Let me put it differently. I think it would be very difficult to stop exactly AT human-level AI, and it wouldn't be very interesting to do that. While I agree with you about the low energy in the field these days, I just don't see why they would stop at that level once they'd gone that far.

However, my main point remains that this is an extremely tired old topic to be polling on. Not just this most popular theme, but ALL of the polls alternatives were boring.

I should have made it clear I was primarily referring back to to the original poll question that was supposedly motivating the discussion and to the specific option of "Human-level AI" that was so strongly favored.

I still recommend the book as something of a classic of comic SF. Sort of serious and witty technical humor, not absurdist. Hmmm... No, I guess it can't be connected to the devolution of /. humor, since the book was published long before /. existed.

We already have plenty of humans around, mostly to ignore. However, if they can develop human-level AI the same techniques will probably not be limited, so it seems pretty obvious that they'll go on to superhuman AI, and that should be interesting. Topic reminds me of When Harlie was One --from about 30 years ago. Quite a good book, but /. is just TOO retro these years.

An alternative poll (for the moronic moderators) of more topical relevance:

Q: What motivates the protests of President Obama speaking to students to encourage them to study harder?

1. Batshit craziness
2. Batshit stupidity
3. WASP fear that the motivated minority students will eclipse their own moronic children
4. General fear of losing credibility with their own children if they discover Obama isn't the bogeyman
5. All of the above
6. Voyeur Cowboy Neal wants to watch

Can you imagine ol' Dubya trying to convince students 'Any of you could become President'? First you need a time machine to make your father President, then go back a little further and make sure your grandfather is a Senator.

And yes, I did scan for moderated "funny" and I was again disappointed. There was a funny link a few weeks ago--but the moderators failed (as usual). I only caught it because the poster of the link described it as funny.

Missing Option: A greeting from President Obama.

Interesting evidence of /.'s death in progress that this is apparently the first mention of the topic. Or have all the moron moderators already censoriously moderated those comments into invisibility?

Anyway, it's suddenly become a very topical poll--but apparently I'm the only one who noticed?

waste of time, but a follow-on poll for the accidental relevance:

Q: What motivates the protests of Obama encouraging students?

1. Batshit craziness
2. Batshit stupidity
3. WASP fear that the motivated minority students will eclipse their own moronic children
4. General fear of losing credibility with their own children if they discover Obama isn't the bogeyman
5. All of the above
6. Cowboy Neal wants to watch

Given the time lapse, I'm pretty sure he didn't do that. However, I think he was actually filtered out at a higher level than that, so he was never really allowed to see what was really going on. I think he was smart enough to smell something--but that is exactly why they kept him from seeing anything concreted. I'm not really interested in that sort of thing, but from what little I've read, it seems like they were pretty good at compartmentalizing things.

In general I don't believe in complicated conspiracies, but I do think Baxter knew too much, had decided to tell all, and was snuffed before he could start squawking.

Oh yeah. I forgot one more obvious thing that may not be obvious enough. The obvious mirror technology would just be large wire loops with thin coated plastic films stretched across them. You want them very light so that they will be responsive to the rotating gyroscopes (located at the center of mass of each mirror), and of course you want them to be cheap since you'll need a lot of them. Actually, I think you would only have one gyroscope per mirror, but it has to be on gimbals so you can rotate in arbitrary directions.

You caught me on the reference to "terraforming". Looks like we need to start by terraforming our own planet to sustain its suitability for human life. Not so funny.

My suggestion along these lines would be a network of large controllable mirrors in orbit. The individual sections could be aimed, essentially by rotating them with gyroscopes. Some region is too hot? Adjust more mirrors to give it more shade and reduce its temperature. Another area is too cold? Add the appropriate amount of reflected sunlight and warm it right up. Might as well send some extra sunlight to the polar regions and cultivate crops there, too. Surplus light for electricity generation on the side.

Expensive? Yes, but basically within the capabilities of existing technologies. I actually think the largest technical hurdle would be sufficiently accurate weather modeling. We'd essentially need to micromanage the weather all over the world. I don't think the launch capacity would be unsolvable. The early launches would focus on the power generation, and the power would be used to crack sea water for the hydrogen that would be used to boost more mirror satellites into orbit.

Okay, so it would also be potentially dangerous, but I'm hoping that the security problems could be solved, and all technology is morally neutral. Any power to do good is also a power to do harm. (Unfortunately, this is not a balanced relationship. There are some powers that can do nothing but harm... But that's getting off the focus--which can be risky with such large mirrors.)

I used to submit stories and suggestions. One of them is still pending, obviously long forgotten. Concluded that was a waste of time.

I've even had vigorous discussions with the big taco. It would be amusing to post some of his highly defensive email. However, I've never done that sort of thing, and I certainly don't care enough about /. to do it. In contrast, at least taco pretends to care--before he goes all defensive.

On the third hand, you have to admit taco has plenty to be defensive about.

The crappiness of MySpace pages is a 1-1 recreation of the crappiness of Geocities. Eyebleedingly bad html backgrounds, autoplay audio, blinkies, etc, etc. And it was very much of a (shortlived) 'community'.

AOL, when it was really popular, was the entire online world for several million people. The AOL chatrooms and internal IM were VERY popular.
And then they let them out into the wider internet world....:(

Is it bad that I read "quite brave" as Burma shave?

Simple: our robotics technology is centuries away from being advanced enough to do all that reliably. What do you do when one of the robots breaks? Right now, we just keep running it with a broken wheel and hope for the best.

I can't believe this is modded Informative. Sick, sick, sick.

Brains are not neural nets, neural nets are a simplified model of how we think the human brain works. And I would bet that no one completely understands how the human brain works. You're original point still seems valid though.

Well, they certainly aren't going to decompose.

If he'd illustrated his problem by describing when and how Firefox crashes, he'd have a valid argument, but he didn't and I've never had trouble with this. So, in my opinion, he's whining about a problem that doesn't exist, and yeah, I'd call his post a troll.