The article claims the thing can last "up to 13 years" before having to be replaced.

In the past, we used Pu-238 RTGs called "Plutonium cells", and the pacemakers never had to be replaced.

I guess this step backwards, towards treating pacemakers as a treatment, rather than a cure, guarantees a recurring revenue stream. One wonders, given the industry that surrounds it, whether we will ever get a cure for anything that started out with just a treatment, such as diabetes, when there's so much money tied up in "recurring revenue streams" and so little in "pay for it once". The whole SAS field itself is based on it.

surgeons sliced open their patients' shoulders

Shit. Under a local anesthetic?

It's the future and whining about it is no different than whining about the advent of the rifle or the machine gun or the bow. Your taking the fight away from the human being through a layer of abstraction to keep your soldier alive. The layer of abstraction in this case happens to be a robot, once upon a time it was a gun or a bow.

The people complaining about this are really no different than the Luddites that think warfare should be conduced hand to hand with swords and maces. They wont be satisfied unless their own soldiers are getting killed on the battlefield too. Technology advances whether you want it to or not. Change and human nature are the only things that stay the same.

Evolution is slow. Evolution goes by trial and error rather than absolutely optimized engineering design and QA, and doesn't have any kind of recursive ability so as to improve its own methods. Sure, give it billions of years and the absolute minimum optimization capability and it'll make something that works pretty well, up to and including the human brain, but that's it. Now, give those human brains a solvable challenge and they'll work it out in a matter of centuries, if not decades, years or even just months.

So, sure, right now horses are better, after all nature got a few hundred millions years advantage before allowing us to start running, but we're catching up, and fast, very, very fast. In a few decades no living thing other than human beings will have any advantage left over our technologically-developed alternatives. And then it'll come the time for technology to outgrow even that last remaining bastion of biological-over-technological superiority too.

there is no nuclear reactor design that could power that thing like a gas engine can.

If there was we could have nuclear powered electric cars.

I really wish people could understand that. the small nuclear reactors could power a laptop or two for 30 years but could never produce enough electricity fast enough to run a clothes dryer for one run.

Second,

people see horse or mule and can't conceive of a horse or mule getting scared of bullets flying by and or getting shot. using a horse to carry your gear only works until the horse gets shot. then the horse runs away with your gear.

You can't order a horse to carry gear to specified coordinates unattended. Horses don't climb rough terrain particularly well either.

But it keeps the grant money coming.

What they've created is a method for representing card games symbolically (probably the hardest part of the project). Then they searched through many permutations of games, and keeping the ones that pass an acceptance criteria. It's AI the same way Prolog is AI.

Or depth first search. Is depth first search AI? Does an A* search make a machine intelligence? We need a new tag, SearchIsNotAI or something.