Stephen Hawking Totes Predicted The Westworld Finale

The Westworld finale was pretty satisfying, as robot revenge fantasies go. Dolores, at least, achieved full sentience and developed the ability to murk humans at will. A giant robot army lurched toward the Man in Black. Anthony Hopkins fulfilled his lifelong dream of no longer appearing on television. Of course, the whole thing displayed a reckless disregard for Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, but I digress. And Stephen Hawking, who many consider the smartest living human, predicted the whole thing two years ago. Hello Giggles drew our attention to this interview he gave to the BBC in 2014, nearly two years to the day before the finale of Westworld. It's shockingly prescient. “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race," Hawking said, citing the potential for AI to evolve much faster than biology allows. Of course, we could have told you that way back in 1999, when The Matrix knocked our collective butts in the dirt. But he's a little more bullish on the potential for humanity to coexist with our robot soon-to-be-overlords than Westworld is. “I believe we will remain in charge of the technology for a decently long time and the potential of it to solve many of the world problems will be realized…" he told the BBC. "We cannot quite know what will happen if a machine exceeds our own intelligence, so we can’t know if we’ll be infinitely helped by it, or ignored by it and sidelined, or conceivably destroyed by it.” Hawking is said to be developing a unifying fan theory that will explain Jon Snow's parentage and provide an epistemological explanation for the Bernard/Arnold paradox. (Kidding!) Watch Hawking's interview with the BBC below.