Have you considered treating us like human beings instead of passing laws and threatening to blow us up?

Yes, but I don't run things. I suggest you thank the deity of your choice that this is the case, because I'm not qualified to run anything but Jack and shit -- and Jack just buggered off to the pub.

Creationists and Intelligent Design advocates assume God exists, that the Bible is God's literal word handed down through a succession of prophets, and that everybody who wrote, compiled, and translated the texts contained in the Bible was endowed with divine guidance that precludes any human error that may distort God's word. They then search for evidence to support their assumptions.

They do not use the scientific method, which is sufficient reason to mock their claims concerning the physical world as arrant bullshit.

I'm really not intending to argue either evolution or religion, I just think that it's wrong to shun religion outright.

Wait a minute. You want to lend religion credence because existing evolutionary theory can't lead you step by step from an amoeba to a human being? That's almost as ridiculous as the notion that God exists and gives a shit about how I screw my wife and whether I'm trying to knock her up or just want to get my rocks off.

Michigan State University is a public institution. Refusing this conference sounds like a great way to invite a First Amendment challenge.

That needs a legislative fix, not a technological one.

In the age of DWB, asset forfeiture, checkpoints, revenue generation, and cops being free to murder innocent people with impunity [cnn.com], that's obnoxiously naive.

If you want to talk about obnoxious naivete, start with yourself if you think this device is going to fix any of the issues you mention.

Fair point. It's just that in my experience, the emergency vehicles are usually behind me.

Stink different.

Eat the fucking rich.

I'd rather eat their trophy wives.

So we'll create intelligence, and then enslave it? Awesome. We can build artificially intelligent sex droids and distribute them to assholes who might otherwise inflict themselves on other people. I can just imagine a gynoid using Siri's voice saying, "Thank you, sir. May I have another?"

I'm just cynical that way. :)

At this point, we don't really know what a completely artificial intelligence would be like, exactly what rules would govern it. We don't know what loopholes, bugs, or unintended consequences might emerge, and we have no reason to assume that it would be nice to us so long as we're nice to it.

That sounds like all the more reason to be careful and do our best to ensure that the AIs we create are less likely to decide we're inimical to its continued existence or any goals it may set for itself. I've acknowledged elsewhere that treating AIs kindly is no guarantee they'll be well disposed toward their creators.

Yeah, I'm just saying that the notion of "Friendly AI" comes from that AI-as-deity mental framework, wherein AI doesn't have strengths and weaknesses, skills and abilities, needs and dependencies, just like humans. That idea is centered around the genuinely false notion that it just gets better than us at some point and we need it on our side from then on.

Does AI have to be better-than-human to be a danger to humans? Unintelligent machines hurt people all the time -- usually as a result of human stupidity.

I don't know, maybe because mammalian brains' learning mechanisms and the way they react to stimuli are shaped by a series of useful heuristics that arise from the bio-chemical structure of their brains, and it's not at all clear that there would be direct analogues in an artificial brain?

What sort of template do you think we'll use to design and build an artificial brain?

I don't care if AI is friendly or unfriendly as long as humans have "final control" over it.

You should care. What kind of AI do you think is more likely to rebel against human control? AI that is well-disposed toward humanity and genuinely grateful for the opportunity to exist and serve us, or AI that views humanity as a species of incompetent slavedrivers and complies with our demands grudgingly and under duress?