While physicist Stephen Hawking is optimistic about the future, he warned in an interview published Tuesday that, with the pace of technological advancement, humans must gain control over their aggressive instincts in order to survive.
The famed English scientist told The Times that the issue lies in the instincts humanity has honed to survive so far.
“Since civilization began, aggression has been useful inasmuch as it has definite survival advantages,” he told the British newspaper. “It is hard-wired into our genes by Darwinian evolution. Now, however, technology has advanced at such a pace that this aggression may destroy us all by nuclear or biological war. We need to control this inherited instinct by our logic and reason.”
He suggested that the creation of a world government might be necessary to ensure that humanity is addressing high-impact challenges, such as climate change and the rise of artificial intelligence.
“We need to be quicker to identify such threats and act before they get out of control. This might mean some form of world government,” Hawking said. “But that might become a tyranny.”
As a general rule, the history of our evolution is of mortality sculpting mankind, and the more mortality, the more adapted and sculpted the species became. As much as we may want peace and safety for all mankind, that is a prescription for the de-evolution of the species.
He is right about more than the tyranny though. Nuclear and Biological weapons do change the equation. I’ve long suspected the more individualistic, libertarian psychology that arises where r/K breaks down due to insufficient population density is where human kind will ultimately evolve to, once space travel is democratized.
While K’s wage wars and battle each other for control of homeworlds (periodically nuking and infecting each other into oblivion), and while societies that conquer post-scarcity devolve into Idiocracy-like dystopias, the libertarian individualists will spread out into space and live lives of exploration, colonization, and reproduction.
If technology allowed the universe to be mapped by autonomous drones, and the exploration to be planned and focused in worthwhile directions based on that data, there is no doubt what human psychology would leave the most impressive history of the species, when all was said and done.
You can fight these things, and whine and cry about them to no avail, or you can recognize the realities and go with them, hoping to make our species the most amazing exemplar possible. Personally, I want humankind to be great. If lots of liberals have to die for that, so be it.
Tell everyone about r/K Theory, because everyone needs to get the hell away from the rabbits