stephen hawking – Militant Futurist

…when it came to subjects outside of his expertise?

That is the question. I ask it because, in the aftermath of Stephen Hawking’s death, I’ve seen several news articles about alarmist predictions he made towards the end of his life. This article is actually one of the less sensational ones I read: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-43408961

Stephen Hawking was literally a genius and one of the world’s greatest minds, but his education and professional expertise were in theoretical physics and cosmology (the study of how our universe was created and how it evolved). Moreover, his most important contributions pertained to black holes, an interesting yet extremely esoteric subject. Put simply, though Stephen Hawking was unquestionably brilliant, his brilliance was narrowly focused and didn’t equip him to make pronouncements about topics like global warming and killer robots. While everyone is entitled to his or her opinion, I disliked how Hawking’s opinions always carried special weight and attracted public attention, even when those opinions were about things far outside his expertise.

As I said in my past blog entry Rules for good futurism, predictions always be analyzed systematically, and the first step in the analysis is to ensure that the person who made the prediction actually has relevant academic or professional credentials. In several instances, Hawking failed this basic test.

In 2017, he predicted:

“We are close to the tipping point where global warming becomes irreversible. Trump’s [decision to pull the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Agreement] could push the Earth over the brink, to become like Venus, with a temperature of two hundred and fifty degrees, and raining sulphuric acid.”

Stephen Hawking had no education in climatology and contributed nothing to the field. Moreover, his words suggest that he may not even have understood the Paris Climate Agreement, which has been criticized as weak to the point of being almost meaningless (countries can make up whatever pollution goals they want–including goals to increase their emissions–and there’s no punishment for failing to meet them). To that end, consider that even though President Trump effectively withdrew the U.S. from the Agreement in mid-2017, U.S. carbon emissions for that year still fell, whereas China–one of the Agreement’s signatories–saw its carbon emissions grow. Both of those trends are continuing well into 2018.

Hawking’s gloomy vision of a Venus-like future Earth is also unsupported by reputable climate models. Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) most extreme estimates of future global warming fall well below 250 degrees (Celsius or Fahrenheit), and there is still considerable doubt over whether the catastrophic climate “tipping points” Hawking appears to be referencing exist, and if so, whether we are nearing any of them. Finally, Venus’ sulfuric acid rain was caused by volcanic activity, and not by global warming. Even if the Earth gets much hotter in the future, that won’t make volcanoes erupt more.

Stephen Hawking also made predictions about intelligent aliens in 2010:

“If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans…We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet.”

Though Stephen Hawking spent his life studying “space stuff” like black holes and the expansion of the universe, that left him scarcely better-equipped than an average person to speculate about aliens. While it’s possible that advanced aliens could come here with hostile intent, his apparent certainty in this outcome–made clear through his use of the definite “would be”–is unsupported by any facts. We have no clue what advanced aliens would be like, so we can’t even assign gross probabilities to how they would behave towards us (hostile, helpful, indifferent).

While I agree with Hawking that we should err on the side of caution and minimize humanity’s “leakage” of radio signals into space to hide from any hostile aliens that might be listening, I think it’s very important to realize that this is just a prudent course of action any person would settle upon if they thought hard about the problem. Stephen Hawking’s superior intellect did not let him go any farther, and the insight didn’t become any more valid once he made it known he shared it. To be clear, Hawking was not the first to advocate such a cautious course of action: three years before his aforementioned prediction, an American diplomat and science writer named “Michael Michaud” said the same thing in his book Contact with Alien Civilizations: Our Hopes and Fears about Encountering Extraterrestrials. I suspect the idea actually predates Michaud by many years, but I didn’t have enough time to research its origins further.

In 2014, Hawking also shared thoughts about home-grown threats to humanity, in the form of hostile A.I.:

“The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race…It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.”

Again, Stephen Hawking’s prediction is nothing new, nor does he appear credentialed to speak on this matter with real authority. The idea of a robot uprising destroying the human race dates back to the famous 1920 Czech play Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti (Rossum’s Universal Robots), the theory that intelligent machines could enter a cycle of runaway self-improvement was first postulated by the British mathematician I.J. Good in 1965, and the observation that computers are getting smarter at a faster rate than humans are should be obvious to anyone who compares their cell phone to the one they had ten years ago. There’s nothing insightful about Hawking restating a few, closely related ideas that have been embedded in the popular consciousness in one way or another for decades (mostly thanks to science fiction films).

And even though Stephen Hawking famously used computers and a robotic wheelchair to overcome his speech- and motor impairments, he had no experience working on artificial intelligence, which is a sub-field of computer science (his education was instead in physics and math). Similarly, I depend on my car for daily transportation and am proficient at using it, but that doesn’t mean I know anything about automotive engineering.

And in 2016, he issued this dire (depending on your time horizon I guess) warning:

“I don’t think we will survive another 1,000 years without escaping beyond our fragile planet…Although the chance of a disaster to planet Earth in a given year may be quite low, it adds up over time, and becomes a near certainty in the next thousand or ten thousand years. By that time we should have spread out into space, and to other stars, so a disaster on Earth would not mean the end of the human race.”

From past comments, it’s likely Hawking saw extreme climate change, nuclear or biological war, alien invasion, hostile A.I. uprising, and extinction-level natural events like asteroid impacts as the potential causes of that epic “disaster,” but he never explained how he calculated that one or more of them would happen for sure by his 1,000 to 10,000 year deadline, meaning his prediction runs afoul of another step in my analysis: “Be skeptical of predictions that are unsupported by independently verifiable data.” In truth, the probabilities of any of those misfortunes happening are unknown, making a future risk assessment impossible. For example, it’s entirely likely that a planet- or even continent-killing asteroid isn’t on course to hit Earth for another 20,000 years, by which time we’ll have space weapons that can easily deflect it.

In closing, Stephen Hawking’s discoveries in theoretical physics and cosmology changed our view of the universe itself, but his doomsday predictions added nothing new. Let me be clear: I didn’t write this to denigrate Hawking or to make myself sound smarter than he was, but rather, I wrote it as a reminder that no one knows everything, and future predictions should always be carefully scrutinized, regardless of how famous, smart, or seemingly benevolent the person making them may be. As a scientist, I think he would have actually appreciated these precepts, even if they worked against him in the handful of instances I’ve highlighted.

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