It seems that the bipeds who once inhabited this planet had, at one time, developed a comprehensive worldwide networking system. They accomplished much through it, from exchange of all kinds of information to commercial transactions, education, and even personal communications.

But suddenly, one day, this useful system was destroyed. Apparently a small group of bipeds, which had enriched themselves by creating carefully distorted fictional representations of life and events, decided that the network might be slightly reducing the rate at which they amassed wealth. So they sabotaged it.

We really have no idea what kind of intelligence those bipeds had - if it was even intelligence as we know it.

" As long as you are on the winning side who is going to prosecute you?"

Exactly. Nicely put.

It never ceases to astonish me how some Slashdotters, who usually seem fairly intelligent and rational, say things like this whenever the discussion turns to politics.

I blame the influence of Hollywood and violent TV. Maybe the actual sight (and smell) of a few real dead and injured people would do you a world of good, and bring your strange thoughts closer to reality.

"There's nothing moral or immoral about waging war".

As that is a value judgment, I shall not say that it is incorrect. It does differ sharply, however, from all international and national laws and norms. Wikipedia puts it simply:

'The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, which followed World War II, called the waging of aggressive war "essentially an evil thing...to initiate a war of aggression...is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."'

The anti-Russian astroturfers are out in force today. Say "Hi!" to the guys and gals in Washington for me.

Ah, a "Troll" vote! I must have hit a nerve there.

The timing of this article is particularly foolish. Less than a week ago Russia announced that it has cancelled its participation in the South Stream project to supply gas through a pipeline under the Black Sea to south-east Europe (which would include Bulgaria and Romania). The EU insisted on conditions that Russia could not meet - for instance, that the pipeline be owned by a different corporation from that supplying the gas. Rather than give up control of what is, after all, its own product, Russia will instead be running the pipeline to Turkey. So Romanians can frack away without any Russian interference, although as well as getting highly poisonous residues in their drinking water they will also have to pay higher prices.

The whole idea that Russia would bother to discourage fracking in order to maintain sales of its own gas and oil is ridiculous. For a start, the Russian products come from conventional wells, and thus cost less than fracked fuels. Also, they are far more sustainable, with vast proven reserves whereas most fracking projects quickly run out of economically-extractable fuels. Conclusively, Russia is in the process of giving up on supplies to Europe - in future it has committed to selling enormous amounts of gas to China and other Asian countries, which do not slander it or attempt to harm it.

Carewolf, your statements about chess engines are rubbish. As anyone with the slightest knowledge of them would immediately know.

"Hogan ended up going off the deep end, conspiracy theories..."

I do recall one of his books was set in a near-future world where the USA and Russia had changed places. The USA was a violent, locked-down military dictatorship while Russia was blooming with free enterprise, invention, and individualism.

Now that was scarily prescient - it's happening as we watch. (Those of us who are still capable of noticing what happens in the real world).

Thank goodness no other nation finances pro-fracking movements, either directly through government or indirectly through corporate-funded foundations. That, of course, would be unethical.

It would be still worse, of course, if any nation were to use actual military and paramilitary violence to secure sources of oil and other fuels. Thank goodness, that could never happen.

The Dunning-Kruger effect may very possibly help to account for people who cite it in their sigs.

"Does this have anything to do with AI self consciousness?"

And now it's you who are introducing external matters. No one had mentioned self-consciousness before in this thread.

" I know the Post Office is old news these days, but their hand writing recognition for hand written addresses was able to read addresses more accurately than humans".

And a fine achievement too - and very useful, I imagine. But it's quite one-dimensional: I bet that software couldn't tell a bear from a moose, for example. So if you wanted to produce anything that could even duplicate human intelligence, you'd need to make huge breakthroughs in generality.

"But when you start ignorantly citing the implementation details of different AI systems without acknowledging the purpose and goal of each design, then you are arguing irrelevant facts".

This is mere ad hominem abuse. I did cite implementation details; but not "ignorantly". If you read my post more carefully, you will notice that I listed the progressively less difficult goals that were adopted as one effort after another failed. The original idea was to create "strong" AI, and the timeline was a few years - certainly before now. That proved completely hopeless, as no one had the slightest idea how to go about it. So then they tried setting less and less ambitious goals, until they reached a level that could be accomplished: playing chess well, and recognising handwriting.

"How does lack of understanding of a problem equate to impossible?"

Perhaps one reason no one has answered this question is that it is ill-conditioned. The sentence is ungrammatical - which matters, not because of some formal rules you are breaking, but because it is hard to see what you are talking about.

Perhaps you mean "isn't it wrong to say a problem is insoluble, just because we don't understand it?" But surely that must be the case. If you don't understand a problem, how can you even begin to solve it?

Or perhaps you mean "isn't it wrong to say something is impossible, just because we have no idea how we might go about doing it?" That is reasonable - it might be quite possible, if only we could find some way of tackling the problem. But until we do - for all practical purposes, it's impossible.

For instance, I might say "it's impossible to go faster than the speed of light". But couldn't that just be because I don't understand how it might be done? True, we'd have to find a way around relativity, but perhaps there may be some refinements - or even a whole new and better theory. In general, it looks to me as if your attitude would rule out saying that anything is impossible. We could just delete the word from the dictionary - as I have heard some positive thinkers actually do.

"Your post seem [sic] to indicate that you fall into the mind/brain trap".

No, it doesn't. Perhaps you think it indicates that, but you would be wrong. I learned about "the ghost in the machine" at school, 50 years ago - by now it's quite familiar.

It is very questionable indeed whether brains can usefully be said to "follow rules". Of course you can assert that, but it strains the facts. One of the most obvious (and distressing) facts about the human nervous system is that it's virtually impossible to describe it in terms of rules. That's because the underlying "hardware" (or wetware, or whatever you want to call the neurons, axons, dendrites, synapses, etc) isn't remotely like a Turing machine. It's massively, immensely parallel, and each neuron is internally more complex than any computer ever built - although its inputs and outputs may appear to be relatively simple. There is clearly something analogous to what we would call "design" going on, especially in the early stages when the nervous system is developing. But it's equally obvious that no one designed it - what order there is simply evolved.

"...my phone recognizes my driving pattern, notes where I park, reminds me of appointments, and so on".

Yes, but it had to be explicitly programmed to do every one of those tasks. That is comparable to the cells in the human visual cortex that automatically recognise, say, a striped pattern or a vertical line. Those "circuits" provide valuable low-level building blocks which help our brains to recognise far more complex, variable patterns. But I doubt whether it's possible, even in theory, to detect a set of neurons that performs the task of noticing when an online commenter is making statements beyond the scope of his knowledge - even though we often have that feeling.

"...I literally mean that statement is nonsensical".

Funny, it makes perfectly good sense to me. If you find it nonsensical, maybe you have not managed to understand what I was trying to convey. Try reading it again a few times, and think it over. The meaning may come to you.

" Not all AI is created with the goal of emulating human thinking".

So far, hardly any. But there is a problem with what you said. Human thinking is the ONLY kind of thinking we know much about - true, other animals exhibit intelligence, but it's mostly a subset of human intelligence.

So human intelligence is both our template of what intelligence means, and therefore a natural first place to look for methods of creating it. Imagine trying to test whether an "AI" is actually intelligent without comparing how it performs with human beings in some way.