I know that. "Crystal" anything makes me think of meth these days.

Crystal Windows? Is that something like Crystal Meth?

Go go Godzilla!

FTFY

I have altered our agreement. Pray I don't alter it again.

I don't want anyone who would fall for that working with me.

Do you have some kind of problem with trouble?

If people didn't get into trouble, we wouldn't even be talking about robots, yet. We'd be posting on Slashdot, stuff like "sucks that I didn't find enough berries today, and the area is running out of meaty squirrels, so I'll probably be moving along soon." You think you want to be a factory or farm slave for the rest of your life, but you don't even get to do that, until after you've already figured out that you don't want it.

Sounds like a lamer version of a mood ring.

Spoke with a friend in NJ, and apparently they used to get on the order of $700 an SREC! Highest I've ever seen was $180? something like that. And as part of the estimate for ROI when I had my 7.2kw array installed, they modeled SRECs as falling off completely in the next year or so (*I'd have to dig that document out... and that sounds like effort).

There is no fundamental difference between creating a strong AI and having a child.

I disagree, though some of it depends on exactly how you create the AI. A child is a machine optimized for serving the "interests" of its genes (half of which it copied from you), and even in the near-future of say "Gattaca" you don't really have much say in how the child works. Even if AIs were grown in a biological analog, the initial inputs would be totally different than anything else in Earth history, much less arbitrary (from our idealist viewpoint) than what goes into making up a person. Even if you set them up to evolve in a biological manner, where the inputs eventually drifted, their "genes" certainly wouldn't be anything like oldschool life genes, much less human. Perhaps you'd get some interesting convergence, but that's not the same thing.

To see the potential of AI, you really need to think like a god, not a biologist. Or possibly somewhere in between the two. Imagine what life on Earth would be like if the creationists were right, and you'll get an analogy of how AIs might end up. (Better yet, think like HPL's elder things, and consider the shoggoth.) Whatever they have in common with previous life would be remarkable exceptions, and most of it would be new and alien-like. I think they're be more alien than "real" (biological) aliens.

Maybe think of AIs as (initially!) part of humanity's extended phenotype, like a spider's web is to a spider, or a dam is to a beaver. Could you convince a spider that a web is like its child, the new spiderdom of the future? I don't think a web that can "do things" would make your argument to the spider any stronger.

I'm not saying you should freak out, but They Will Not Be Humanity.

And most of what I'm saying is from taking a fairly extreme biological view. I wonder if that's kind of outdated, and AIs are going to be even less like life, than predicted in previous decades.

While, myself, I have never been there, I know too many people who have.

It is hard to understand from an outsider, and it took me a lot of training to understand what is going on.

More people should try to understand....

Why would those businesses be targeted if the rioters weren't racist?

Uhh.....

Reminds me of a story my grandfather told me about his experience in the South Pacific. Punchline was "You're a dumb kid, that Japanese guy is a dumb kid, and you both stumbled upon each other. You've got nothing against each other, but because of something people thousands of miles away decided, only one of you was going to walk away that day."

Despite running some masterful election campaigns, he has displayed an amazing ineptitude when it comes to messaging during his reign.

Ahh so he has joined the likes of Trotsky and Che? He'll be in good company, helping Van Jones keep the bench warm.