Stephen Hawking’s comments about the necessity to genetically modify ourselves to counter the rapid advancement in machine intelligence have been met with much controversy in the media [A couple of examples here and here]. In defence of Hawking’s argument, how can anyone state that something definitely will not happen in the future? Hawking is simply basing his vision of the future on our technological advancement to date and extrapolating it into the next 1000 or so years of human evolution. If we place Hawking’s statement in the context of the far future instead of the next 50 years, his argument starts to have some kind of credibility.In other news [and on a completely different subject]: I’ve got my tickets for England v. Albania at St. James on Wednesday… whoop!