Who ever suggested that there was any "privacy and confidentiality" of wearable devices that use Bluetooth? Who would even think such a thing? We're not talking about encrypted communications devices here...

I'm just confused about people deep-linking walled off content. It's fucking pointless. It's a bit like me offering you this awesome picture of Mel Gibson riding a motorbike with a chipmunk balanced on the handlebars:
file:///home/cederic/pictures/awesome/mel/motorbike-chipmunk.png

Awesome, isn't it?

I love your assumption that everybody uses this thing called Facebook. Here's a hint for you: Several billion people don't.

It's ok, the rest of the Internet mostly works.

Or I could treat content hidden behind a curtain as invisible, which to me, this is.

Fuck it, if they wanted to share they'd have posted it somewhere people could see it. Their choice.

I recall bicycles chained to railings outside railway stations being subject to summary destruction by the bomb squad for very related reasons.

London, late 80s..

It's a shame you replied to my post several branches down a conversation, as that security point is extremely pertinent.

Between the data slurping, the ad provision and the security concerns I'm reluctant to tread too heavily down the IoT route.

Then again, I have a smart tv with built-in camera and voice commands. You could argue I've already lost.

Had the people living in Scotland voted to leave the UK then I'd have accepted that choice with no fuss at all.

I was and still am however mocking the SNP desire to be independent from the UK but part of the European superstate. I think that demonstrates that independence is not their genuine desire, and that leaves their motives open to challenge.

The concern isn't so much that the AI would have human-like goals that drive it into conflict with regular-grade humanity in a war of conquest, so much as that it might have goals that are anything at all from within the space of "goals that are incompatible with general human happiness and well-being".

If we're designing an AI intended to do things in the world of its own accord (rather than strictly in response to instructions) then it would likely have something akin to a utility function that it's seeking to maximise, and so implicitly has a goal defined by that function - some arrangement of the world that scores the most highly according to that function. Whether the nature of that goal is inscrutable beyond the wit of man, or utterly prosaic like the "paperclip maximiser"... if it doesn't share our values then the things that we value may end up disassembled for raw materials.

In the admittedly unlikely event of a machine achieving a degree of intelligence that allows it to completely achieve any goal it happens to have, the only way for humanity to win is if it has goals that align near-perfectly with what's best for humanity, which is a vanishingly small target when you consider the universe of possible utility functions that aren't that.

Obviously not really a concern with the current state of technology, but if progress in making more intelligent machines follows anything like an exponential curve then we could fall foul of how bad our intuitions are around exponentials, and end up being taken by surprise by a machine that's rather abruptly more intelligent than we expected. Especially if we make it able to improve itself.

Get out of the Loony Bin, did you?

It's an interesting document, but consider the source.

Just a small note, the military is switching to the iPhone 6 from the BlackBerry. Most of the leadership at the very large DoD facility I work for turned in their BlackBerries a few months back for iPhones.

You are made for carbon. The AI can use that carbon and other atoms for something else. Your atoms are nearby to it and it doesn't need to move up a gravity well. And why restrict what resources it uses when it doesn't need to? And if finds the nearby atmosphere "toxic" then why not respond by modifying that atmosphere? You are drastically underestimating how much freedom the AI has potential to do. We cannot risk it deciding what it does and gamble that it makes decisions that don't hurt us simply because you can conceive of possible ways it might be able to achieve its goals without doing so. That's wishful thinking in a nutshell.

On the contrary, the primary concern is that people who think it will go well are over anthropomorphizing. If general AI is made, there's no reason to think it will have a motivation structure that agrees with humans or that we can even easily model. That's the primary concern. I agree with most of the rest of your second paragraph is accurate in the sense that it general AI seems far away at this point. But the basic idea that AI is a threat isn't from anthropomorphizing. I recommend reading Bostrom's excellent book "Superintelligence" on the topic.

Were we to have control over immigration we wouldn't need heavy-handed legislation constraining employers.

Forgive me for not wanting to live in a communist utopia. I've seen where that leads.

It was the labour union controlled party that opened the immigration floodgates and they haven't yet been closed. Half of net immigration comes from the EU and we can't prevent it under current agreements.

I want those changed. This country is too small for its population and adding 300,000 to the population every year is not sustainable. There is already a shortage of housing, the NHS is being stretched beyond its capacity, people leaving school are struggling to find jobs.

Fuck that, and that's just one tiny element of what the EU is doing wrong. Fuck you too for trying to suggest that the UK should just roll over and let Brussels dictate national policy. No.

When people are coming into the country and taking on low paid jobs, there are multiple impacts:
- wages depress, which reduces the tax return on those jobs
- many of these jobs pay wages below the net tax threshold, so those workers receive more in benefits and tax credits than they actually pay
- the number of jobs doesn't necessarily rise at the same rate as immigration, which is one reason youth unemployment is so low

So those workers are causing additional strain on the NHS while not making a net contribution in their own right.

Forgive me for highlighting that you're full of shit.