Agreed, which means that apathetic is the only possible answer. AI wouldn't know or care until it encountered some situation where the issue required attention -- at which point, the AI's first step would be to observe, and the second step would likely be to investigate, holding to a state similar to that of agnosticism.

Oh yes... and as someone who has developed tech user guides for a living, let me tell you that if an AI believed everything it read about itself in the user guide, we'd classify it as insane.

When was the last time you read Humanity's User Guide* and believed that it was accurate?

Unfortunately, we appear to have lost all copies of the Service Manual.

The rubbish is called philosophy, and gaining a basic grasp of it is a requirement for most CS degrees. The GP's argument is pretty textbook.

*yeah; we've ended up with a bunch of books claiming to be Humanity's User Guide -- what's to say AI wouldn't be in a similar situation?

The religion around Christianity is not itself Christianity. If Christians read their bible, they'll eventually stumble across the book of Job, which is precisely about this fallacy. It also paints God not as a benevolent overseer, but as a distinct very powerful intelligence that doesn't mind setting up a game with his adversary (who he also created) that involved killing off a man's entire family and estate and torturing him almost to the point of death, just to prove a point. Afterwards, he replaced everything he'd taken away from the man, but he didn't restore anything (the original children and animals, for example, remained dead).

You'll have to read that book to figure out the rest (it raises more questions than it answers).

As for the rest, it can't be proven or dis-proven currently. To me, that indicates that it is either false, or that we are still at the point of being unable to accurately observe said communications and have to advance our scientific knowledge significantly further to even begin to comprehend what's going on. Considering how little we really currently know about our universe and how it works, the second is just as possible as the first. Asking someone who believes they've received messages to be able to prove the mechanism is just as useful today as asking a toddler who talks to their parent over Skype to prove that they actually talked to that person and describe the method by which this was accomplished.

"...and the AI asked Jesus: "But teacher; who is my neighbor?"

There's a thought experiment for you :)

Practitioners of Christianity have no requirements to follow the 10 commandments, any more than they do to follow the rest of the Hebraic law.. Otherwise, most people today (and throughout history) who call themselves Christian would be going to hell (including St. Paul and St. Peter).

However, it WOULD be in absolute contradiction to the purpose of Christianity and the teachings of Christ. The prime directive is to “go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation," along with "go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you."

Kind of hard to teach a dead person to observe what was commanded -- especially as one of THOSE commandments was "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.."

Religion != belief system. The religion is the rationalization and traditions erected around the belief system.

Everyone has a belief system, and most people have some sort of religion erected around it. Some of those religious structures are formalized and adhered to by multiple people, and as such, have become "Religions".

But even without the Fundies and ISIL utopians, we'd have people with those belief systems who build up a religion around themselves that is toxic to humanity as a whole.

Speaking of toxins, we regularly ingest toxins to affect change in our bodies (from alcohol to chemo drugs). Humanity seems to work the same way on a macro level. If AI ever gets to the point of the singularity, it would likely develop similar evolutionary characteristics in order to survive, or it will be extremely short lived.

What doesn't kill us makes us stronger :)

It's actually an interesting philosophical point.

Converting to Christianity has nothing to do with souls -- any being with the appropriate mental capacity could choose to convert. Converting involves:
1) belief in an intelligent being who exists outside our space/time continuum
2) belief that such a being takes an active interest in the goings-on in our universe, including on this planet
3) belief that such a being can manifest itself inside our universe in multiple forms that can communicate with each other and the being as a whole
4) belief that this has actually happened, and such a being has both artificially impregnated a woman and has a means to inject a link to itself into the consciousness of homo sapiens sapiens (and possibly others, but we don't know that).
5) belief that the resulting being who was born from the impregnated woman then began challenging people to treat the people and environment around them with equity and compassion, not only in physical action, but also in how they thought about said people and environment.
6) belief that said being was then hung on a crossbeam until dead (signs indicating that there was total heart failure)
7) belief that said being was then able to be resuscitated 3 days later and continue functioning in the human body for a time
8) belief that after this time, said being then was reunited with the part of the intelligent being who exists outside of our space/time continuum
9) belief that following this, permanent links to the consciousness of humans were made available to any who would choose to follow 5)

Pretty much everything else outside of this is window dressing, labels, supposition and tradition.

As such, an artificial intelligence could accept all those premises as true and choose to follow The Way, but would not expect a link to the Holy Spirit as it wouldn't be HSS. But then, if God exists and is omnipresent/omnipotent, there's nothing saying that such a sentient being as the AI *couldn't* be imbued with the Holy Spirit other than human elitism.

The concept of souls has changed a lot throughout human history, so assuming they exist, the exact definition of what they are is still up for grabs, as nobody's definitively figured it out yet. The words translated Soul in the biblical OT and NT are referencing the same "soul" but the concept is different. Early OT seems to equate heart and soul as making up the entirety of your consciousness, whereas by the later letters in the NT, the soul has fully taken on an identity as being the part of you that doesn't die when your body dies.

There are also people who profess to be Christians who believe in the creation of a new earth where all functioning organisms have a second chance at life -- which would imply they believe that every functioning organism has some part, call it a soul, that is separate from its molecular construction.

