"That's one thing you can already say about Apple's computers - no bloatware."

Apple did a lazy port of iTunes to PC so that people could use their iPods. It sucked because they didn't put much effort into it. Possibly on purpose.

In the US the male life expectancy of a 65 year old is about 18 years. Nimoy was wealthy, so add a bit to that. Statistically, he died prematurely. Medically, since he had advanced COPD, he surely did. COPD also sucks, so chances are his last decade or two weren't as nice as they should have been.

The size of the brain is much less important than the brain to body mass ratio. Several animals have larger brains than humans (elephants being one), but they all have large bodies as well: http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/b...

I'm going to go ahead and guess you're American? Your culture seems to have this weird blind spot where the rest of the world is concerned.

You know that the populations of the USA, Israel and most, if not all, other countries with modern social systems are reproducing at below replacement levels, right?

Your personal prejudices are causing you to focus on a few niche groups. Grow up.

I'm not sure what assertion you think I don't have any evidence to back up. That babies show outward evidence of emotion? You made the same assertion with zero evidence, but it shouldn't be hard to find some. That you don't know if it's genuine emotion (whatever that is) or just outward signs of it? Sorry, you've got to provide evidence for what you know, not me.

William of Ockham would say you're full of baloney. You seem to be proposing that there's some je ne c'est quoi ("emotion") that we (and babies) have that isn't an emergent property and for some reason cannot be possessed by an artificial construct. That mystical hypothesis is much more complicated than the idea that there is no magic and things like "feeling emotion" or "looking happy" are properties of complex systems in the right arrangement.

You don't really need a supercomputer. The math involved is really very simple. Determining what the coefficients are is difficult and expensive, requiring large trials, but once you've got them your phone, plus a nurse, lab and imaging equipment, is more than capable of diagnosing the vast majority of things you're likely to get.

Most people do want a person around to reassure them. Also, until the robots get good enough, the nurse can provide an objective assessment of symptoms.

If you read the article, it turned out to be someone from the RAND corporation. So you're modded as funny but.

What did the newly-created human do that requires an act of redemption?

Logical argument about illogical premises is illogical.

You can seriously write "the only way to reconcile our disobedience to a Holy God was for someone perfect to die on our behalf" and expect people to take the rest as a logical argument instead of the crisis of the week for a vampire/zombie/witch TV series?

Babies demonstrate characteristics we associate with emotion. They look at stuff, grab things, cry, and smile. You don't know that they actually have "emotion" or are just genetically programmed to exhibit those behaviours so you don't eat them.

Even if you do think babies have emotion, unless you believe in some mystical soul, they must have developed it at some point. Do fetuses have emotion? Embryos? Fertilized eggs? Unfertilized eggs?

Not many people who believe in a religion understand it, much less understand the concept of religion itself.

You can get animals, including humans, to act superstitiously using plain old reinforcement learning. That's not hard at all to program into a computer. Add in "parents" teaching "children" and greater credulousness in the children and you'd have something strongly resembling religion. No understanding necessary.

There was a story on Slashdot a while ago about a study showing that most financial spreadsheets have so many errors in them that corporate financial decisions are basically random.

No, you don't. MDs make a big deal about taking histories and grading things by eye and such, but most don't really bother, aren't very good at it if they do, and, fortunately, it doesn't matter that much anyway. I have a colleague who looks quantitatively at the way physicians in a particular area use the standard scale to grade symptoms. Some do an okay job, but most are quite poor, and they're all highly variable. Various tests that are more automated or can be easily administered by a nurse (or student) perform much better.

On top of that, most physicians can't (or don't bother) to do the basic, simple math that's required to properly evaluate test results, either quantitative or qualitative ones, don't really learn anything new more than five years post-med school (which is still during residency for many of them!), make a frightening number of mistakes, and suffer from such blatant conflicts of interest that they're regularly made fun of on comedy shows.

I expect it will be illegal within 20 years to diagnose or prescribe without consulting an expert system. We'll have nurses, because people like the human touch, and computers. Surgeons will follow into obsolescence shortly after. The US will be a pioneer, as soon as the HMOs and insurance companies realize you can replace an expensive physician with a PC. When everyone realizes that cost cutting measure is also improving care, the rest of the world will follow.

Hopefully whatever they want, as opposed to our current strategy of making up lots of useless jobs so that everyone can "work" eight hours a day. You don't really think it's necessary to have four Gap employees to fawn over the three concurrent customers, do you? Or armies of people deciding what colour and font best represents the qualities of Icy-Fresh Gum on that billboard?

We've been shuttling people displaced by machines into make-work jobs since at least the 50s. Perhaps this time things will change so fast we'll start to reconsider some of our delusions, like the necessity for people to work at or beyond their optimal maximum.

The only reason to replace humans with robots is that the robots are more efficient. That means they increase production, reduce costs, or both. Replacing human workers with robots means everybody has to work less to make the same or more. The problem is purely one of wealth allocation, not creation.

Your assertion that people who aren't working won't do anything but breed is also not supported by evidence. People who are educated with large amounts of personal freedom have a much lower reproductive rate than people who need to spend most of their time working in order to survive.