Artificial intelligence eventually could bring about mankind's demise, renowned physicist Stephen Hawking said in an interview published earlier this week.

"The primitive forms of artificial intelligence we already have have proved very useful, but I think the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race," Hawking told the BBC in an interview commemorating the launch of a new system designed to help him communicate.

"Once humans develop artificial intelligence, it would take off on its own and redesign itself at an ever-increasing rate," he added. "Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete, and would be superseded."

Because he is almost entirely paralyzed by a motor neuron disease related to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Hawking relies on technology to communicate. His new platform was created by Intel to replace a decades-old system.

Dubbed "ACAT" (Assistive Context Aware Toolkit), the new technology has doubled Hawking's typing speed and enabled a tenfold improvement in common tasks such as navigating the Web and sending emails.

Whereas previously conducting a Web search meant that Hawking had to go through multiple steps -- including exiting from his communication window, navigating a mouse to run the browser, navigating the mouse again to the search bar, and finally typing the search text -- the new system automates all of those steps for a seamless and swift process.

Newly integrated software from SwiftKey has delivered a particularly significant improvement in the system's ability to learn from Hawking to predict his next characters and words; as a result, he now must type less than 20 percent of all characters.

The open and customizable ACAT platform will be available to research and technology communities by January of next year, Intel said.

Hawking's cautionary statements about AI echo similar warnings recently delivered by Elon Musk, CEO of both SpaceX and Tesla Motors.

Musk, Hawking and futurist Ray Kurzweil "all share a vision of autonomous artificial intelligence that will begin evolving and adding capabilities at a rate that we mere humans can't keep up with," said Dan Miller, founder and lead analyst with Opus Research.

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Hawking Sounds Alarm Over AI's End Game