For adults, those gadgets just flatter our natural laziness and make us feel as part of a giant group, a very strong even if unconscious motivator.

For kids, I think those are more simply seen as toys. Kids love talking toys and toys they can interact with. The motivation here is more about fun and discovery.

In both cases, it's remarkably easy to get those gadgets adopted by large user bases.

For sure they just look like necessary steps towards a 1984-like, world-wide totalitarian regime. The only missing part for now is video, but I'm certain it's just a matter of a few years. Devices with integrated video will happen. They will be marketed as wonderful aids that you can wake up by waving in front of them, but also that can look after your cat when you're away, after the elderly and maybe even after your kids so you won't need any babysitters anymore. A huge potential market, so it WILL happen. Then we'll have the infrastructure for total surveillance. What Orwell didn't envision though, being influenced mainly by the soviet regime, is that it's not just our governments that will be able to spy on us all. It's also private companies, potential hackers and governments from foreign countries.

We're not heading towards "1984". It's possibly going to be a lot worse.

Yes, this study once out was almost immediately and publicly critiqued for its inconsistencies and poor methodological approach. And for good reasons.

Releasing it as is was a huge mistake. It gave room to a lot of people for instantly using counter-fallacies and trying to claim the opposite: that eating organic food doesn't make a difference, which obviously is an even worse fallacy than the initial claim. Not being able to rigorously prove a danger doesn't make it suddenly safe. I'm observing a current trend slipping towards this kind of reasoning and it's concerning.

Makes you wonder if that was not the actual intent.

A proper study of ths kind would be almost impossible to conduct, so you're pretty much left with retrospective data only and obviously incomplete data. Does that mean that we should keep eating shit food with low nutritional content and siginificant levels of all kinds of pesticides? I don't think so.

Thanks for the info. Development methods are one thing, and I realize how big Windows source code must have grown and how difficult it has become to work on it, but I do think the fundamental problem is still one of strategic vision.

I don't agree with the current state of Windows being linked to development difficulties. It's almost entirely caused by a defective vision.

I cited the agile methods because they are very often tied to a strategy problem, and are often used to try and circumvent it or ignore it altogether.

I don't quite agree with what has been said above, most agile methods in use today rely on frequent releases, such as "scrum". And ALL of them focus on splitting a project into tiny tasks. May sound like a good idea on the surface, and works reasonably well on a solid existing code base, but makes long-term architectural design and decisions impossible to make.

Despite regular bold statements that agile methods have improved everything, experience shows that it has mostly degraded software quality and consistency and only improved short-term revenue for software companies.

Regarding Windows, this has gone downhill so much that it defies good sense. It actually used to be a pretty decent platform (at least starting with Windows NT 4 and Windows 2000), very consistent. Starting with Windows 8, it started degrading. You just have to remember their main strategy was to push forward Windows on mobile platforms. They failed spectacularly with the mobile market, yet they kept insisting with all the same methods. Windows 10 is essentially the result of a strategic failure, which is incidentally consistent with agile methods, as those basically promote no long-term vision or strategy and only focus on short-term makeshift jobs, AKA "new features".

Well, you may also consider that those who do have one in their house willingly just actually deserve to be under surveillance. Some kind of natural selection.

The problem though is that it has indeed long-term impact on all of us, even those that refuse to have those kind of devices. Because the more people will use them, the more they are bound to become, first, a commodity, then eventually become mandatory (of course for national security reasons). This logical path is so obvious that I have a really hard time believing that it won't actually happen. Hope to be proven wrong.

I'm not sure this "professor" has really understood what AI was all about. Thinking that any AI-enabled device will just act as it is "programmed to" is clearly simplistic (although by itself a tautology, since software-based machines are just running 'programs') and a complete misconception of where AI is heading to IMO.

AI without the internal ability of devising new ways of doing things is NOT AI. And by being able to devise new ways, it has pretty much equal chances for them to be bad or good, all the more that humans have a hard time enough defining clearly what is good or bad, let alone machines.

This overly "optimistic" talk just sounds like marketing babble, more so than an educated opinion. Sorry "Sir'.

Cameras are of little use if the shooter hides their face. It's not like it's hard to do. And if obvious means of hiding one's face are themselves detected (which I'm not sure how security systems should handle, should we arrest people walking around with band-aids hiding part of their face?), when there are cameras everywhere, they will be walking around with masks. There are very good silicone-based masks nowadays that even an human can get fooled by at a distance - so an automated recognition device has no chance whatsoever at the moment. And I'm sure you'll be able to buy a custom-made, very realistic mask in a matter of a few years or months. It's becoming a big thing in Japan. So yes, automated surveillance is just wasted money, and has been proven to be pointless on a regular basis.

As for focusing on this gun thing, I think it's kind of a false question. Mass murderers don't need any frigging gun to kill people. There are myriads of other means that are readily available, some even very cheap. Just look at what's been happening in Europe for a few years now. Even a kitchen knife can make a lot of damage.