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Comment Re:Doesn't matter (Score 3, Informative) 341

It's not even a matter of whether a particular substance is a "pollutant" or "toxic". Many necessary substances can be harmful if present in high concentrations. You can die just by drinking too much water. That doesn't mean that water's a pollutant, even though too much can kill you. The argument that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant because plants need it is similarly confused -- too much of a good thing can be harmful.

To get to the heart of the matter, the EPA considers any harmful emission to be a pollutant, even if the substance emitted is necessary for life.

Comment Re:General artificial intelligence? (Score 1) 107

Yes, exactly! I would say that the AI programs we hear so much about: Watson, Google's self-driving cars, deep-learning neural networks, and so on will never reach general artificial intelligence. It's like climbing a tree and expecting to reach the moon. All those programs use simple algorithms geared towards just one purpose. You present those programs with any task other than the specific one they were designed for, and they fail miserably. General artificial intelligence, the ability to handle a wide variety of tasks autonomously, is a different beast altogether.

Comment Re:This synopsis (Score 1) 130

Well, if you have the idea of a rocket, yes you can put the parts together and make a rocket. But no one has an idea of how to make a working general artificial intelligence. That's the leap. What are the parts we need? How do we put them together? No one has a clue! If you know how to do it, write it up in a thesis, collect your PhD, and make billions.

Comment Re:This synopsis (Score 1) 130

There's a tremendous gap between the "AI" that researchers are working on and and artificial general intelligence. The algorithms used in AI systems are almost always very simple. These algorithms are simply not going to make this leap and become what we would consider intelligent. It's like expecting Google search to suddenly gain sentience. My favorite quote about this is "Believing that writing these types of programs will bring us closer to real artificial intelligence is like believing that someone climbing a tree is making progress toward reaching the moon."

Comment Re:Scientists? (Score 1) 80

A scientist, like any person, can say anything they want. You shouldn't believe something a scientist says just because they say it. They have opinions and can be wrong just like everyone can. I'm sure some scientists say ghosts exist and others say they don't.

Science, on the other hand, can find no evidence of ghosts. That doesn't mean they don't exist, however. Science makes no statement one way or the other on the subject of ghosts. They have never been observed, as far as we know, but could still exist.

Comment Re:Boy who cried wolf (Score 3, Informative) 163

Where do you get this "end of the world" thing? As for the claim of "alarmism", do you not remember the flu strain several years ago that tended to kill healthy people in the prime of their life, rather than "immunocompromised hosts"?

It's not that the reports are "alarmist". It's (1) you're not understanding the actual risk, and (2) you're pretending that the reports are predicting the end of the world.

Comment Re:Birthday paradox? (Score 5, Insightful) 334

The birthday paradox would mean that even if planets with intelligent life are an average of thousands of light years from the nearest alien planet with intelligent life, the likelihood of one pair of planets with intelligent life existing much closer together than that is high. Those two planets would be like the two people who share a birthday in the paradox. That's a completely different idea than this article is about.

Comment Re:Free from captivity... for how long? (Score 1) 341

Good point. Maybe he could be considered mentally incompetent and placed in a non-jail institution. I think a zoo could be nice, but if he's considered a legal person, that's probably considered cruelty. If he's considered a person, we also wouldn't able to let him live in the wild, I think. Casting a person out into the wild would be considered cruel, too. I'm all for treating animals nicely, but granting legal personhood doesn't seem like the way to go about it. I think it would be more productive to treat mentally ill and mentally defective people better instead. And maybe also allow people who are suffering to end their lives the way they wish.

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