well it seems to me that both Hawking and "The Register" should have thought things through more clearly before their public almost ex cathedra style pronouncements.
Hawking frets also about man-made global warming, and the possibility that we will "pass a tipping point at which the temperature rise becomes self sustaining." This point seems fair enough and at present rates of increased global warming/cooling, highly likely. In short the human race probably may be doomed, and even doomed within our own lifetimes.
"Perhaps we must hope that genetic engineering will make us wise and less aggressive," he writes. The deeper suggestion here, that we humans, as nature made us, are bad and stupid and should be ashamed of ourselves, is the suggestion of a colossal ignoramus, according to "The Register".
I think the nub of it is that such comments as the last paragraph imply that we all have to submit to some bastardised form of Christianity (or if you prefer Christian-derived humanism or atheism), and to its tenets, and that idea could infuriate many people. Or are Hawking's robots to be Christian robots? In many religions there is no suggestion of any innate badness, which could of course be taken to mean that robots are not Christians since they normally do not exhibit goodness or badness either. But that is hardly acceptable either. Some difficult problems here.
But Hawking at least looked for an answer to his problems and asks if anyone has sensible answers. By and large "The Register" does not, it seems. But, I have very rarely heard sensible answers on the web to ANYONE'S questions other than very detailed technical stuff where the web is often helpful. The internet seems not to be of much use for more practical lay-type questions like Hawking's and "The Register" reply could almost be paraphrased into one that I asked recently on the internet about weeding my garden, where in essence I was told to 'go out and do it' or 'don't bother' or 'buy our weedkiller', not very useful in the circumstances I gave.
As for me, I am afraid that any answer I could have slickly given to Hawking's query would have been far more grim than the question itself, which after all wasn't the point. What we really needed, maybe, was an improved question and an improved answer or maybe a petition or maybe...?
Hawking's original query was "How can the human race survive the next hundred years?"
Well it seems to me that both Hawking and "The Register" should have thought things through more clearly before their public almost ex cathedra style pronouncements.
Hawking frets also about man-made global warming, and the possibility that we will "pass a tipping point at which the temperature rise becomes self sustaining." This point seems fair enough and at present rates of increased global warming/cooling, highly likely. In short the human race probably may be doomed, and even doomed within our own lifetimes.
"Perhaps we must hope that genetic engineering will make us wise and less aggressive," he writes. The deeper suggestion here, that we humans, as nature made us, are bad and stupid and should be ashamed of ourselves, is the suggestion of a colossal ignoramus, according to "The Register".
I think the nub of it is that such comments as the last paragraph imply that we all have to submit to some bastardised form of Christianity (or if you prefer Christian-derived humanism or atheism), and to its tenets, and that idea could infuriate many people. Or are Hawking's robots to be Christian robots? In many religions there is no suggestion of any innate badness, which could of course be taken to mean that robots are not Christians since they normally do not exhibit goodness or badness either. But that is hardly acceptable either. Some difficult problems here.
But Hawking at least looked for an answer to his problems and asks if anyone has sensible answers. By and large "The Register" does not, it seems. But, I have very rarely heard sensible answers on the web to ANYONE'S questions other than very detailed technical stuff where the web is often helpful. The internet seems not to be of much use for more practical lay-type questions like Hawking's and "The Register" reply could almost be paraphrased into one that I asked recently on the internet about weeding my garden, where in essence I was told to 'go out and do it' or 'don't bother' or 'buy our weedkiller', not very useful in the circumstances I gave.
As for me, I am afraid that any answer I could have slickly given to Hawking's query would have been far more grim than the question itself, which after all wasn't the point. What we really needed, maybe, was an improved question and an improved answer or maybe a petition or maybe...?
# posted by uv : 4:53 AM
Subscribe to Posts [Atom]
