Stephen Hawking in Hong Kong this week. Photograph: Song Xiaogang/ChinaFotoPress
Celebrity professors say the darndest things. Imagine if someone down the pub told you straight-faced that computers risked taking over the world, and that super-intelligent humans would need to be genetically engineered to compete, writes David Fickling.
Imagine them then telling you that this super-race would cause less enhanced humans to die out, and that organic life would be eventually replaced by self-sustaining robots flying through space and building new generations with mining expeditions in remote solar systems.
You'd maybe laugh at them, look at them askance, or call the police. You certainly wouldn't give them a standing ovation.
But that's precisely the response that Stephen Hawking - author of A Brief History of Time, Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge University, the world's most famous motor neurone disease sufferer, heir to Isaac Newton's academic chair, Simpsons cameo actor, etc, etc - gets whenever he comes out with wild speculations about the deep future of humanity.
He was at it again yesterday, telling a Hong Kong audience that humanity needed to colonise space to escape the consequences of possible environmental, technological, medical or undreamed-of disasters on earth.
It's not that anything he says is necessarily wrong. It belongs in the field of speculation, and if Professor Hawking was an expert in genetics, or politics, or economics, or computer science it might be worth listening to.
But he's a mathematician, whose expertise centres on obscure areas of theoretical physics that have little bearing on whether the future's going to look like AI: Artificial Intelligence, 2001: a Space Odyssey, or Escape from New York.
Futurologists are normally only taken half-seriously when they talk about events taking place in clearly defined fields in the near future.
Human knowledge and technology changes so fast that it's pointless making predictions about what's going to happen more than 50 years or so from now.
That's not to deny that Professor Hawking's crystal ball speeches are fun and that he's entitled to make some money from some enjoyable flim-flam. But please, let's not treat him as if he's Moses coming down from the mountain: this stuff is showbiz, not science.
