No limits to freedom of speech! The hit I put out on Anonymous Coward is clearly covered.

When they get something serious, most people want a person around, regardless of their age. Most people also want a person around to do things like take blood, give injections, etc. Things like physiotherapy also work much better with a personal touch. We'll undoubtedly invent robots at some point that will do that, but it's further off.

Why would an AI be perfect? It's creators probably aren't. Supposing you buy the original sin idea, isn't it an interesting question that if a perfect god created a flawed humanity, what would humanity's creation be?

"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.