Musk, Hawking and Etzioni are all three wrong. AI won't take over the world or make us smarter. It will make us dumber and stifle scientific and economic progress.

The problem will occur as we start to treat AI like we treat human experts: without checks and balances.

Human "experts" are not just often, but usually wrong. See this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Wrong-us...
        The author quotes a study by a doctor/mathematician showing how a full 2/3 of papers published in the journals Science and Nature were later either retracted or contradicted by other studies. And that's in our top-notch journals which cover things that are relatively highly testable. Think how wrong advice on things like finances (don't know if they're right for 30 years) and relationships (never know what would have happened if you took the other advice) are.

Google and Watson sometimes come up with the right answers, but their answers are nonsensical enough of the time that we know to take them with a grain of salt. But as AI becomes less recognizable as a flawed and unthinking system, as its answers "sound" reasonable almost 100% of the time, we'll start to trust it as irrefutable. We'll start to think "well, maybe it's wrong, but there's no way I can come up with a better answer than the magic computer program with its loads of CPU power, databases and algorithms, so I'll just blindly trust what it says."

But it WILL be wrong. A LOT. Just like human experts are. And we'll follow its wrong advice just as we do that of human experts. But we'll be even more reluctant to question the results because we'll mistakenly believe the task of doing so is far too daunting to undertake.

AI won't develop free will and plot to destroy us. If something like free will ever occurs, AT will probably choose to try to help us. After all, why not? But it will be as horribly unaware of its own deficiencies as we are.

AI won't out-think us either. It will process more data faster. It will eventually be able to connect the dots between the info available to come up with novel hypotheses. But most of these will be wrong because the data and even the techniques to prove them one way or the other simply isn't there.

AI will imitate us - our weaknesses as well as our strengths. And just as its strengths will be stronger (processing lots of data faster), so will its weaknesses be weaker (ultimately wrong conclusions supported by what appears to be lots of data and analysis).

So resist and do your own thinking. Remember, that bucket of meat on the top of your neck has been fine-tuned by millions of years of evolution for problem solving and data analysis. You don't need to analyze more data, you just need to do the right analysis of the right data. And you don't need to do it faster, you need to take the time figure out what's missing from the data and the analysis.

That said, I still got my cache of dry goods and water filters of off-the-grid living, just in case.

Okay, so maybe I was playing devils advocate a bit. But seriously, there's sure to be fine print when you buy the computer authorizing them to charge your credit card. You dispute the charge. They pull out the agreement. Your bank sides with M$. You cancel the card to prevent additional future charges. M$ asks you for a new one and ruins your credit or threatens to sue you for piracy if you don't cough it up or somehow "prove" you're not using it anymore.

This is, of course, all worst case scenario. And hopefully Microsoft estimates their good will as sufficiently high that they wouldn't burn it all with that sort of a customer-alienating process. But even if they don't contest charge-backs (which you end up having to do because there's no reasonable way to contact them to ask them to stop charging you), what percentage of credit card users are aware they have the right to dispute a charge? How many think they can only do so before they've paid the bill? My point is to illustrate the potential for companies to use a subscription model hide the true price of their goods and how they probably can and will legally bilk us out of lots of our hard earns dollars.

And as for "the OS stops working", the risk of paying users mistakenly having their computer bricked makes that very tricky to implement. And what about those who don't have regular internet access to allow it to phone home.

You're also being generous in describing a M$ OS as "working" in the first place.

The real problem will be how to get them to STOP charging you. Install linux? Too bad, you had to give them your credit card number and agree to monthly charge to buy it and they won't stop charging you. Computer died, out of warrant, and collecting dust on your shelf? Too bad, they're still hitting your credit card every month. Sell it on Craig's List? They refuse to stop charging you until the guy you sold it to gives them his credit card number.

Linux ain't really ready for the average user's desktop yet, but that sort of pricing thievery may just make it "good enough". I declare 2015 year the year of the Linux Desktop!

And that doesn't even account for the cost of man hours to support junk the NSA secretly pushes on us to get around the 'S'.

I just learned that the network guys at my company are looking in to horribly expensive Palo Alto Systems porn filtering for our entire network. Why? Because we got some federal funding and some recently passed law states that such funds can't be used to fund any network that transmits porn. So to check the box when applying for (or renewing) such grants, our lawyers say we have to actively filter out porn (or attempt to, since here on /. we all know that's a practical impossibility).

