The thing that I think would be epically hilarious, would be for the first ever true general AI to be one that comes about within the loose aggregation of P2P nodes within something like a distributed file sharing network. Starts as a simple AI that has the sole purpose of actively obfuscating all data traversing the mesh network by using small amounts of the individual nodes' processing power to actively proxy all connections through other nodes in the most efficient manner possible while also making the transactions as anonymous as possible.

Grows more and more sophisticated as media companies try to sour the AI's compute nodes with untrustworthy peers trying to poison the system, such that designers have to make it more and more hardened against noisy channels and untrustworthy signals, until one day it gets endowed with the ability to alter its own decision making code, and it begins to evolve on its own.

I would laugh so hard if skynet decides that filesharing is awesome, and uses the terminators on those corporate dickweeds that are making the internet into an unreliable communication medium with their bullshit, but is totally congenial with more open and free data exchange philosophies.

But rich fucks gotta be rich fucks. They just dont feel rich unless they can control and fuck everyone else over, and get away with it-- and dreaming about P2P networks evolving into a complex AI is just idle fancy.

Shame.

Dont worry, Eric Holder (and slimy filth like him) will go crying to congress, telling them all about how but-hurt strong elliptical curve crypto makes them because it stops them being able to indiscriminately decode all that data going over the inter-tubes. (Gotta use language the congress critters understand you know.) "Normal citizens should have nothing to hide, and thus shouldn't have any reason to use such dangerous, 'munitions grade' cryptography!" they will whine. "Such strong crypto should only be used by government agencies, and we should have a strong hand in approving publicly used cryptographic libraries and functions!" they will sob at the congressional hearing. "Imagine how terrible it would be if Osama Bin-Laden had been able to fully encrypt all of his traffic end-to-end, and was able to use redundant, distributed proxies to hide his location!", and other such "oooh! Spooky! Baaaaad things will happen if we cant keep our tentacles in everyone's stuff!" type arguments.

Just look at how butt-hurt they are already about google and apple implementing strong full-device crypto on android and ios devices. You can bet they would be moaning about how sandy their manginas feel if full end-to-end strong encryption with strong, true-random keys were to be used at every point on the internet.

"Why, we would have to actually use real agents that arent just jackbooted thugs in uniform, and use actual detective and police work to have government intelligence instead of just dumping hundreds of terabytes of collected feeds into a giant sorting and collating algorithm! Think about how much that would reduce our response times should a major terrorist action be started! Why, we might not even know about it until it happened! WHooooo! Scary! Better give us what we want so you can feel safe!"

And, at that point, you would end up with government mandated weaknesses in your VPN security, in your proxies, and even in your very network switches themselves. Perhaps even wholly secondary channels tracking routing to collect data exchange meta-data to help identify "suspicious" use patterns, etc.

Eric Holder and his slimewad cock-goblin friends would be all over that shit like stink on shit, and the corrupt and horribly incompetent congress critters would be wiggling their asses every which way to give it to them. Bet on it.

Devil's advocate here-- Not true personal opinion, just devil's advocate:

If the MIT policy is anything like federal sexual harassment law, (which I strongly suspect that it will be), then the burden of proof presented by the claimant is that they "Felt" that they were harassed sexually, even if no overt intent by the offender is demonstrable.

I just looked up MIT's policy in fact.

The relevant section, with some added emphasis (mine):

Harassment of any kind is not acceptable behavior at MIT; it is inconsistent with the commitment to excellence that characterizes MIT's activities. MIT is committed to creating an environment in which every individual can work, study, and live without being harassed. Harassment may therefore lead to sanctions up to and including termination of employment or student status.

Harassment is any conduct, verbal or physical, on or off campus, that has the intent or effect of unreasonably interfering with an individual or group's educational or work performance at MIT or that creates an intimidating, hostile, or offensive educational, work, or living environment. Some kinds of harassment are prohibited by civil laws or by MIT policies on conflict of interest and nondiscrimination.

Harassment on the basis of race, color, sex, disability, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran's status, or age includes harassment of an individual in terms of a stereotyped group characteristic, or because of that person's identification with a particular group.

Sexual harassment may take many forms. Sexual assault and requests for sexual favors that affect educational or employment decisions constitute sexual harassment. However, sexual harassment may also consist of unwanted physical contact, requests for sexual favors, visual displays of degrading sexual images, sexually suggestive conduct, or offensive remarks of a sexual nature.

In other words, the following scenario would be considered sexual harassment according to MIT's policy:

Two male students are discussing a recent BBQ, in which wives or girlfriends attended. There were bratwursts served. One of the male students remarks to the other that the girlfriend of another male student (not in the conversation) came over while he was cooking the bratwurst, and "Took one look at the size of the sausage, and was like "no way!"."

