Celebrated physicist Stephen Hawking has redefined the world as we know it. So when he speaks, the world listens. On being asked at a Reddit AMA recently about the dangers of advancements in AI technology, his response set social media abuzz with anxiety.

Hawking warned of dangers of a possible intelligence explosion; the concept which, proposes that once we build Artificial Intelligence (AI) with human intelligence levels, it can consequently improve itself to the point of exceeding human intelligence, what is famously known as superintelligence. Technological singularity is another term that describes the scenario.

“It's clearly possible for a something to acquire higher intelligence than its ancestors,” said Hawking at the Reddit AMA. “The line you ask about is where an AI becomes better than humans at AI design, so that it can recursively improve itself without human help; if this happens, we may face an intelligence explosion that ultimately results in machines whose intelligence exceeds ours by more than ours exceeds that of snails.”

Hawking, in fact, described another problem that could be potentially harmful – unemployment. Inequitable resource distribution, an already surmounting problem across the world, can get further aggravated by increasing mechanisation. “If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed – everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution; so far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality,” said Hawking on Reddit.

In spite of being hard to believe, findings show that this isn’t far from truth. As unemployment in developed economies with high mechanisation increases, one estimate by Oxford pegs 45 percent automation among occupations in America within the next two decades. Hawking seems to have raised some legitimate concerns about AI technology.

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