Great book.

The robot should give priority to its owner. If the robot has to consider all humans equal, it will have to deal with ambiguity and uncertain intention in the external environment, which can lead to some disturbing possibilities. Consider the possibility that a robot could be manipulated into committing murder by having two pedestrians step out in front of a car on a narrow bridge. The car has no choice but to turn off the bridge, because two people are worth more than one. Or turning away from pedestrians (who are more likely to die) and instead going into oncoming traffic (where the oncoming car may or may not even have a passenger, or it may be a school bus). By always maximizing the survival of the passenger, I suspect that overall deaths will be minimized.

The word "perfect" is meaningless outside of mathematics.

Agreed. I recommend it to all our new programmers.

Personally I like the idea that the underlying reality of the universe is random. I find the idea that the universe is a deterministic clockwork to be depressing. Of course, the universe is going to be whatever it is no matter what I think. Unless, of course, I'm the one who collapses the wave function.

I guess you're not a fan of the Copenhagen interpretation. From Wikipedia:

The Copenhagen interpretation - due largely to the Danish theoretical physicist Niels Bohr - remains the quantum mechanical formalism that is currently most widely accepted amongst physicists, some 75 years after its enunciation. According to this interpretation, the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics is not a temporary feature which will eventually be replaced by a deterministic theory, but instead must be considered a final renunciation of the classical idea of "causality".

Now you've done it! Now we have to define "thinking". And thinking is required to define thinking. Or is it? Because I haven't defined thinking yet.

Oh yeah, and understand natural language commands and stream ultra high-def video.

I wear glasses, and if they suddenly had a HUD that was smart enough to keep out of my direct line of sight unless I wanted it, and if they had a camera and could understand some basic hand gestures from me, and make a virtual keyboard if necessary, and if they had headphones integrated into the part that rested on my ears, and if they were a smart phone and GPS and video camera and web browser, and if they didn't cost more than your average smart phone, and if they looked like normal glasses, I would be ok with that.

I want to do away with this base 10 nonsense and institute a base 12 numbering system. Try evenly dividing your primitive base 10 system into thirds!

It would make a great platform for space observatories. Imagine a grid of radio telescopes on the dark side. It would also probably be a good place for a gravity wave detector.

Just wait until the foreigners start building robots to immigrate into America for them. Then we'll be in trouble.

Of course it will never be settled. Even if we are capable of comprehending all the laws of the universe and we do eventually figure them out to explain all observable phenomenon, it will always be logically valid to say there is something we haven't observed yet. Induction does not lead to logical truth. It is even possible (but unlikely) that the universe is actually completely chaotic with no laws, and what we see as gravity and the other forces just a really big coincidence.

The failure of Linux to become the dominant operating system before Android didn't mean that an open source operating system wasn't viable. It just need the right platform to thrive.

My advice to Americans is to avoid dairy while in China. Every American I've known who ate dairy while in China was incapacitated with violent vomiting and diarrhea. Some needed to be hospitalized. The dairy technology and culture there isn't what it is in the west. I once asked a Chinese co-worker why he didn't like cheese. He said it was the smell. If I never had cheese before and then was confronted with a pile of feta I probably would feel the same way.