Is this an attempt at passing the Turing Test? If so, you FAIL!

I was under the impression (not that I've ever lowered myself far enough to use an iPhone) that any alternative browser you can get through the App Store is nothing more than a "skin" over the in-built Safari browser of iOS... no option for different rendering engines, etc. Was I mistaken in this understanding?

You mean like the franchise model that McDonalds operates in many countries of the world (including the UK), where this is (based on how a local franchisee described it to me) exactly the approach (all or nothing. You can't just sell the burgers, you have to adhere to the whole brand identity, right down to the WiFi if you offer it. The only exception is the right to opt out of SOME of the promotions.)?

Because the post that the GP was replying to ended (if you ignore the smiley face) in an ellipsis followed by a full stop / period, not the four periods suggested by the GP.

Ever heard of an ellipsis?

TBH I knew that such sensors exist. They're even fitted as standard in my car, albeit with a somewhat different purpose, and will happily bitch that someone hasn't got their seatbelt on if it detects enough weight without the corresponding belt being fastened. Bugs the crap out of me when I have the car relatively loaded and whatever I've put on the seat is heavy enough to trip the sensor. At least it only beeps at me, rather than cutting the engine!

... Should have guessed that would happen...

My comment was something of a play on words, not so much a suggested fix to the problem in TFA. I, personally, haven't RTFA yet (crappy mobile internet connection).

Here in the UK, bum is almost always used as a colloquialism for what Americans call their butt/ass/fanny/whatever...

The humour intended in my comment appears to have been lost in translation.

Ermm... Possibly because the Turing test is a test of INTELLIGENCE, not KNOWLEDGE. They are the different, but related, concepts. A person who can reliably parrot a whole host of facts is often considered knowledgeable, but not necessarily intelligent.

By your example, an encyclopaedia would be considered knowledgeable... Would you also say that the encyclopaedia itself was intelligent?

Assuming he means a sensor to detect whether the driver is sat and the seat, surely a heavy enough bag ought to do the job?!?

But then again, you're comparing the processing capabilities of a computer to what I (as someone who hasn't studied this field in great depth, so I may screw up the terminology somewhat) would refer to as the human brain's ability to consciously process information. You seem to be forgetting that the human brain is also sub-consciously processing immense data-sets of information that we probably aren't even fully aware of, just to keep us alive, create out emotions, sensations and a whole host of other things that are part of sentience. Some of this sub-conscious processing may even spill over into our conscious processing, affecting the conclusions and decisions that we come to. This may be where at least part of our creativity comes from and could partly explain why computers are, thus far, particularly suited to raw analytical tasks, while humans are seemingly better suited to more creative endeavors.

A key question at this point would be, assuming the above to be correct, will a computer ever be capable of truly creative tasks, and without such, can it ever be considered truly sentient, or merely a simulation of sentience?

It's an image from an article in a newspaper that, if there was any real justice in the world, would be relegated to serve only for wrapping my dinner when I pick it up from the local chippie.

I think that this is part of the problem, and why people are so scared of the idea of AI.

We don't know enough about what makes US sentient/intelligent. Because of this:

1) If we ever do create an AI, we won't be able to control it

2) If our means of avoiding (1) is to stop any research/development just short of the steps that would grant it sentience/intelligence, how can we do this if we don't know just what it is that grants US our sentience/intelligence. Bearing this in mind, we could create an AI construct by accident and, in our panic to control it, turn it against us.

OK... first thing's first... I'm not in the field of AI.

That being said, my understanding is that, for something to be classified as a true AI, it needs to develop at least a rudimentary form of sentience. In other words, it needs to "think for itself". A lot of the fears and pop-culture around the dangers of AI surrounds what would happen if the AI were to "think" in ways we don't want it to.

So what's the solution? Restrict its ability to think for itself? Then it fails the sentience test and cannot be considered as qualifying as a "true" AI.

Alternatively, we could try to encourage it to think the way we want it to. A couple of things to bear in mind here:

1) We don't even fully understand how WE think for ourselves yet.

2) We have tried to encourage the way people think in particular directions in the past (organised religion, brainwashing, politics, advertising, etc) and look where it's brought us!

What worries me (OK... worries is a strong word. It doesn't keep me up at night or anything like that!) isn't so much that we might, somehow, create a true AI, more that when we do, we will be so worried about it thinking thoughts that we don't want it to that we'll screw it up.

Erm... Did someone get kicked out of college for misunderstanding the meaning of the term "animal husbandry"???

At least things aren't as bad as when the "Scunthorpe Problem" was rife! Those are days I'm glad to have behind me.

Running a school network and suddenly finding that you are unable to email colleagues or browse websites with Essex, Sussex, Wessex or Scunthorpe in their addresses was annoying... but having to explain this to the ISP who implemented the block was a challenge. Techs there just didn't seem to be able to get their heads around the concept of a SUB-string being a problem (they thought their filter was only parsing whole addresses for comparison against the "think of the children" list.

That being said... Chrome's spell-check remains convinced that Scunthorpe isn't a word!