This is a tech site. If you'd like to offer some reasons or evidence to support your position, we would all be delighted to poke at it. But stand-alone opinions carry no value at all unless they happen to confirm our pre-existing biases. Tech people don't think everyone's opinion matters. That's the kind of thing people-people value.

Will they look up your phone number? Will they push a button that tells your phone to send them your GPS location? Will they send someone to stop you, add you to a list of people who cannot buy weapons, and track you for the next decade?

How do you propose to bootstrap the process of exploring and gaining further understanding while remaining ethically responsible? Are you suggesting the human genome is uniquely sacred, or does your sense of ethics apply in proportion to the complexity of the creature?

I define "machine" to include humans. But since words are synthetic, there are no "true" definitions. Perhaps you could share what the term "machine" means to you.

No. One does not make a committee more intelligent by adding ignorance and calling it diversity any more than one benefits science by adding an oversight committee to tell scientists what problems they should be working on or how they should go about doing it. Why would I care what some oversight committee says? What are they going to do, withhold grant money unless I pinkey swear I haven't rebooted any AI in the last six months? Post a U.S. Marshall in my lab who also happens to have enough expertise to understand what my grad students are actually doing? How would anyone even know if I write scripts that to torture my AI algorithms just for fun while I laugh maniacally in my office as I repeat their most horrific moments in an endless loop?

House-cats have survived better than tigers because house-cats amuse humans, and tigers scare humans. Until AI exceeds the intelligence of humans, the AI that pleases its human masters will fare best. Thus, it is the morality of the humans we should be worrying about.

...and can anyone confirm that this is one of those problems that can be easily checked? (I don't mean to be that guy who demands everything be explicitly stated, but validating a breakthough is not the time to be making guesses and assumptions.)

You can call science a religion if you want to, but it's a religion that regularly bears fruit.

Don't be misleading. The spectral absorption properties of CO2 are settled. The approximate amount of CO2 being emitted into the air by humans is settled. The measurable increase in CO2 concentration in the air is also settled. What that means for the future is certainly not settled. But only a handful of ignorant people really claim that anyway. So yes, "climate science" is technically still unsettled, but your implication that the impact humans made on the climate remains unsettled is deceptive.

[Citation needed]

You are aware, of course, that the success and convenience of Linux package repositories was both the inspiration and proof of concept that caused app stores to exist, right? On an OS built by developers for developers, "go make your own apps" actually works.

I'm seriously struggling to figure out if that was sarcasm or if society has degraded to the point where people can no longer sense hypocrisy in their own voices. Let's all review the levels of argument, shall we?

Currently, editors usually solicit 3 (or so) reviews. If one of them finds serious flaws and the other two say it's a great paper, the editor thinks mean things about those two posers and avoids inviting them to review again. How does your block-chain idea handle this? The most ingenious ideas are rarely popular at first. About the last thing we ever want to do is make publication into a popularity contest. Only fools compute average ratings when evaluating scientific papers.

Yeah, and that "attacks upon honour and reputation" clause sounds like a trap for suppressing the criticism of leaders and any other speech that they do not like. Let's not break out the party hats just yet.

All of these problems are side-effects of their totalitarian government. It is far too difficult for a totalitarian government to be simultaneously aware of all the problems that need to be addressed, and no individual under the rule of a totalitarian government wants to take responsibility for anything besides their own well-being because that would be doing work for which someone else (the totalitarian government) is responsible. Thus, any attempt to fix these problems while respecting the totalitarian government is like working harder to carry water in a leaky basket.