Despite 72-year-old Professor Stephen Hawking just receiving a serious upgrade to his computer-generated speech system, smarter tech, he told the BBC, “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”

Prof Hawking says the primitive forms of artificial intelligence developed so far have already proved very useful, but he fears the consequences of creating something that can match or surpass humans.

“It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate,” he said. “Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.”

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