Thanks, "Assmasher". I value your learned input.

To the people who hired you, the most important thing is getting the product to work reliably so they can start making money with it. It won't matter at all how pretty the chart bubbles are in the design document, if the program crashes or is otherwise unusable. So score one for the talented programmers there.

Which is not to say software engineering isn't important -- only that exactly how important it is will vary with the size of the project. e.g. for a smaller project like a script or a one-off data processing program, just about any design (or no design) can be made to work well enough. For a large program (or one that will eventually grow into a large program), detailed software engineering is necessary to prevent its eventual collapse under the weight of its own complexity.

Whatever your yearly stipend from the government will get you.

(Hey, if it works for Alaska, it could work elsewhere -- just fund it by taxing cheap robot labor instead of petroleum)

I find the whole think kind of surprising, since it is known that the whole brain doesn't go to sleep at the same time. Sleepwalking happens when part of it isn't asleep at all.

Sure, just capture them and subject them to brain surgery for the implant, then turn them lose so you can capture them easier next time.

In case you haven't heard, there's a more fun way of getting kids.

Those damb religio-political dogmatists keep blocking publication of my papers on the theory of anturgic phrogneal boropathy.

FTFY

Something about a beast named DCLXVI ? Dacelixovius the bigfoot?

AI has to get in line behind my flying car.

Your subject line holds the answer: Maybe the idiot futurists really are in danger of being surpassed by machines!

They just haven't figured out that the rest of us aren't idiots too.

People who think AI is a looming threat to humanity learned all they know about AI from comic books and movies.

Really? Do tell -- what was the resolution of that monitor, and how much did it cost you at the time? (Also, what computer monitor are you using today?)

I don't think that would count as learning. That ten-line program will always do exactly what it was programmed to do, neither more nor less. An adaptive program (in the sense the previous poster was attempting to describe) would be one that is able to figure out on its own how to do things that its programmers had not anticipated in advance.

An interesting feature of the Volt is that it will handle this for you -- i.e. if the gas engine hasn't been used in a long enough time, the Volt's computer will force it to be used for a little while just to give it some exercise (and keep the gas in the tank from getting too stale IIRC).