Stephen Hawking says most of our history is "the history of stupidity"

In a lecture at the University of Cambridge this week, Stephen Hawking made the bold claim that the creation of artificial intelligence will be "either the best, or the worst thing, ever to happen to humanity". The talk was celebrating the opening of the new Leverhulme Centre of the Future of Intelligence, where some of the best minds in science will try to answer questions about the future of robots and artificial intelligence - something Hawking says we need to do a lot more of. "We spend a great deal of time studying history," Hawking told the lecture, "which, let's face it, is mostly the history of stupidity." But despite all our time spent looking back at past errors, we seem to make the same mistakes over and over again. "So it's a welcome change that people are studying instead the future of intelligence," he explained.