Rees is concerned about the hazards of man's scientific progress, kind of the old Frankenstein trick. Here is some of his take on this common theme, from a 2015 article with this heading: "An explosion in artificial intelligence has sent us hurtling towards a post-human future, warns Martin Rees"
Rees sketches a picture:
'In Davos a few years ago, I met a well-known Indian tycoon. Knowing I had the title Astronomer Royal, he asked: “Do you do the Queen’s horoscopes?” I responded, with a straight face: “If she wanted one, I’m the person she’d ask.” He then seemed eager to hear my predictions. I told him that markets would fluctuate and that there would be trouble in the Middle East. He paid rapt attention to these insights. But I then came clean. I said I was just an astronomer, not an astrologer. He immediately lost all interest in my predictions. ...
'....[T]his century is special. It’s the first when one species – ours – can determine the biosphere’s fate.
....[B]reakthroughs that may now seem like science fiction.... will offer great hopes, but also great fears.'
'Society is more interconnected than ever, and consequently more vulnerable. We depend on elaborate networks: electric-power grids, just-in-time delivery, satnav, globally dispersed manufacturing, and so forth. Can we be sure that these networks are resilient enough to rule out catastrophic disruptions cascading through the system – real-world analogues of the 2008 financial crash? London would be instantly paralysed without electricity. ...
'Not all those with “bio” expertise will be balanced and rational. My worst nightmare is an “eco-fanatic”, empowered by the biohacking expertise that may be routine by 2050, who thinks that “Gaia” can only be saved if the human population is reduced. The global village will have its village idiots, and they will have global range... So this is a real anxiety – number one in my estimation – and will raise the tension between privacy, freedom and security.'
....
'We’re witnessing a momentous speed-up in artificial intelligence (AI) – in the power of machines to learn, communicate and interact with us. Computers don’t learn like we do: they use “brute force” methods. They learn to translate from foreign languages by reading multilingual versions of, for example, millions of pages of EU documents (they never get bored). They learn to recognise dogs, cats and human faces by crunching through millions of images — not the way a baby learns.'
'Deep Mind, a London company that Google recently bought for £400 million, created a machine that can figure out the rules of all the old Atari games without being told, and then play them better than humans.'
...
'AI will take over a wider range of jobs – not just manual work but accountancy, routine legal work, medical diagnostics and surgery. And the big question is then: will AI be like earlier disruptive technologies – the car, for instance – which created as many jobs as they destroyed? Or is it really different this time?... [I]t’s clear that once a threshold is crossed, there will be an intelligence explosion. That’s because electronics is a million times faster than the transmission of signals in the brain; and because computers can network and exchange information much faster than we can by speaking...'
'In the Sixties, the British mathematician I J Good, who worked at Bletchley Park with Alan Turing, pointed out that a super-intelligent robot (were it sufficiently versatile) could be the last invention that humans need ever make. Once machines have surpassed human capabilities, they could themselves design and assemble a new generation of even more powerful machines — triggering a real “intelligence explosion”. Or could humans transcend biology by merging with computers, maybe losing their individuality and evolving into a common consciousness? In old-style spiritualist parlance, they would “go over to the other side”.'
'The most prominent evangelist for runaway super-intelligence – so-called “'singularity” – is Ray Kurzweil, now working at Google. He thinks this could happen within 25 years. But he is worried that he may not live that long. So he takes dozens of pills each day, and if he dies he wants his body frozen until this nirvana is reached.'
'I was once interviewed by a group of “cryonic” enthusiasts in California called the “society for the abolition of involuntary death”. They will freeze your body, so that when immortality is on offer you can be resurrected. I said I’d rather end my days in an English churchyard than a Californian refrigerator. They derided me as a “deathist”. (I was surprised later to find that three Oxford academics were cryonic enthusiasts. Two have paid full whack; a third has taken the cut-price option of just wanting his head frozen.)...'
'[I]nterplanetary and interstellar space will be the preferred arena where robotic fabricators will have the grandest scope for construction, and where non-biological “brains” may develop insights as far beyond our imaginings as string theory is for a mouse.'
'Abstract thinking by biological brains has underpinned the emergence of all culture and science. But this activity – spanning tens of millennia at most – will be a brief precursor to the more powerful intellects of the inorganic post-human era. So, in the far future, it won’t be the minds of humans, but those of machines, that will most fully understand the cosmos – and it will be the actions of autonomous machines that will most drastically change our world, and perhaps what lies beyond.'
Rees overlooked one calculation: the robots already HAVE taken over. That would have begun centuries back, when man's intellect began to be used, not just to solve problems, but to relieve human boredom.
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