Ha ha ha ha ha ha, did you just compare damage to a 'bridge inside borders' to a bridge over the ocean?

I compared a bridge across a large body of water to a bridge across an only slightly larger body of water. Whether the bridge goes from one country to another is largely irrelevant unless the leaders of one country or the other are idiots. After all, they would both have to pay part of the cost of any future repairs to that bridge, which is a powerful disincentive to bombing it in a fit of stupidity. If anything, the nature of such a bridge might even serve to stabilize relations between the two countries.

The only bottleneck there is a port and ports are much easier and faster to build than additional bridges to increase throughput.

Ports can only increase bandwidth. What shippers care about is latency. The only way you can improve latency with boats is to build faster boats, and the faster the boat, the less it can carry (and the more fuel it takes), so there are very real practical limitations involved.

A burning bridge stops all cargo from being moved, while a burning ship only stops that ship. Shipping docks are a scalable solution, while a bridge is a fixed throughput solution that cannot be scaled without building a second bridge.

A burning dock stops all cargo from being moved. Your point? You think that after Russia and the U.S. build a multi-billion-dollar bridge, one of them is going to suddenly decide to blow it up on a whim? Periods of international tension might very well close the bridge, but I can't imagine them being shortsighted enough to blow it up.

Also, bridges can be repaired pretty quickly these days, for the most part. When a tanker fire destroyed an elevated road segment in San Francisco back in 2007 and caused it to fall on top of another elevated road segment (requiring significant repairs), they had the lower segment repaired in eight days, and the upper one rebuilt in just 25 days. And with the floating bridge I described, assuming you build some extra segments, damage could be repaired in hours simply by towing another identical segment into place and fastening it to the adjacent segments. You just have to provide enough of a financial incentive to grease the wheels of the bridge building company. :-)

Sure, but that's only an issue if the regulations specify Tesla levels of performance and efficiency. I'm suggesting the regs could be written with the most efficient ICE automobiles on the market *today* as the benchmark for what is feasible. These are by not necessarily fantastically expensive, nor are they hair-shirt city cars. The Mazda 3 is a four door sedan that seats five and has an engine that delivers 184 hp at 26 mpg city/35 highway; MSRP is 18.8K$. If you need a people mover you can get a seven passenger Mitsubishi minivan rated 25 city/31 highway for 23.2k$.

It's clear that the current state of the art in ICE makes affordable, practical cars that exceed the current average mileage technologically feasible. They're being sold now. If on the other hand you want high performance, e.g., to go 0-60 mph in under 4 seconds, then you're talking big bucks and exotic technology.

What manufacturers won't be able to do is slap a tarted-up body on a primitive $26,000 truck chassis, call it an SUV, and charge $50,000 for it. I'm talking about the Silverado based Suburban. I think there's a place in the world for such vehicles, but it's insane to charge an additional 24k to slap two rows of seating in place of a pickup bed; there's plenty of headroom to charge a gas guzzler tax on that one.

Well, it's not like your complaints are technically insurmountable challenges.

A realtor who was smart could manage multiple Twitter accounts and have interested people subscribe to only the appropriate one(s). EG. Offer one list for only commercial properties, one for only foreclosures, and several for regular residential listings, broken out by price ranges.

As for the laundromat idea? It's just an example of something creative I saw done with the technology. If you find it unbearable, fine ... don't use it! I doubt most laundromats offer the feature anyway. But I've also seen a similar thing done inside area hospitals, where if you subscribe, you get tweets with immediate updates on little things like specials their cafeteria or gift shop has running that day. You'd probably subscribe to it only for as long as you were staying in the hospital, and remove it again when you leave -- so not a big deal.

I mean, ultimately, you can do ALL of this social media stuff with only the older technologies out there. Email and Usenet newsgroups, plus RSS feeds and links to downloads via FTP cover a lot of ground. Throw in some IRC servers to handle chat, and you're "golden".

The thing is though, people decided there were fancier ways to get some of these things done. It's a lot easier to toss an app on a smartphone and let someone create a user login/password for the service than figuring out how to configure everything necessary to pull down a Usenet feed, subscribe to the right groups, decode binary attachments, etc.

Indeed. But it's also true that change per se puts more stress on less innovative or agile companies, especially companies that have massive investments sunk into older technologies. No matter what rules you set it'll benefit some companies over others; rules that are very favorable to GMC would be unfavorable to Tesla and vice versa. They'll both argue that rules that benefit them the most are best for the country.

I'll say this for Tesla's position, though: the notion that it's physically impossible to build fuel efficient cars that people will want to buy is balderdash.

