Abstract
On July 27, reddit, WIRED, and Nokia brought us the first-ever AMA with
Stephen Hawking with this note: At the time, we, the mods of /r/science,
noted this: “This AMA will be run differently due to the constraints of
Professor Hawking. The AMA will be in two parts, today we with gather
questions. Please post your questions and vote on your favorite
questions, from these questions Professor Hawking will select which ones
he feels he can give answers to. Once the answers have been written, we,
the mods, will cut and paste the answers into this AMA and post a link
to the AMA in /r/science so that people can re-visit the AMA and read
his answers in the proper context. The date for this is undecided, as it
depends on several factors.” It’s now October, and many of you have
been asking about the answers. We have them! This AMA has been a bit of
an experiment, and the response from reddit was tremendous. Professor
Hawking was overwhelmed by the interest, but has answered as many as he
could with the important work he has been up to. If you’ve been paying
attention, you will have seen what else Prof. Hawking has been working
on for the last few months: In July, Musk, Wozniak and Hawking urge ban
on warfare AI and autonomous weapons “The letter, presented at the
International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Buenos
Aires, Argentina, was signed by Tesla’s Elon Musk, Apple co-founder
Steve Wozniak, Google DeepMind chief executive Demis Hassabis and
professor Stephen Hawking along with 1,000 AI and robotics
researchers.” And also in July: Stephen Hawking announces $100 million
hunt for alien life “On Monday, famed physicist Stephen Hawking and
Russian tycoon Yuri Milner held a news conference in London to announce
their new project:injecting $100 million and a whole lot of brain power
into the search for intelligent extraterrestrial life, an endeavor
they’re calling Breakthrough Listen.” August 2015: Stephen Hawking says
he has a way to escape from a black hole “he told an audience at a
public lecture in Stockholm, Sweden, yesterday. He was speaking in
advance of a scientific talk today at the Hawking Radiation Conference
being held at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.”
Professor Hawking found the time to answer what he could, and we have
those answers. With AMAs this popular there are never enough answers to
go around, and in this particular case I expect users to understand the
reasons. For simplicity and organizational purposes each questions and
answer will be posted as top level comments to this post. Follow up
questions and comment may be posted in response to each of these
comments. (Other top level comments will be removed.)