Well, if you have the idea of a rocket, yes you can put the parts together and make a rocket. But no one has an idea of how to make a working general artificial intelligence. That's the leap. What are the parts we need? How do we put them together? No one has a clue! If you know how to do it, write it up in a thesis, collect your PhD, and make billions.

There's a tremendous gap between the "AI" that researchers are working on and and artificial general intelligence. The algorithms used in AI systems are almost always very simple. These algorithms are simply not going to make this leap and become what we would consider intelligent. It's like expecting Google search to suddenly gain sentience. My favorite quote about this is "Believing that writing these types of programs will bring us closer to real artificial intelligence is like believing that someone climbing a tree is making progress toward reaching the moon."

Not for quite a while. As someone who has worked in robotics, I would say the scenario for the next several decades would resemble XKCD's What-If on the robot apocalypse.

A scientist, like any person, can say anything they want. You shouldn't believe something a scientist says just because they say it. They have opinions and can be wrong just like everyone can. I'm sure some scientists say ghosts exist and others say they don't.

Science, on the other hand, can find no evidence of ghosts. That doesn't mean they don't exist, however. Science makes no statement one way or the other on the subject of ghosts. They have never been observed, as far as we know, but could still exist.

No matter how conductive cooling fins are, you need a certain amount of surface area to get the heat away from the processor. You may be able to pack a quadrillion transistors into a cubic centimeter, but if they use 2 MW of power, even cooling fins that fill a cubic meter will not be sufficient to cool it.

Where do you get this "end of the world" thing? As for the claim of "alarmism", do you not remember the flu strain several years ago that tended to kill healthy people in the prime of their life, rather than "immunocompromised hosts"?

It's not that the reports are "alarmist". It's (1) you're not understanding the actual risk, and (2) you're pretending that the reports are predicting the end of the world.

Fuck beta! Fuck beta!

Well, that's a different way of stating the birthday paradox, but it's still not what the article is about.

The birthday paradox would mean that even if planets with intelligent life are an average of thousands of light years from the nearest alien planet with intelligent life, the likelihood of one pair of planets with intelligent life existing much closer together than that is high. Those two planets would be like the two people who share a birthday in the paradox. That's a completely different idea than this article is about.

Good point. Maybe he could be considered mentally incompetent and placed in a non-jail institution. I think a zoo could be nice, but if he's considered a legal person, that's probably considered cruelty. If he's considered a person, we also wouldn't able to let him live in the wild, I think. Casting a person out into the wild would be considered cruel, too. I'm all for treating animals nicely, but granting legal personhood doesn't seem like the way to go about it. I think it would be more productive to treat mentally ill and mentally defective people better instead. And maybe also allow people who are suffering to end their lives the way they wish.

Going into the 3rd dimension will mean even less surface area per transistor for heat to escape. We're not going to be able to pack millions more transistors per unit volume than we can now by stacking processor boards and putting cooling units between them, unless we can get the power consumption per transistor down by a factor of thousands without shrinking the transistors. It's theoretically possible, given our current knowledge of physics, but engineering such a system might take a while...

I would say that any site that allows downloads of executable content also needs HTTPS. Otherwise, a middleman could install malware in your downloads nearly as easily as they could see your passwords.

You can get SSL certificates for free, but they're WAY more difficult to use than they need to be. I've installed certificates before, and it's a bunch of tedious, boring, repetitive work. What are computers for but to automate tedious, boring, repetitive work!? The computer should handle all work for me, and all I should have to do is click a button, for chrissake! That's what Let's Encrypt does.

There isn't such an extension already? If there isn't, someone should write one or alter an existing one to add that functionality, at least as an option. Then people should try it and let us know how painful it actually is to use. My guess would be: extremely painful for most users for the next several years, so painful that hardly anyone would use it willingly. Maybe some businesses could force it on their employees.

The problem with HTTP is that a middleman can see and alter content. If a browser doesn't warn when it encounters a self-signed certificate, then HTTPS would be no more secure than HTTP -- all the middleman has to do is use a self-signed certificate to decrypt/encrypt packets as needed. So browsers do prefer HTTPS, when the certificate can be verified. If you're using HTTPS and the certificate can't be verified, it's no more secure than HTTP unless the user is warned, and in fact it's a way of detecting that a middleman may be present. That's the whole reason for the death warning!