Stephen Hawking thinks computers may surpass human intelligence and take over the world. We won't ever be silicon slaves, insists an AI expert

It is not often that you are obliged to proclaim a much-loved genius wrong, but in his alarming prediction on artificial intelligence and the future of humankind, I believe Stephen Hawking has erred. To be precise, and in keeping with physics in an echo of Schrdinger's cat he is simultaneously wrong and right.

Asked how far engineers had come towards creating artificial intelligence, Hawking replied: "Once humans develop artificial intelligence it would take off on its own and redesign itself at an ever increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete, and would be superseded."

In my view, he is wrong because there are strong grounds for believing that computers will never replicate all human cognitive faculties. He is right because even such emasculated machines may still pose a threat to humankind's future as autonomous weapons, for instance.

Such predictions are not new; my former boss at the University of Reading, professor of cybernetics Kevin Warwick, raised this issue in his 1997 book March of the Machines. He observed that robots with the brain power of an insect had already been created. Soon, he predicted, there would be robots with the brain power of a cat, quickly followed by machines as intelligent as humans, which would usurp and subjugate us.

This is based on the ideology that all aspects of human mentality will eventually be realised by a program running on a suitable computer a so-called strong AI. Of course, if this is possible, a runaway effect would eventually be triggered by accelerating technological progress caused by using AI systems to design ever more sophisticated AIs and Moore's law, which states that raw computational power doubles every two years.

I did not agree then, and do not now.

I believe three fundamental problems explain why computational AI has historically failed to replicate human mentality in all its raw and electro-chemical glory, and will continue to fail.

First, computers lack genuine understanding. The Chinese Room Argument is a famous thought experiment by US philosopher John Searle that shows how a computer program can appear to understand Chinese stories (by responding to questions about them appropriately) without genuinely understanding anything of the interaction.

Second, computers lack consciousness. An argument can be made, one I call Dancing with Pixies, that if a robot experiences a conscious sensation as it interacts with the world, then an infinitude of consciousnesses must be everywhere: in the cup of tea I am drinking, in the seat that I am sitting on. If we reject this wider state of affairs known as panpsychism we must reject machine consciousness.

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Fear artificial stupidity, not artificial intelligence