Well, yes and no. Frankly, although I don't use Twitter much -- I don't have a problem with the core concept. There's something interesting about a form of social media that places such strict requirements on the length of what you can send out in a single broadcast. At first, I thought it was pointless - but I've grown to rather like it when it's used thoughtfully. There's an art to realizing when you have something unique, thoughtful or funny to share and distilling it down to 140 characters. And there are "niche cases" where people came up with good uses for Twitter that its own developers probably didn't even imagine. (EG. The realtors that let you follow them so you get regular updates about new home listings, or the laundromats that use it to let you know when certain washers or dryers are finished.)

Facebook is "all over the place" with what you can do with your account on the site. Personally, I like Facebook, but my friends and I tend to share hyperlinks (with comments about what we're sharing and why), and then enjoy the discussions that come about it in comment replies beneath it. Seems to me, that's almost exactly what Hossein is lamenting the death of on the net in this article!

And how long does it take two trucks to ship the same amount of goods as a fully loaded freighter?

I'm not sure how that's relevant unless your company needs to ship a full freighter-load of goods. I'm not talking about the biggest companies here. I'm talking about the myriad companies that routinely use international shipping in much lower volume. For those companies, what matters is latency—how long they must wait for something to arrive stateside—not bandwidth.

If you're one of those rare companies that can fill a freighter, then your company is clearly in the category that can afford to bring in its first two weeks' supply by air while the boats are carrying the next month's supply, and the boat latency doesn't matter (unless you're a shipping company). But even for those big companies, it could still cut out the second week of air shipments, which could be a significant financial win. And for shipping companies that provide services to smaller companies, being able to offer a level of service between "very expensive" and "glacial" would be a significant win, too.

Of course, I did forget to mention one other thing, which is the need to build roads to that bridge, which would no doubt add considerably to the total cost.

Nobody can predict what will happen between the U.S. and Russia, but I'd be really surprised if things got so bad that U.S. companies didn't feel comfortable shipping goods through Russia. It's not like we're talking about a third-world country or anything.

And what you say about damage is downright silly, because the same concern applies equally for a bridge inside our borders. In fact, by your standards, the docks where those boats load their cargo should never have been built, because if one of the minimum-wage immigrants carrying cargo on his shoulders out to a small boat in waist-deep water dies of a heart attack, it doesn't prevent other workers from loading cargo, whereas if a dock collapses, it does, and those workers can be used for other things if we suddenly no longer need boat shipping. I mean, the only way that logic even starts to make sense is if a serious failure is highly probable, and if that's the case, then it means they got the design wrong.

Besides, the cost of a Bering Strait bridge could be a lot lower than you might think. They would need one segment of it to be tall enough to let shipping traffic through—possibly between the two Diomede Islands—but the rest of it could ostensibly be a simple pontoon bridge, which is relatively cheap.

Most of the cost of the project would likely be for that one span between the two islands that's tall enough to let ships pass under it. That would cost several billion dollars, in all likelihood. The remaining 55 miles, assuming other pontoon bridges are any indication of cost, should be the neighborhood of $5 million to $10 million per lane-mile. At 55 miles long, a four-lane pontoon bridge should cost a couple of billion dollars, give or take, which is about as much money as we waste on a single B-2 bomber.

Of course, a pontoon bridge in that area would have to be specifically designed to withstand the rather severe storms that the Bering sea experiences, which could drive the cost way up. On the other hand, the project is so huge that economies of scale would kick in and bring the component cost way, way down (because you'd be building over 18,000 identical 16-foot segments), which would probably balance that out to a large extent.

Of course, I am not a bridge engineer, so my estimates could be way off, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if someone were able to come up with a design that fell under the $10 billion mark, or about twice the cost of the Bay Bridge. Heck, the tunnel that Russia proposed was only sixty or seventy billion, so that estimate probably isn't too far off the mark.

I'm not forgetting. Then again, that was also true for telnet back when I started setting up DNS zone transfers.... Just saying. :-)

But not cheaper and faster. A boat from China or Japan takes 10-14 plus loading and unloading time (which, if you're sharing a boat with a bunch of other companies, can potentially add weeks of delay before the boat leaves the dock), and air shipping is relatively expensive. With two or drivers trading off, you could potentially do California to Japan by truck in about a week.

Having a bridge between North America and Asia could be absolutely huge for shipping, as a potential midpoint between the two shipping methods. Whether it will be or not is another question.

With a non-autonomous weapon, the person who pulls the trigger is basically responsible. If you're strolling in the park with your wife, and some guy shoots her, well, he's criminally liable. If some random autonomous robot gets hit by a cosmic ray and shoots your wife, nobody's responsible.