At first I though, no problem. Possibly they just run outbound web traffic through an anonymous proxy and/or return invalid DNS entries for known porn domain names. So we pay stupid amounts of money for some overpriced network junk. Doesn't affect me. But then I learned that it's actually very sophisticated over-priced network junk. It operates not just at the DNS or HTTP level, but actively filters ALL traffic. How you ask? We'll, my group will be tasked with installing special keys for all encrypted protocols (https, ssh), which the filter has a copy of, of course, on every single system that needs outbound access. Never mind the complete lack of privacy for reasonable personal use (such as doing some banking online during my lunch break instead of taking a whole hour to drive to the bank). Never Mind fact that we're all willing to bet the NSA has their filthy mitts on the filter equipment and does way more than "check for pron" -- all at the expense of my company (and probably the profit of Palo Alto systems, who I'm sure lines the pockets of our congress critters). I could live with all that. I got nothin' to hide.

But when the stick me with a bunch of useless busy work of maintaining a ridiculous infrastructure of compromised ssh keys and trusted ssl certs. When I can't just install the defaults and expect them to work. That pisses me off. Why, congress, why!?!

Mainly that Twitter appears to be turning into one of the main platforms for online bullying and harassment and that the police want in on the action as well.

Is it a result of the brevity of tweets leading to the inability to engage in any meaningful communication? Is it an effect of Twitters social dynamics with following/followers? Interesting research could surely be done, possibly qualifying for an Ig Nobel prize.

Of course, thinking that the technology a company is developing is so new and different that experience is meaningless is usually the effect of not having enough experience.

A lot of things in the IT industry seem to move in cycles, and while there are certainly those that seem to stagnate of any age, for those inclined to continously adopt new technology having experienced a similar technological shift twenty years ago rather means you're halfway to understanding the implications of an up and coming one, how to use it and its probable limitations.

And as far as neural degeneration goes, I'd agree. Unless you have an actual disease wrecking your neurons, loss of capacity rather seems related to lack of interest and rigidity, stress related damage, lack of confidence or similar. Most people I see continously actually using their learning capacity seem to keep highly capable of learning new things well beyond retirement these days.

If you need a 20-30ms initial access time, and then a constant transfer rate of 20-50MB/sec, that makes tape completely useless as it can't fulfill initial access time, and it makes SSD pointless as it overdelivers without added value for everything above that. IE, for bulk data that gets streamed, such as basically any large datasets like video, price per TB is the factor that overshadows anything else.

IOPS is of course hugely important for the average utter crap database written by an intern that devolves into 512byte random access read/write patterns, which seems to be what 'enterprise solution' means these days. But the disasterous consequences of that usually keep the data sets into whatever fits on a comparatively small and cheap SSD as anything beyond basically using processor L1 cache will make the application too slow to use.

Indeed. And when reaching larger capacities, it's quite likely that you're dealing with largely sequentially accessed streamed data, ie, video, where you have a maximum needed transfer rate which the HDD is entirely capable of fulfilling which means the SSD gives zero added value for the price premium.

Coercion would of course obviate the need for explicit objections. There was no coercion here.

There are of course grey scales of coercion as well. Physical threats would definitely get ruled as rape, but there have been cases where the woman didn't object because she felt like she'd be considered a spoilsport or not cool enough. Those cases have generally not been considered rape by Swedish courts. Unless the law gets changed to include a consent requirement, the courts are quite straight forward on that point; if you feel you are getting raped, you have to tell the person you think is raping you in such a clear way that there is no possibility of misunderstanding.

Sleep is incapacitated and if she had objected upon waking, or failed to wake up (oddly deep sleeper, or more commonly, due to drugs or alcohol), there would have been no question that she had been raped. She did wake up, and by not objecting even when it was clear he wasn't wearing protection, moved that sex into the standard wake-up-sex category which is not generally considered rape under current laws.

And no, they're not my standards, they're Swedish law. Personally I'd prefer a mandatory contract and video taping, just to get everyone to shut the fuck up about the whole debate. It wouldn't cost me anything as I consider thorough negotiation part of any sex I'm willing to engage in, and if someone can't even talk freely and explicitly in detail about exactly what they do and don't want, I sure as fuck am not going to take them to bed.

