What a thoughtful argument you make! Perhaps what we really do need in our schools is philosophy classes where the purposes and boundaries of science - and religion - can be explored outside of the body of useful theories that result. Unfortunately philosophy is pretty squishy and is exactly the sort of thing that is being cut from existing curricula.

I can think of a number of uses for an AI that possesses the dexterity and visual recognition skills of a human being without nearly as much intelligence. It doesn't take that much intelligence to collect garbage or keep a bathroom clean once you know how, and you don't have to be smart enough to figure it out if someone smarter can tell you. Of course this would be pretty bad for the numerous humans employed in such operations unless we as a society can finally figure out this "post-scarcity" thing. Luckily the same mostly goes for farming; even if the robots can't do it quite as well as humans, they just have to do it well enough to produce something, because all the robots should need is free solar power. And slow solar powered self-driving cars could pick up the food and deliver it to markets all over everywhere.

Long story short, a horde of robots with human skills and less than human intelligence could finally provide us with a permanent ethical servant class. If we can maneuver our society correctly, that servant class could make the cost of living effectively zero for every single human being.

I'm sorry, but the ability to create a human intelligence is not the same as creating an artificial intelligence. We have specialized wetware to duplicate ourselves. It isn't controlled by our minds and we didn't design it. We just know how to operate it. We don't really know how to create human intelligence besides how to trigger that self-replicating function. We are not currently any more capable of creating strong AI than is a self-replicating computer virus.

I think you may have happened upon the real reason that creationists insist the Earth is only 6000 years old. It's not because they think the Bible actually supports such a ludicrous statement. It's because if the Earth were that young, or even somewhere close to that young, then evolution would not be a plausible explanation for the origins of the creatures that inhabit it. And in my experience, the sort of Christian that believes in a young Earth (there are others!) usually fails at convincing people to follow Jesus unless Jesus is the only option.

Sorry to potentially derail the topic. You said "intelligent design" in this context and it suddenly made sense.

The human brain uses between 20 and 40 W of power. The average mobile CPU is about the same. But it takes (as you yourself claim) a cluster of 90,000 CPUs (probably of a higher power desktop or server variant) to simulate the human brain at 1/2400 the speed. In what way will "a modern processor...use much less energy than the human brain"?

When I saw "Cyber Ring Stole Secrets...", for some reason I read it as there was some super cool ring that somebody used to spy on traders. Then I thought, "I want this Cyber Ring. Where can I get one?" Then I realized they weren't talking about something James Bond might wear, and the entire story just isn't very interesting anymore.

I do really appreciate having thoughtful discussions, and I'm glad my words were not lost on you. You've got some good points yourself, and although I don't really have any argument to voice right now I'm reminded of something more basic that informs my unfortunately unusual point of view.

One belief I hold that pretty much nobody in politics shares is that economic growth is not the ultimate standard by which we should judge progress in our society. Look at the last few years. A Democratic Washington has largely succeeded in turning the economy around, and we're back to growth and Wall Street profits. But how's the average American doing? Wages have been stagnant since about 1970, and that trend shows no sign of abating. Home ownership levels are not recovering. People of my generation are moving back in with their parents, and baby boomers are being forced out of their homes by gentrification. And falling unemployment levels are really due to people giving up on finding jobs, not because they found them. It's easy to look at GDP and say "we fixed it!" But growth in GDP does not necessarily mean a growth in the economy, and growth in the economy does not necessarily mean an improved standard of living for the average American, and an improved standard of living does not mean people are happier today than they were fifty years ago. We need to figure out how to measure what really improves peoples' lives, because economic growth ain't it.

Oh, I'm sure some groups of idiots would vote for her. But elections in this country typically come down to less than a 10% margin. Surely you can agree that Slashdot is at least representative of 10% of the population's political views.

An invalid cert means you could be susceptible to a man in the middle attack. But even with an invalid cert, you're still more protected than without SSL. An educated user can make an educated decision. Unfortunately we are talking about mass market computer users, who as anyone in IT can tell you do the stupidest things imaginable on a daily basis. We're also dealing with web site operators that just want to put something up and let the server deal with everything with a minimum of hassle. Doing SSL at all is not easy, and doing it right is hard.

In the military, they have a standard that all technical manuals must be written for a 4th grade reading level. How to operate the tank? 400 pages that an average 10 year old could understand (with enough attention span). Every piece of open source software should have the same goal, not just for its documentation (you do have docs, right?), but for its API design. Instead, as I read in another comment by jandrese: "All of the APIs are apparently written with the thought that anyone messing with SSL should have PhD in cryptography first, because otherwise they're just going to screw it up."

No we shouldn't. HTTPS should be everywhere. A somewhat insecure implementation of SSL is better than no SSL. Further, everything should be encrypted so that we can have some basic level of privacy. It's also not a good idea to raise a red flag for hackers to see over every "appropriate and necessary" use of strong encryption. And finally, if you want it to be illegal to spy on you, it helps to have the DMCA on your side. Any attempt to protect communications makes it a crime to break the encryption no matter how trivial it is to do so (based on my not lawyerly understanding; I am not responsible if this assumption gets you into trouble).

Oh, so that's why I didn't see any responses for the last week, and then this morning just a huge flood of stuff to go through. Interesting data point: the only post of mine that kicked off a lot of replies despite the messaging bug was political.

You've got a point there, but it isn't even necessary. Mitt Romney can make a profit come hell or high water. All that Carly Fiorina can do is torpedo a successful company's profits and market share. It's reasonable (if misguided) to think that a successful CEO might have some skills that apply to political office. But Carly Fiorina is about as far from a successful CEO as you can get.

I can't find a single positive comment on /. about Fiorina. We've got a surprisingly diverse collection of political opinions here (even if the ideologues seem convinced that /. is some kind of haven for extreme political views opposing their own), and if not even the trolls can find something supportive to say it seems pretty clear that this candidacy is totally DOA.

It's a real shame that most people don't understand the vast majority of military action is logistics. I know it's off topic, but I would really, really love to play a strategy game that at least gave a nod to this huge facet of all military operations larger than border skirmishes.

History of Scientific Method

Science and the scientific method evolved alongside and informed by philosophy for the last several thousand years. Nearly all prominent figures in science prior to the foundation of the modern scientific method were primarily philosophers (Aristotle, Bacon, Descartes, et al). The scientific method we use today has enabled many intelligent people to pursue knowledge without needing to first understand the limits of our own perceptions and understanding, i.e. philosophy. But philosophy is still the foundation of why the scientific method works at eliminating the bias that creeps in from the human element.