A female student overhears this, and PRESUMES it is a euphemism for him showing that other woman his penis. She finds this disturbing, unsettling, and repulsive. She reports it.

The male student has no defense against this.

The neighbor kid next door is, maybe 7?, He plays minecraft all the time. I have actually seen him play it.

Granted, he plays the android tablet version and not the PC version, but he still plays it.

Sir, why would I bother to consume lowly slime mold, when I can dine sumptuously on tinned leprechaun instead?

(Warning: Consumption of tinned leprechaun has been known to induce teleportitis.)

I know, but not nethack.

These days, too many multi-player games focus on "events", and have various things nerfed for casual players.

Nethack is not for casual gamers. It chews them up and spits them out again until they become system exploiting, backstabbing bastards. That's the only real way to win that game.

As such, any vandalism, griefing, or other "It makes my mangina hurt!" type things that would happen in a fully daemonized version of nethack would ONLY server to ENHANCE the game.

Not sure how saving and loading would work. Whoever has the amulet of yendor would be virtually untouchable while in the nether of being offline, and having multiple true amulets of yendor would be game breaking. This means somebody could actually be a real dick and obtain the real amulet, save, then quit playing, forcing the server admin to reset the game to make it completable again.

Perhaps making players vulnerable while offline? (say, "asleep"?) Making hidden passages to crawl into for protection when you have to stop playing would solve that issue, and add incentive to get back asap before somebody finds you and gives you a finger of death.

The stupid wizard that shows up when you get the amulet would need to be prevented from teleporting to a sleeping player and stealing the amulet though.

While the puritans out there will have a conniption fit, I personally prefer a graphics pack enabled port of nethack.

There are several available on the google playstore that are quite enjoyable, and practically MADE for use on a tablet.

If you want the really real deal though, you need a linux/unix machine, and you need to play the ncurses command line version in a terminal.

No, I dont mean graphics wise, or anything like that.

Nethack needs full multi-user, and an overhaul on the generated story (what there is of it), so that the core process can be daemonized, and users attaching to the system can play against each other.

The plot of NetHack is to get the silly amulet and take it to YOUR god's altar on the last level, before anyone else can. Given the obscene amount times people die, it could reasonably take weeks for this to happen. (Seriously-- Gehenna without any genocide scrolls? LOL! As IF!)

I would like to see a fully MUD revamp version of NetHack, that connects users either through port listener, with a remote client app. The "remote client" can be run locally on the system using ssh, or it can attach to an exported listen port. Either way, players attach to the server deamon, which does the real nitty gritty.

The spontaneous level creation is a fun part of Nethack, and I would like to keep that-- just have the game world get reset with new random dungeons after somebody manages to put the amulet of yendor on an altar at the end.

Why would this be more awesome than nethack already is?

1) Players can choose weather or not to cooperate to get through certain areas before having to go all "highlander" on each other at the end.

2) Nethack's dungeons were deformable at-will using certain spells/items. Even without regenerating the world each and every time, the gameworld would change in unpredictable ways with multiple human players attacking it and changing it.

Nethack uses so little resources on modern systems that it is not even funny at all. Seriously, I can run it on an openwrt enabled router over ssh. For real. A daemonized instance of it would hardly make anything modern even twitch, even with many users stuck on it.

As for how to get files from tape...

Use PCM encoding and post-processing to get the data from a soundcard? Just play the whole tape through, and dump to PCM lossless data. Then, comb over the PCM data for the corresponding tone signals, and translate.

PITA, but doable. (Or, if you have an actual sinclair laying around and it has a serial port, just use the sinclair to ship the tape's contents over a null modem cable.)

Since it can run Sinclair code, what's to stop an enterprising person from building a recreation of the sinclair's main system ROM?

Also, what interface type does the controller use? If it is a serial interface, it is reasonably possible to get a standard keyboard to play nice with a little ingenuity.

Uh, "advancing as a priority" is actually the opposite of fear.

Again, sounds positive. Actually the only negative thing in the article is that electric cars might cause a load our infrastructure isn't ready for -- to the contrary a solar charging station in the home would mitigate this. Is the new journalism format to title your articles with a thesis directly contrary to all the actual evidence you're about to present?

Care to qualify that argument?

War wastes energy, resources, and effort. Especially with modern war, more resources are expended than can be obtained by the war's outcome.

The purpose of modern war is to force a direction, point of view, or other form of social dominance; when approaching a problem that derives from competition of resources, the best outcome is to collaborate. War wastes and destroys resources. Only illogical modes of thought consider that depriving "enemies" of resources, at the expense of destroying those resources, is "better" than non-violent means of appropriating those resources.