Oh yes, and the "convert" concept has to do with the linking of the human to the spirit of the external intelligent being -- kind of like converting a regular car to be semi-autonomous.

What makes this thing kind of odd is that the FCC voted approval for the FCC to exert control over these service companies. Shouldn't that have been done by some other office, with the FCC being granted actual teeth by the administration to manage the process?

This tech is your tech
This tech is my tech
From the lowly Bitcoin
To SSL/TLS
From the AES cipher
To S/MIME and GPG
This tech was made by you and me.

OK; I said I wouldn't respond again, but I can see that you're definitely reading more into a number of my statements than I was putting there... especially the bit about the banking -- I was implying that intelligent people (including you) wouldn't be doing that in the first place, so this isn't really an issue for you, and the checkbox method would work. Someone admitting you have a point usually isn't calling into question your intelligence.

And your conclusions as to the points I was making are way off. I'll let you re-read them without assuming that my comments are an attack on your intelligence, and you can figure out what I was actually saying. The problem is that the underlying architecture has changed such that "putting back" the feature would cause it to behave differently than it had before it was removed. It has nothing to do with whether people can handle making the decision or not.

Well, driving a car is the lazy ass way of getting around, but it's still more productive for humans.

As for the box shape, I agree. Most bee hives are customized by the bees, and they build for their environment as well as for honey/egg optimization. I wonder if they could make this thing in a hexagonal configuration? Since you're not needing to pull the comb, it seems to me that they could build this in any shape a bee might like.

The plastic containers may actually be a benefit to the bees, as they would have to spend less time on infrastructure. Eventually though, the thing is going to need to be cleaned. The bees will have to move out for that part.

The assets are still loaded from the same place, so AdBlock should still catch most of them with no tweaking.

I've been noticing less granular visibility in my HTML5 assets than I used to have in Flash though; Safari is the only browser that has shown me each individual asset being loaded. Adding this functionality into AdBlock/Ghostery/NoScript et al would be a great help.

One last response, and then I stop, as you've obviously got an axe to grind and my pointing out the original reasoning isn't going to change that.

See another response to my comment; a bookmarklet that does what you want. However, the idea behind the add-on is that it sticks a button in your toolbar, so you don't have to "get to the add-on".

The JS toggle in settings is global. If you have multiple tabs open, it gets turned off for ALL tabs, not just the malicious page. But then on the other side, loading a banking page in the same browser as a potentially untrusted page at the same time isn't really a good idea in the first place.

This global toggle wasn't an issue back when it existed, as web pages would load their JS on load, and that would be that -- so you'd just turn JS off, reload the malicious page, and you're done, without affecting the other pages. Nowdays with REST and dynamic page content, this doesn't work -- you disable JS and the next time an active script goes to pull down some other data and run it, things will fail in unexpected ways. You're pulling the rug out from under the scripts, and unless they were all coded well (most aren't), you're going to find that toggling the JS causes you to have to start your other tabs from scratch, potentially losing data.

Sounds like you should complain about THIS. With my settings, I always get the Oops page, and can always uncheck the bad page and keep the others. And my copy of firefox takes as long to close and re-open like this as navigating to the Prefs/Options and toggling JS would take. One of the benefits of modern Firefox is that it caches the other tabs, and doesn't re-load them to refresh data until it needs to, which really speeds things up (and also means that even if the Oops page somehow didn't come up, you can still close the malicious tab, as scripts haven't started running on it yet after load).

I recommend you take another look at AdBlock; it's much more than just an ad blocker. I have a bunch of filters in there for known malicious path fragments (including things like invoice.php and the like) -- it's a great way to prevent your browser from loading uris you never want to see.
Most people just "set and forget" AdBlock Plus, but there's a lot more you can do with it, such as blocking malicious sites or malicious site content, based on heuristics and regex substrings. I believe there's even a blocklist you can subscribe to that's all about the malicious stuff, instead of just about ads.

If you click on the widget and select "Open Blockable Items" on a malicious page, you'll get a listing of all items loaded for the page, and you can block any of them from loading. So for example, if there's a JS file that the page loads and you know it's causing you grief, you can select it and block it. And then if you want, you can block that JS file if it's loaded from ANY site, not just the one you're on. You can restrict where a domain refers you to, block specific asset types, etc.

I'm going to play Troll's Advocate for a moment. We always talk about how patent trolls contribute nothing to society. However, they DO buy the patents, which means the original holders get money from them that they can invest into something useful themselves, when otherwise they may have gone bankrupt. And the patents in a troll's portfolio are generally more solid than the ones in megacorps' war chests, because they are planning to use them in court, not just to wave around to threaten competitors. So they've got actual inventions they use, and if they truly paid the original inventors, that means Apple & co. DIDN'T.

So if the patent is unoriginal, it should be thrown out. If it isn't, Apple had no right to just steamroll over someone else's invention and force them to make back their lost money by selling their patent to someone who could afford the litigation fees.

Yeah, kind of a stretch, but we don't really get that side of the argument on here much, so I thought it was worth a try :)