A University of Cambridge research project is preparing to investigate whether technology has the power to destroy humankind.
The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk -- a collaboration between philosopher Huw Price, astrophysicist Martin Rees and Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn -- aims to study and mitigate any "extinction-level risks to our species as a whole" associated with technological advances across a number of fields.
"In the case of artificial intelligence, it seems a reasonable prediction that some time in this or the next century intelligence will escape from the constraints of biology,"Price told AFP. "[In that scenario] we're no longer the smartest things around," rather, we would exist at the whim of "machines that are not malicious, but machines whose interests don't include us."
But conducting risk assessments on new technologies is unlikely to be a straightforward process. According to the project's own mission statement, "The seriousness of these risks is difficult to assess, but that in itself seems a cause for concern, given how much is at stake."
Developments in artificial intelligence, biotechnology, nanotechnology and the extreme effects of anthropogenic climate change would all come under the centre's research remit when it launches in 2013.
The trio hope to guarantee humanity's survival for at least the next two hundred years although that target is not without a very human ulterior motive:
"[W]e hope to make it a little more certain that we humans will be around to celebrate the University's own millennium, now less than two centuries hence."
Image: Shutterstock
