Absolutely agree. I too work in the field of AI (logic and knowledge representation). Religion is something that preys upon a very complex self-concept. In AI there is no need for a self-concept unless you are trying to design a chat bot to pass the Turing test. Expert systems do not need to be self-aware. Autonomous vehicles do not need to be self-aware. And by self-aware I mean "Oh 'I' exist and 'I' am a program running on hardware". Autonomous vehicles are mostly reactionary systems, closest to our autonomic responses. If anything, simulating self-awareness is a tremendous inefficiency and may introduce some unpredictable results, which is not what we want from our AI. We design systems to get stuff done correctly and safely, not shoot the shit while toking a stogie.

Quit focusing on the supposed virtues that are "extolled" and look at things which are fundamentally more important than surface teachings.

1. Look at the power-structure within the group organization. Typically each church or congregation has a few leader which tells everyone else what to believe, how to behave and promotes a very specific culture. This is structure is all about power and dominance. It is not egalitarian.

2. Look at what a person has to believe about themselves in order to be a Fundamental Evangelical Christian. The fundamental premise is that we are inherently tainted by sin. This is a direct attack on the self-esteem of the individual in order to dominate how they think, reason, and move through the world. You are fed a story about how bad you are and how much you must be saved. This is tremendously about thought-control. Power.

The focus on the virtues is a distraction in order to infect you with a debilitating self-belief and instill a willingness to participate in the herd of followers.

What we now know as "Christianity" today is nothing like what was taught by the character "Jesus" in the bible. All of the great sages in history have had their teachings perverted, misused and abused by those that came after. Jesus's teachings are not the foundation for "modern Western Civilization."

There is what we SAY, and then there is what we DO. While the formal definition of a-theist is "absence of belief in a god", I've found a significant difference in the outward behavior between self-identified atheists and agnostics. The attitudinal disposition towards one identification over another has an impact in how people relate to each other, what they are willing to participate in and the tacit judgments held of those that self-identify differently.

There is a culture and ethos amongst the community of people that actively self-identify as atheist. They pass on tacit attitudes towards each other, and there is just as much group-think taking place in the local college's atheist club as there is in a religious club.

One very common assumption amongst atheists is material reductionism.

I've found just as much contempt-prior-to-investigation coming from atheists as theists, but agnostics tend to be either apathetic or more willing to investigate Subjective Phenomena beyond what is explainable via material reductionism.

Abuse: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism Who gets labelled a terrorist and why? It's not just about who commits violence. It's about who is a threat to the existing power-structure. Terrorist is the new communist.

Hire humans to build more hardware. Make robots to build more hardware. Build spacecraft when the Earth has been completely mined of its resources and start mining on other planets. Architect more efficient hardware and algorithms and recycle old hardware.... The limits we think we know are very often a product of limited imagination, and not intrinsic to the physical world.

You can view "potential" as the integral from time t to infinity. Does that smooth over your cognitive dissonance?

Math has prior art on the use of the term. In fact, Physics' use of the term is just plain derivative.

In AI, the term singularity refers to the point where an AI can sustain its own learning and that learning outclasses what humans are capable of comprehending/predicting. Right now AIs are dependent on and limited by human instruction and guidance. I'm not talking about quantity of knowledge, but what the AI is capable of doing with that knowledge. The kind of reasoning and complexity of interaction the AI is capable of.

If the function f(x) represents the learning potential of the AI, then at the point that AI is able to teach itself and learn higher order concepts, metaphors, and thought patterns, its potential will have outclassed human potential and the function is effectively a singularity. (Might as well be infinite, since its beyond human comprehension).

On a personal note, I don't think a singularity is achievable without somehow embuing the AI with various forms of visceral sensation. Less symbolic reasoning (Chineses Room) and more experiential primitives. While human intelligence has been greatly advanced by language and formal conception, the underpinings of our concepts and understanding is still our primitive and direct experiences. We draw pictures on the board and ask our students to visualize when they are learning math. We use pictures to ground the meaning of the symbolic order.

Could you cite a formal study of the error rates on vote casting for the different voting devices used, broken down by demographic?

It would help to actually do some research as to how it was probable that Romney would get 0 votes in these 59 districts.

This page: http://hatthief.blogspot.com/2012/11/other-precincts-where-romney-got-0-votes.html

Has the best explanation.

I will summarize:

1. -The precincts were primarily black, and we had our first black president running
2. -The precincts were centered in democratic territory.
3. -The precincts had small numbers of voter turn out.
   (Obama 4, Romney 0 is hardly statistically significant for proving fraud.)

I know its fun to take information and use it to support the worst possible interpretation, but you should probable check the contexts to make sure you have the right expectations set. I would expect tight, mono-culture communities to have uniform political views and voting behavior.

I know this, and I am definitely for the 3rd party donation of working mitochondria. My post wasn't to nay-say the procedure, merely to point out that there is more going on that should be given due consideration.

Does it have to be genetic material? It's not like gene expression is a context free grammar, quite the reverse. It is context sensitive. The chemical environment that the mother provides does have a significant impact on how the fetus develops. Hence why we encourage mothers to stay healthy, not smoke or drink, and avoid significant stress.

There's gotta be something better than Cyanide to take in pill form to commit suicide in a pinch...

I've seen a lot of comments saying that its just an improvement in mitochondria and has no other impact on the original "human" DNA. This is an over simplification and is only possibly true if just the mitochondria is transplanted from the 3rd party donor. More likely its the DNA in the cells nucleus that will be transplanted to an egg from the 3rd party donor. In this case epigenetics can and will have a significant impact on how the genes of the original two parents gets expressed.

epigenetics

So, yeah, there would be more than just getting functioning mitochondria, all the organelles in the donor cell are mixed in as well as all the regulating chemistry involved in gene expression.

Unless it is to cure disease...

http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/genetherapy/gtsuccess/