This is a huge issue for our society, because the rule of law and criminal deterrence is based on personal responsibility. Machines aren't persons. The death penalty for a machine is stupid (watch out, robot, if you kill someone we'll take out your batteries!). The number of ways that things can go wrong without the owner of the machine having a reasonable amount of liability is huge.

What if the autonomous weapon malfunctions in the field? Is the owner responsible for having deployed in that particular location? Is the manufacturer responsible for the bugs that occur? What if the machine is operating outside of recommended parameters? What if the machine was hacked, and the bug occurs due to a faulty communication issue, ie the message was sent to authorize targeting your wife, but then a fraction of a second later another message was sent rescinding the order, but the message was garbled or never arrived due to a netwoking delay in transit on Amazon's cloud servers? What if the machine's owner deploys thousands of vermin killing robots around the city without incident every day, but it just happened to kill your wife because she was misidentified as a rodent?

The fact is that AIs and autonomous robots have no legally useful place in society (unlike nonautonomous robots). There is almost no deterrence value in threatening an owner with fines (how much is reasonable in the rodent example?) and there is no value in destroying the offending machine (an autonomous machine is not alive, and it may be the identical model from a manufactured run of 1 million products, so what's the point of scrapping that one unit?). There is no point is blaming a random customer who bought the machine and probably has no clue at all how it operates or how to detect malfunctions. And you can bet that the manufacturing chain is full of lieability disclaimers and insurance companies will pass the buck. So what hope is there for avenging your wife? And if it goes to trial (against whom?) how long and how much cost will be spent for an uncertain outcome?

The ethical issues surrounding blame are serious, and at the risk of going slightly off topic, they are similar to the issues of terrorism. If a suicide bomber blows himself up in a crowded place, you can't pick up his pieces and stick them in jail. Nothing you can do to him has any deterrent effect, and going after his family or friends is, at best, a legal nightmare and an ethical problem. The issues surrounding autonomous machines are a bit like that, because, well, the fact that it's an *autonomous* machine means that no human being was actually pulling the trigger or directly making the choice to shoot.

3) Go to the drug store and buy a deck of cards...

Next time you go to fix Grandma's email, bring along a deck of cards and ask her to show you some solitaire games. In fact bring four decks -- some of the old games required more than one.

When faced with a tricky question, one think you have to ask yourself is 'Does this question actually make any sense?' For example you could ask "Can anything get colder than absolute zero?" and the simplistic answer is "no"; but it might be better to say the question itself makes no sense, like asking "What is north of the North Pole"?

I think when we're talking about "superintelligence" it's a linguistic construct that sounds to us like it makes sense, but I don't think we have any precise idea of what we're talking about. What *exactly* do we mean when we say "superintelligent computer" -- if computers today are not already there? After all, they already work on bigger problems than we can. But as Geist notes there are diminishing returns on many problems which are inherently intractable; so there is no physical possibility of "God-like intelligence" as a result of simply making computers merely bigger and faster. In any case it's hard to conjure an existential threat out of computers that can, say, determine that two very large regular expressions match exactly the same input.

Someone who has an IQ of 150 is not 1.5x times as smart as an average person with an IQ of 100. General intelligence doesn't work that way. In fact I think IQ is a pretty unreliable way to rank people by "smartness" when you're well away from the mean -- say over 160 (i.e. four standard deviations) or so. Yes you can rank people in that range by *score*, but that ranking is meaningless. And without a meaningful way to rank two set members by some property, it makes no sense to talk about "increasing" that property.

We can imagine building an AI which is intelligent in the same way people are. Let's say it has an IQ of 100. We fiddle with it and the IQ goes up to 160. That's a clear success, so we fiddle with it some more and the IQ score goes up to 200. That's a more dubious result. Beyond that we make changes, but since we're talking about a machine built to handle questions that are beyond our grasp, we don't know whether we're making actually the machine smarter or just messing it up. This is still true if we leave the changes up to the computer itself.

So the whole issue is just "begging the question"; it's badly framed because we don't know what "God-like" or "super-" intelligence *is*. Here's I think a better framing: will we become dependent upon systems whose complexity has grown to the point where we can neither understand nor control them in any meaningful way? I think this describes the concerns about "superintelligent" computers without recourse to words we don't know the meaning of. And I think it's a real concern. In a sense we've been here before as a species. Empires need information processing to function, so before computers humanity developed bureaucracies, which are a kind of human operated information processing machine. And eventually the administration of a large empire have always lost coherence, leading to the empire falling apart. The only difference is that a complex AI system could continue to run well after human society collapsed.