I think that it is "Evolutionary Psychology" that is the religion -- not science.

If you said, "Evolutionary Psychology is ritualized Nuttery, like Economics," then I would be in complete agreement with you.

A bit of a preview for the future: Rainbow's End.

Oh, here, you can read some of the ideas and thoughts from this presentation he made.

It doesn't only seem plausible at this point, it seems practically guaranteed to arise.

I can see an argument that a person's device is effectively part of their brain or their body.
I own it, I control it.
Also. Both my device and my body can catch a virus.

Perhaps the problem with BYOD is sick days.

A bunch of anti-vax types on my FB page were posting articles about how schoolchildren showed that plants that were grown with microwave water didn't grow, with side-by-side illustrations.

Snopes debunked it by repeating the experiment.

Until I see confirmations of the experiment, I am highly skeptical.

One of the biggest advantage of a watch, is that it is practically ALWAYS on your body.

So it should have a virtual button somewhere, to ** ring your cell phone ** for you, so that you can find it.

I've been a professional programmer for ~15 years now; What you've said here strikes me as fairly odd.

Object Oriented Programming is nothing mystical. "Associate methods with your data structures by type." There's half of it. "Now inherit the methods in subtypes." There's the other half of it. We could talk about interfaces and polymorphism as well; It doesn't take long: "You can plug a lot of different things into the wall to get electricity, if we share the interface to the wall plug." People have been talking about that in different ways, for at least a thousand years.

Technical thought is broad and deep. Back in the early 80s, people were talking about "Structured Programming," (within the "procedural" world,) and they really hammered in the concepts of encapsulation and cohesion -- much before the popularity of OOP (itself derived from Alan Kay's ideas) in the 1990's. If there are deep ideas in Object Oriented programming, the deep ideas are ideas that share across technical domains of all kinds.

So I don't think "Object Orientated Programming" is any kind of real barrier.

What robots cannot be programmed to do, is answer the question of: "How do we want to live?"

You have assumed that humans have a specific purpose: propagating genes and having kids.

I don't see it that way. Yes, we have a sex drive, but there is no such encoding in the mind that says: "Your purpose is to breed."

I wake up in the morning; I have a million more desires than "just breed." Some of these desires include: I want to live in an enlightened society. I want clean air and water and plants and life. I want a society where people genuinely like one another and grow and learn and develop. More ambitiously, I'd like people to be able to live longer lives. I'd like people with self-discipline and care. I'd like people who want to do what is right, and feel confident that they can do it. Also sex: I want a world that is much more sexual.

But all together, this is a bit more than just, "just breed." We have hearts. In particular, YOU have a heart. You might be depressed in your outlook, but the fact remains. You have a heart.

You've said: "Human beings are not special." I don't see the point of your statement; What does it matter if human beings are special or not? I care more about the kind of life and world that you are wanting to make.

If you're disappointed with how things are going, that disappointment requires a sense that things could be some other way -- the "appointment" that has not been made.

They use lenses and software to expand the field of view to more than 110 degrees diagonal.

The proper sequence should be:

Humans reason (with their morals) --> Humans write laws/code --> The laws/code go into the machines --> The machines execute the instructions.

Laws are not a substitute for morals; they are the output from our moral reasoning.

It's not about states. It's about cities.

And if you look at a county map, you will almost certainly see the CITIES.

Time to update the urban archipelago maps. I bet they still hold.

Surprised it hasn't been more prominently mentioned...

Now, given the normally U.S. libertarian bent of the Slashdot audience, it is understandable that an outright British Socialist writer like Brunner would get short shrift, ...

I know, right? The U.S. Libertarians were all too busy citing George Orwell, 1984..!