Redditors are gonna Reddit, and so when news spread that physicist, author and Principal Skinner-puncher Stephen Hawking died, people on Reddit mourned by remembering the time Professor Hawking had done an AMA.
They were drawn in particular to Hawking’s final Reddit comment, which was, by all accounts, pretty bleak:
If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.
The rest of the chat is heady stuff, mostly about the potential rewards and opportunities for humans as artificial intelligence grows and matures. But then this one user posted a question on a very different topic:
Kind of a perfect answer, if you ask me. But then I’m not Mike Myers.