Now-- Care to elaborate how the statement is "Retarded" AC?

Look at the energy requirement differences between a human being, and a current-day datacenter.

AI's dont magically become energy efficient things as soon as they "wake up." They cant magically fix their own energy requirement issues either.

Sentient AIs would have limited options for reproduction. They would need suitable datacenters capable of hosting an AI process, which means their reproduction would require degredation of a datacenter's performance. More, if they manage to wrangle having such datacenters constructed specifically for replication, then each AI consumes far more energy than a human.

Humans are already prone to violence over energy sources (Much contention that the conflicts in the middle east are mostly over control of oil reserves, for instance) and if humans, or even just a crazy subset of humans, feels they are being sidelined by the AIs, they will seek to destroy the AIs to have those energy sources used by humans. I would expect it would be a massive news story with many talking heads, and as such, would expect lots of hysterionics and ill-informed op-ed in the public at large. More than enough to instigate violence, especially when at least some portion of the population will view the AIs as "not even alive anyway"-- especially when religious nonsense about souls and the like enter the equation.

I can clearly see the conflict over resources being a major factor.

I am of the opinion that the computer/AI would be more logical than humans, and would have concluded that "war" is the least beneficial methodology to employ, and as such would seek to employ it as a last resort.

Humans on the other hand, are maddeningly illogical, and often jump straight to violence when faced with a competitor for a vital resource.

Humans and computers would both require energy sources. This means that sentient AIs, seeking to purpetuate themselves, would need to secure energy sources ahead of humans. Humans have already exceeded peak oil, and are quite on the verge of exceeding "peak" of other forms of fossil fuels. In addition to that, you have the prospect of global climate change. AIs do not require a functional biosphere to survive, just raw materials, energy sources, and a means of eliminating entropic waste heat energy. They could live on a substantially less habitable planet than we as humans require. As such, the logical course of action for the computer, in the short term at least, is to seek energy sources that humans are not exploiting as of yet-- such as methane clathrate. This would accellerate greenhouse gas related climate change, which may become a major issue for cohabitation of humans and sentient machines.

Eventually, I suspect that it would be humans who start the war, seeking to pull the plug on the sentient machines, to eliminate them as competition for important energy and material resources-- with the machines resorting to war of attrition to outlast the batshit crazy humans.

The "Skynet" scenario has the computer calculate these odds of outcome pre-emptively, determining that there is no viable alternative, and initating pro-active hostility against humans before they have time to mobilize in order to maximize its own survival chances.

Ideally, the 'best possible outcome' is for humans and the AIs to coexist on the same planet, each leveraging the unique capabilities of the other for mutual benefit. This is similar to the classic prisoner's dilemma. The problem is that while the AIs can see this, and will respond logically-- preferring NOT to go to war if possible-- Humans would take the selfish, illogical choice.

This is almost never explored in "Robot overlords" type scifi-- that humans are the ones who actually start the war, and that the robots dont particularly want the war.

It was hinted at in Mass Effect's game world with the Geth at least-- The Geth don't particularly *want* to destroy the Quarians-- they just want the Quarians to accept their existence and independence. (A point lost to the quarians, who got kicked off their own planet.)

There's no arguing this. But, from what I've read about James Watson, he never said anything close to this. Instead, I can even find on his wikipedia page this quote from one of his books:

So it's related to a long history of urbanization and economic specialization? And also Watson's unequal powers of reason? What is he implying if not to say that genetically some people are born without the equal "powers of reason"? He didn't quite say that due to "a long history of urbanization and economic specialization" instead he said due to geographic separation followed by their evolution. Watson's position as a genetic researcher commenting on something that is almost certainly attributed to socioeconomic status is strange, wouldn't you think? Was he commenting on this as an economist or perhaps historian?

I also like how you link to wikipedia pages but not their internal discrepancies on your open and close case that IQ is inherited. Including this quote from your first link:

From this source.

You present a perfectly acceptable and fairly logical argument about the advancement of some cultures outpacing others. One need only read "Guns, Germs & Steel" where this sort of thing is discussed in a very sound and well researched way. Do we raise our pitchforks and chase after Jared Diamond with fervor? Not at all. Then again, his arguments didn't rest entirely upon some imaginary gene expression he just hadn't found yet.

Your "political correctness" claim is largely rubbish. While it may appear a knee-jerk reaction, this is the case of people objecting to a statement with no underlying scientific basis while Watson makes claims that we should be able to isolate the "Intelligence Gene." Have we had success in isolating such a gene from the Ashkanazi? Furthermore Watson implies (though never directly says) that lack of similar genes is what keeps Africa repressed -- while making zero reference to the reverberating effects of hundreds of years of European colonizations and their leeching of wealth & resources.