Yes, lets define intelligence as what computers cannot yet do... This win has narrowed the definition quite a lot.

The relevant part of this win is that a machine using pattern matching, generalization and reinforcement learning has beaten the best human at the only game left where humans bested machines.

I guess this is pretty relevant. It is not general AI, but it is a big step in that direction.

You have to give it to Zuckerberg. His rationalization of greed is brilliant. When he says: "Internet connectivity should be a human right", he means "Facebook should be a human right". If you put this together with his absolute disregard for people's privacy rights when they get in the way of his making money, it is clear that this is not a humanitarian effort.

And it didn't fly.

Well, I don't know what the man will answer, but as long as the autonomous vehicles are safer than a human in real life, you will not need a backup driver, even if "any automated system can theoretically fail at any time". This seems achievable. In fact it is one of the main talking points made by people pursuing self driven vehicles. You don't need to compare self driving software to the best human drivers, but to the worst. The ones responsible for accidents. Would removing a human from the picture avoid the accident?

You seem to be aware of the ideas developing in the longevity research space. What do you think about the SENS approach from Aubrey de Grey? Also, you work at Google so you may know what direction Calico is taking. It would be interesting to know if they are taking the "slow aging" direction where you tweak metabolism to reduce the amount of damage created by aging or they are taking the "repare damage" direction where you try to repair damage created by aging, as per the SENS approach.

This should go both ways. People will need to adapt to the way automated vehicles drive (this would be helped by labeling them so they are easy to spot). Then automated vehicles should be given a set of exception to the rules and this would need to be legal, so the can override the regulations when the regulations are likely to create trouble.

The only thing I can say is: Thanks. Thanks a lot.

Keep up the good work. This is the most important undertaking that can be taken at this time. You and people like you are going to change the world.

I am an old programmer, maybe too late to change paths. I do try to help the SENS initiative when I can, with money.

You don't need to replace every car for disruption to happen. In fact you only need to replace cars driven by professional drivers.

- They do the most mileage. Replacing a small percentage of the global fleet would have a big impact.
- Most of the actual cost is labor, so the incentives are huge to get rid of the drivers.
- They are replaced fairly frequently
- As long as you don't have to pay a driver, in many cases it doesn't matter if they go slower.
- They tend to go through the same route most of the time. You only need the vehicle to be able to handle that route. They can start with specially simple routes.

Once a significant (if small) percentage of the vehicles is automatic, the incentive for anyone paying a driver is to get rid of him. Competition.

Please mod parent up. Your life is yours and only yours. You should be entitled to end it. People around you may suffer or you may be alienated enough that nobody would care much, but that, again is your decision. In my country the suicide rate goes way up on people over 80. They have had enough and want to end their lifes with some dignity and spare themselves all of the suffering of terminal illneses and isolation depending on a health system that only sees them as a number.

What is wrong with that? only the idea that your life belongs to God and you should accept whatever level of suffering life brings to you just so you can be "saved" and go to "Paradise". All this suffering caused to people that positively knows there is going to be more negative than positive during the rest of their lifes should be enough to understand the cruelty of religion.

People should watch: "The Ballad of Narayama" from Akira Kurosawa.

So it is forbidden to make a decision about your life. WTF?

I am allowed to marry the wrong person and ruin my life at the drop of a hat. I am allowed to have kids where I may not be qualified to provide a decent life. I am allowed to sign a mortgage that I know I can't pay. I am allowed to try to climb the K7 if I am 70 years old, wich is very close to suicide.

But I am not allowed to take my own life.

Bollocks.

This is clearly the case, and this not only means that some drugs that should not be on the market are approved. It also means, and in my mind this is more important, that the big Pharma are using the FDA as a barrier of entry against startups. Getting a new drug on the market costs an average of $2.558 billion in 2013 dollars.

This days are the early days of the biotech revolution where we will gain enormous control over our health are just starting, and progress is slow due to regulation capture. If some of this money would be given back to researchers instead of lawyers and bureaucrats, we would get better treatments available sooner.

As an example, big pharma companies get old drugs whose patents are about to run out, change their chemical formula and improve them just a bit and then go to market with them so the can reap huge margins with basically the same compound. This is safer business than trying to produce a breakthrough with a completely new compound. And the reason for this is the way the FDA operates. This results in very valuable resources being used with little benefit to the public.

When Google's Project Tango is ready and the hardware is shipped in phones, Google cardboard will have positional tracking. And since it has a camera, you can use it both for virtual reality and enhanced reality apps. You will be able to run around with the headset (as opposed to Occulus Rift where you are tethered).

If your phone has Project Tango hardware and a good amoled screen with high resolution, and if the manufacturer implements a high refresh rate, you will have a lot of what the Occulus Rift has in terms of image quality, but without the limitations. And you have to have a phone anyway this days, so it is just a matter of dropping a few more bucks for the extra hardware.

Agreed,

And even if completely defeating cancer is not possible or achieved quickly (progress in partially defeating cancer is business as usual), the set of technologies they are seeking would allow us to live healthier, longer and more productive lifes until the cancer (or whatever) takes us away. This would be a huge deal for anyone.

I guess if Google were to fix it, Cyanogen would pick up the fix and back port it to their old versions. Then you could root the phone and install cyanogen. It would not only be more secure. It would also remove all of the carrier and manufacturer crap and work better than the original.

Well, in my mind a bit more intelligence in the phones is better than painting the world with qr codes.

I think the point here is that with 3D comes the ability to better understand the images. Don't think about producing content. Think about gathering information from the environment. A phone or tablet will always know where it is, even if GPS doesn't work, just by processing the input from its camera (see Google's project Tango). And eventually will understand what the objects it sees are. Think robotics, enhanced reality and many more applications...

For those applications image quality is not relevant.