In the late 1970s in junior high we would ride the bus and get off at random stops and write down pay phone numbers. Then when we got home we would call the numbers and do all sorts of gags.

The one that inexplicably worked well was telling people that had won money from a radio station. Why they believed that an 8th grader sounded like a disk jockey is still beyond me.

It's almost kind of sad that kids of today can't get that experience. There's very few pay phones left and I bet none of them accept incoming calls. It was also pretty safe from a get in trouble perspective. Call logging and tracing would have been a huge endeavor and we never called any one pay phone more than a few times or suggested anything violent or even all that ribald.

They don't pay it off now by printing money because other people keep buying the debt.

The dollar represents 2/3rds of the world's reserve currency. The rest of the reserve currencies combined aren't enough to replace it.

Hyperinflation probably isn't always a guarnateed outcome, I would wager political pressure not to manipulate monetary and fiscal policy that much is a bigger reason.

One other interesting takeaway for me was the range of what it might mean to be be a superintelligence. The author being interviewed said there are kind of various dimensions to superintelligence, such as speed of processing, complexity of processing, size of "memory" or available database of info, concurrency (ability to process independent events simultaneously).

Not all superintelligences may have all of these qualitative dimensions maxmized, either, which can be part of the problem of failing to recognize when one has been created because we may fail to see its potential because it doesn't seem omniscient.

I think it's also interesting how we kind of default to science fiction ideas of like Terminator or other "machines run amok" scenerios where the outcome is physical violence against humans.

Some of the outcomes could be more subtle and some of the biases could be inbuilt by humans and not the part of some kind of warped machine volition or intuition.

One of the everyday examples might be the advanced software designed to bank finances, linking program trading, risk and portfolio analysis, markets, etc. The amount of information big banks have to process on a daily basis is massive and while humans make important decisions, they rely heavily on machine analytics and suggested actions (and modeled outcomes) to make those decisions.

The system may make money, but is it only biased in terms of firm profit or could it have other, unintended capital effects? Is it possible that while each big bank may have their own unique system but because all these systems have a lot of shared data (prices, market activity, known holdings by others, common risk models, etc) that they could have an influential or feedback loop among them that might actually drive markets? Could this unintentional "network" of like systems be something like a superintelligence?

One question I sometimes ask myself -- what if wealth inequality wasn't a conspiracy of some kind (by the rich, the politicians, a combination, etc) but instead was something of a "defect" in the higher order of financial system intelligence? Or maybe not even a defect, but a kind of designed-in bias in the system's base instructions (ie, make the bank profitable, for exampel) that resulted in financial outcomes which tend to make the rich richer? What if the natural outcome of markets was greater wealth equality but because they are heavily influenced by a primitive machine intelligence we get inequality? How could we know this isn't true?

I think these are the more interesting challenges of machine superintelligence because they grow out of the things we rely on current (and limited) machine intelligence to do for us now. Will we even recognize when these systems get it wrong and how will we know?

Because US debt is denominated in US dollars, we could pay it off tomorrow with a spreadsheet entry at the Federal Reserve which created $16.39 trillion by fiat. There may even be some non-inflationary gimmick that could be employed to pay off existing debt via normal government revenue and only sell treasuries to the Fed who would never sell them.

And because the dollar is the dominant world reserve currency (around 65%), Congress could just vote to nullify a huge portion of that debt tomorrow. There's no short or even medium term replacement for dollars as a trading currency, so not only would it suck nations holding that debt the world would have to keep using the dollar or go broke.

The latter is the existential threat to the Chinese economy. With the stroke of a pen, the Chinese could see 1.2 trillion just wiped off their balance sheet.

When you control both the printing of your money and issue debt in the same money, anything is possible.

I listened to a podcast (Econtalk, which is about as sober as podcasts get) that interviewed an AI "worrier" and he acknowledges that our current technology can't produce a superintelligence now. But he does make a couple of interesting points which I think make for reasonable discussion even if it isn't the "ZOMG, PANIC" kind of talk you imply.

One, discussing machine superintelligence before it actually develops is almost necessary because once it DOES exist it may be difficult to control. By definition, superintelligence will be smarter than we are and capable of manipulating at a level of complexity we can't grasp, making it hard to control.

And we've already created single-purpose "intelligences" similar to this, like the old "Internet worm" or some kinds of computer viruses that while they lack general purpose intelligence, have a self-replicating intelligence that can be difficult to contain. Imagine a smart hypervisor designed to manage a computing cluster but with the intelligence to replicate/migrate nodes across cloud computing infrastructure. Couple it with cyber defense technology, encryption, etc but given the single minded purpose of "don't shut down". It's not hard to see at a not-so-far-off level of intelligence that it could self-migrate across cloud platforms, resisting shutdown, possibly even able to hide in private cloud platforms all while being able to escape detection and control.

Which brings up the other point -- we don't know what machine superintelligence will look like. Part of the problem with understanding what superintelligence could be is that we don't know how far we are from creating one because as humans we try to imagine superintelligence in anthropomorphic terms using human epistemologies. It doesn't have to be the anthropomorphic HAL 9000, it could be a hypervisor manager, a securities trading system or some other single-purpose automation system that contains a feedback loop between a series of "dumb" systems coupled with a control plane. We may create it by accident and even if its not perfect, there are some realms where it wouldn't take long running amok to cause large problems, even if the outcome wasn't "judgement day".

Some devices like Nest seem to add more intelligence to things we already use, but some devices just seem to add gadgets without actually making things more intelligent.

Where are my outlets with an integrated, network accessible power meter? Or the smart electrical panel that can have circuit priorities and acceptable power source types assigned to it so that when I run off a Tesla PowerWall I get maximum utility from the power? Or even the main power meter that lets me see my electrical utilization in real time?

So much of the IoT just seems to be about adding new gadgets whose utility seems limited while ignoring the rest of the house which is dumb.

Well, yeah. Isn't this what any company is supposed to try to do?

In Hawaii, the statute of limitations for a lawsuit over a written or oral contract appears to be 6 years. In California, where I'm guessing Luckey resides, it appears to be 4 years for a written contract, and 2 for an oral one. (Source: http://www.nolo.com/legal-ency...)

This makes complete sense.

I also wonder if gang affiliation in prison has a lot to do with it. I don't claim to be an expert, but from what I've read it's difficult to survive in a lot of prisons without some kind of gang affiliation. Even if you're not a full-on blood-in member, a lot of time people end up owing favors to whatever gang they were involved in and they're expected to pay those back and most prison gangs easily can reach out beyond the walls and coerce poeple back into criminal behavior.

As in Donald Rumsfeld's known unknowns. We know that the risk of an asteroid strike, but we don't know about all the potential asteroids that could hit us.

While the overall risk is low, we don't know what could possibly hit us.