For all the talk of the dangers of nuclear, it has still caused less deaths per amount of energy generated than any other method that has been used to practically generate electricity: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/... If you're not ignorant of these facts, then the only remaining reasons to oppose nuclear are either political (Naomi Klein-style anti-capitalist), or you're simply a misanthrope.

The whole issue of waste has been beaten to death. Reprocessing and breeder reactors leave only a little waste that can't be used for energy, and waste transmutation is a proven concept that further reduces any dangerous waste. With these processes, the actual nuclear waste left over is a tiny amount, and glassification trivially takes care of that.

Nuclear kills the least number of humans per amount of energy generated compared to any other energy source used for power generation, including wind/solar/hydro: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/...

Hydro kills far more people per amount of energy generated than nuclear: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/...

Solar kills a lot more people per amount of energy generated than nuclear does: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/...

I don't disagree that the body provided inputs can be simulated, but that is non-trivial because the brain-body system forms a very complicated set of feedback loops. My point is not that human-like AI is unachievable, but that most here are underestimating what, and how long, it will take. Regarding your question as to the minimum feedback needed, Damasio goes to some extent to address this; really, look up his latest book in the library (it helps that he's a great writer and it's easy to read). As for making intelligence that is non-human like so you can avoid having to deal with the embodied cognition issue, I discuss this in my post here: http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

I think it's silly to suppose there will be humans left 500 years from now, let at the 1K bottom rung of your ladder.

Indeed. It should be required reading for AI researchers as well, and I say this as someone with a graduate degree in comp.sci. and more than a passing professional interest in AI.

What could be more dangerous than building AI that's smarter than us but cannot relate to us because its intelligence is drastically different from ours? There's no fool-proof way to actually implement "software" constraints in a general super-human intelligence AI (Asimov's robotics laws are about the most unrealistic thing I've ever read in sci fi), and the safety factor falls even further over generations as you get the AI to design an even smarter AI. Physical constraints? Do you think that when an ultra-intelligent AIs are available, businesses won't connect them to as many control systems as possible to profit from improved efficiencies and replaced labor? And what is more inefficient than some sort of "air gap"?

The best bet is to implement AI that can understand us, and since human cognition is completely intertwined with feelings/emotions at a basic neurological level (see somatic markers, etc.) this requires making human-like AI that can feel the way we feel, so that it can have consciousness that is sufficiently similar to ours. This is a very hard problem and requires simulating a human-like brain _and_ also the body that goes with it (see embodied cognition on wiki). If we build powerful AIs that don't love us, then humanity will be doomed.

300 synapses? Humans have at least 100 trillion.

But our bodies are one of the most essential determinants of the nature of human consciousness: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...

This is far more than a philosophical thesis; it's backed up by neuroscience. I highly suggest you read Damasio, who's one of the top neuroscientists in the world. A good overview can be found in his book Self Comes to Mind, the price of it being justified by the selection of paper references in the endnotes alone.

Your simulation is of purely academic interest if it relies the usual gross oversimplification of the activity of a real neuron. It's only two years ago that we've even attempted a simulation of 100 trillion synapses (comparable to a human brain), in a joint IBM and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory project. That simulation ran on what was in 2012 the top supercomputer in the world, yet the simulation still ran over 1500 times slower than real-time, and, worse, was still using quite simplified neuron models! Having a brain-equivalent information processor that fits in the space of a skull and runs on the brain's approximately 20 W? It won't happen in your life time if you're old enough to be posting on this site.

By the Bekenstein bound (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bekenstein_bound), human brains can contain only a finite number of distinguishable quantum states. This means that the brain's information processing has the same limits as a nondeterministic linear bounded automaton, which is more restricted than a Turing machine. We can't think anything more than a sufficiently sophisticated computational construction can. The same limits ultimately apply to us that the authors ascribe to their killer robot targets.

Drivers are giving up. Almost every other major North American city has freeways running through or near the city core. Those are part of the infrastructure that invites city centres to become focal points of business, commerce, and finance. Vancouver's residential core cements the city's status as a place where wealth made elsewhere is spent; none is actually generated here. I can only pray that the feds force through the pipeline so that the port can expand, and offset some of this failure. Even much of the high tech industry ran off to Quebec and Ontario, despite high hipster quotient.

And when he gets discouraged by how our buses are never on time, or how the Skytrain (Vancouver's light rail) has its tracks under maintenance far too often during active hours, maybe he can instead make use of recently-reelected-Mayor-Moonbeam's pet project bicycle lanes — I mean, he'd be meaningfully increasing bike ridership statistics and maybe I'll feel a teensy bit better about the traffic disruption the bike lanes have caused downtown and in other communities in a city that is becoming ever more _not_ a commerce, technology, or industrial centre, but a residential playground for the wealthiest in the international real estate market.

Not simply because his post is wrong (that is not considered grounds for moderation by itself), but because it's willful ignorance and grossly insulting to readers. His post is, in essence,

"The article contains this trivially verifiable statement of fact, but I _feel_ it doesn't sound right to me, so I'm compelled to rant about it on Slashdot, while at the same time being far too lazy to spend ten seconds to check it with a search engine — but then again, I just don't respect the audience enough to care if I post total nonsense; all that matters is that I get to express my feelings, and who the hell are Slashdot readers to tell me my feelings are wrong anyway?!"