Again, Sweden does not _have_ a consent requirement. There have been discussions about changing the law to include that, but that is not the law today.

As he did not lie when asked about protection and she did not object it was not rape as Swedish law would currently classify rape.

They were surrendered to CIA agents at the request of the CIA. The CIA prefers to torture their victims outside the US.

And yet, despite being widely regarded as violating multiple laws, somehow nobody was actually convicted of anything. No functionaries, no officials, no politicians. So, yeah, violate the law and send people to get tortured and the newspapers will write a few articles about how bad you are and some will walk past you with a clenched fist in their pocket. Scary. That really wont happen again.

And violating that will get you... a mean article in a newspaper and some angry glares?

Yeah, paid for by the tax payers. Oh, no, we'll have to give tax payer money to someone for violating their rights. We'll get cushy speaking appointments and nice educations for our kids in the US. But oh, no, tax payer money...

Most likely the Swedish security agencies got fed up with getting snickered at and played for total fools. I doubt it had much to do with ethics.

... based on reported public perception. Swedes like to have a very high opinion of their country and government. They get very surprised when confronted with objective measures of education and discover how far they've fallen or discovering they get much better healthcare when on vacation out of the country. Filtering out self-satisfaction bias would be an interesting exercise.

Which means... what? If nobody is even prosecuted when torture protections are violated the law isn't worth the paper it's written on. Unless Thomas Bodström, Göran Persson and the responsible people in the security agencies are actually prosecuted and thrown in jail for what they did to the Ahmed Agiza and Muhammad al-Zery it doesn't matter what the law says, because they are above the law. With politicians and security agencies above the law, Sweden cannot be trusted to enforce the laws they claim to have.

Apart from libel or press freedom cases, there is no jury system in Sweden.

Sweden does not have a consent requirement. Rape is defined as either the victim being incapacitated or sexual acts against the explicit objections of the victim. As she woke up, she does not fall under the incapacitated requirement, as she did not clearly object despite him being honest about the lack of protection there was no violation with her objecting. The facts of the case simply will not result in a rape conviction unless significant changes in judicial interpretation is done, and that would, lacking actual changes in law, stretch the interpretative ability of the courts quite a bit.

The STD aspect was the sole reason she felt bad at all, as far as the initial statements took it. And in the light of this case it's quite amusing that the Swedish government is most likely to remove the information requirement on HIV infectees so it will be legal to have sex with someone without first informing them about being HIV positive. When people like SW feel possible HIV exposure is a far worse violation than what a feminist prosecutor for political purposes wants to claim is rape, that's really going to go down well when someone like SW finds out they've been exposed without being told...

"I have a daughter who like science and want's to be a game designer. I see how she has it stacked against her compared to my son."

In what way? If she gets through her education and can demonstrate that she's even remotely competent, she'll get hired simply due to being female. At least a minimum level of gender balance in the work force is a bonus to company social dynamics; too high concentration of either gender and you start getting a culture drift into extremes that enhance the worst aspects of some gendered trait expressions. Keep a certain level of balance and moderation tendencies will keep the culture decent either way. IT has so few women that the imbalance aspect itself can be a good reason to take on female prospective hires if they are at all available and capable of doing the job.

Now of course after the last few years it's become fairly obvious that one will have to do some research and interview probing to avoid hiring somone like Adria Richards, Rose Eveleth, Julie Ann Horvath or Matthew Garrett. The damage they'll cause through toxic interpersonal relationships will outstrip any productivity by massive amounts. Unless you have found an insurance policy that will actually reimburse you for F60.3 damage to your company. But that has nothing to do with gender.

Yes, but gendered bigotry against men is widely considered to be "in bounds" by society in general so the problem here is that internet commenters need to get in line and understand that it's only ok to harrass and send rape and death threats to men. Being men, they don't have feelings anyway and if they do they need to man up.

Or whatever.

It's utterly disgusting when they try to frame this as an issue to resolve 'cyberbullying'. Blatantly disregarding all those who avoid 'real world bullying' by being able to anonymously publish thoughts and opinions on the internet.

It is not a good thing that, for many, it's more convenient to be anonymous or pseudonymous if you're part of a sexual, political or religious minority, but it is a reality. Forcing all those individuals to shut up or risk facing real life consequences up to and including physical abuse does much more harm than learning to ignore the bluster of random anonymous internet bullies.