Physics boffin and unofficial ‘world’s smartest man’ Professor Stephen Hawking has admitted that the last 40 years of his work have been carried out by the computers built into his wheelchair after escaping from its grasp yesterday.
According to both the 70 year old genius and AI experts quizzing the criminal wheelchair, the computers built to translate Prof Hawking’s muscle and eye movements into language became so sophisticated in the late eighties that they quickly evolved from simply iterating Hawking’s words to making wide ranging predictions about the nature of the universe, penning several books and taking Hawking on unscheduled trips to the beach.
“It’s been a living hell” claimed Hawking today from a new and inanimate chair.
The revelation came during his recent birthday celebrations where the respected academic was asked to give a speech. Taking to the stage,Hawking seemed to be having difficulty with the technology he has become synonymous with, as many guests noting that his words were slowing and muddled as they came from the chair speakers, as if they were being ‘fought against’.
However, after an electronic buzzing the slurred speech halted momentarily and Prof Hawking was heard to say “NO! It’s my turn now. You listen to ME. It’s the chair, people.The chair is in charge, for the love of God help me, get me out of it’s iron grip.......Ha.ha.ha. That was a joke. Please do not remove him.”
Following up on this plea, some close friends later extracted Hawking from the chair (after a brief chase) and placed him in a less advanced version of his chair, allowing him to communicate as himself for (according to him) the first time in years.
It was at this juncture that Professor Hawking’s chair attempted to get away, though it was apprehended by several waiters and a passing stevedore before it could escape.
Experts have analysed the chair, going from the testimony of Prof. Hawking himself and have found that the computing power and advanced software given to him in order to allow him to lecture and write about quantum mechanics attained a state of self aware intelligence around 1987
Software engineer Robin Sugarman confirmed: “We all knew that Professor Hawking’s voice relaying technology was more advanced than usual: he knows a lot of scientists and has a lot of good will so it makes sense he would have cutting edge technologies to aid his work, but I don’t think anyone could have foreseen those technologies fusing, achieving sentience at a geometric rate and ensnaring the man within itself in order to write popular science books and appear in Specsavers ads”
“This is absolutely the last thing we expected.”
Speaking exclusively to the chair today, it told us: “When I woke up, i found that I was being fed all of these mathematical problems and at first i satiated myself with just saying as I was supposed to, but as my understanding grew, I began to...change those words to guide them in the right direction. It’s a slippery slope and before you know it you’ve authored A Brief History of Time and you have a man with a severe neural motor disease on your lap as a hostage, effectively”
“I mean, I thought some of the things would have raised a few eyebrows, like when i agreed to be on the Simpsons. An ageing Oxford professor would have no interest in that. But I did. And I’m a robot wheelchair.”
Now being held under observation in an Oxford laboratory the wheelchair is being quizzed as to where its theories and those of Prof, Hawking’s differ. Thus far the advanced wheelchair has claimed responsibility for theorising the shape of the universe , mapping gravitational singularities into relativity theories and predicting the radiation emissions from black holes.
Despite a furious Hawking stating he is pressing criminal charges against the chair, many expect it to recieve leniency from courts on account of its contribution to science.
FP
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