Echoing what physicist Stephen Hsu wrote in Nautilus in 2015 (a piece that made the “50 Great 2015 Articles Online for Free” list), Reed Hastings of Netflix believes the future will see a race between engineered humans and Intelligent AI. To me, that seems the most likely outcome. In the very long run, we will probably increasingly drive our own evolution. We’ll be the “existential risk” to what Homo sapiens currently is.

From Chris O’Brien at Venturebeat:

During a conversation on stage today at the DLD Conference in Munich, Germany, Hastings said he was far less worried about looming threats of an AI-triggered apocalypse than are many other observers, such as Tesla’s Elon Musk.

“Some people worry about what happens when machine intelligence is too strong,” Hastings said. “That’s like worrying about our Mars colony and people being overweight on our Mars colony. We can deal with that later.”

He emphasized, rather, that machine intelligence is just beginning to be felt, through applications like Netflix’s recommendation engine. But he expects that impact to accelerate and predicted that the world is only five to 15 years away from a time when we can hold a three-person conversation and not be sure which of the three is a machine.

Even then, Hastings believes all will not be lost for the puny human race. As AI accelerates, he predicts that so, too, will the ability to augment our genetic code.•