The FBI, GCHQ, BND, etc are going to tear apart the finances of every person that donates to this project.
Under what pretense? Funding terrorism? Tor, Ter, not too much a stretch I guess. Seriously, they can't do a thing to stop Tor funding without resorting to breaking or seriously misapplying their own laws. I don't think they'll go that far.
Pride is not what is "holding us back" in this field.
Pride has held us back since we were first capable of feeling it. The inability to admit to being wrong because the evidence offends one's vanity has always plagued science and every other part of our culture and personal relationships.
After thousands of years of attempts, not one man out of the whole of humanity can tell us what intelligence is, much less how it can emerge out of any observed natural process. We only assume that it is possible because we are operating on a presumption of materialism.
Considering how little we understand life mechanically, much less life as mind bogglingly complex as a human, it's no surprise that we currently have no answer outside the realm of philosophy and general description. If "materialism" is what can be directly or indirectly observed by people, unfortunately there's no escaping that without divine intervention.
Once we can fully measure the state of every particle in a human brain and run a simulation with complete accuracy, we should not be too surprised if it turns out to be only a simulation of a comatose state.
I think a lot of people, particularly atheist scientists, would be so surprised they'd immediately fall to their knees and ask God for forgiveness. Ironically I'd be overjoyed to discover we all had souls. Unfortunately the smell prevents me from believing it.
Call me when you show non-biological free will. Emulation of deterministic life processes is interesting, but it's free will that needs to be demonstrated in silicon.
Life is extremely efficient, from the micro to the macro scale. To attempt to recreate even a simple organism using current technology (including a purely logical recreation in silicon) would be like building a modern supercomputer out rocks and sticks. When you speak of "free will" being recreated, you've pretty much chosen the highest possible level of what we'd consider a property of advanced life. What excited me about the article is that it suggests instead of tackling the mountain it may be more fruitful to attack a single grain of sand first. Perhaps once we understand a grain of sand, we can start working our way up to the higher and more complex relationships and functionality.
For example, rather than trying to create AI using programming, try reverse-engineering a single-celled organism's molecular composition and chemical processes. If that can be understood completely it provides a starting point for how to reproduce and modify it. Being able to "run" a bacterium in a simulated environment, and later being able to create one physically, is the first step toward truly understand how life works as a machine. Until we have that kind of understanding, the idea of creating real intelligence or artificial life will be confined to cheap imitations which work nothing like the real thing. If we don't understand how a human works as a massive ongoing chemical reaction, we have zero chance of creating one out of gears and silicon.
Drill a 2-3km shaft into a salt dome, excavate a cavity at the bottom, suspend a 150kT nuclear warhead at the centre surrounded by a reaction mass, such as water laced with a neutron absorber. Above the cavity, at the bottom of the shaft, put a large shock absorber (such as a few hundred metres of oil backed by an ablative-coated pusher plate), with your 3500 tonnes of payload on top.
Most of the radiation would be contained underground, and a dome over the launch site would capture most of the rest.
Is that like the geek's version of "hold my beer"? Holy shit.
It is nice to pick international system units, however it would be better to do it right. This should be km/h, not kph.
Unit Nazis per hour.
Stellar rays prove fibbing never pays. Embezzlement is another matter.