Oh no, we can -- and should -- speculate. Consider everything we can think of. Consider.

What we should NOT do is create a self-fulfilling prophecy by taking the verbal fecal output of doom-criers as the inevitable or even as the likely.

Since you mention cats, would you like an AI treating you like you treat the cats?

Frankly, that would be awesome.

Except that the opinion of people like Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates and Elon Musk is definitely worth more than any "majority" thinking differently.

Nosense. That's just hero worship mentality. Very much like listening to Barbara Streisand quack about her favorite obsessions.

Bill Gates' opinion is worth more than the average person's when it comes to running Microsoft. Elon Musk's opinion is worth more than the average person's when building Teslas and the like. Neither one of them (nor anyone else, for that matter) has anything but the known behavior of the only high intelligence we've ever met to go on (that's us, of course.) So it's purest guesswork, completely blind specuation. It definitely isn't a careful, measured evaluation. Because there's nothing to evaluate!

And while I'm not inclined to draw a conclusion from this, it is interesting that we've had quite a few very high intelligences in our society over time. None of them have posed an "existential crisis" for the the planet, the the human race, or my cats. Smart people tend ot have better things to do than annoy others... also, they can anticipate consequences. Will this apply to "very smart machines"? Your guess (might be) as good as mine. It's almost certainly better than Musk's or Gates', since we know they were clueless enough to speak out definitively on a subject they don't (can't) know anything about. Hawking likewise, didn't mean to leave him out.

Within the context of our recorded history, it's not the really smart ones that usually cause us trouble. It's the moderately intelligent fucktards who gravitate to power. [stares off in the general direction of Washington] (I know, I've giving some of them more credit than they deserve.)

No, it's something slashdot did, since I never had the scroll before and didn't change any settings.

You are crazy. Here is an example of the democratic process working, yet you desperately have to search for some conspiracy theory to continue your irrational hatred of the USA.

No. It's an example of a republic not working. What history books tend to call "decline and fall" when it's happened in the past. It is what happens when governments completely lose sight of, and concern with, and respect for, the principles that brought them into being.

This is real life, not a Tom Clancy novel.

Oh, we know. In Clancy's works the US TLAs are the good guys. That's not been the case for decades now.

It's deep, but it's dry. And it has a sharp rock floor at about the 100 foot level.

If we got rid of those damned banks, we would have to come up with a financial policy that encouraged manufacturing, since we do not have any raw materials and there is not much farm land either.

I fail to see how not having banks bleeding us dry would be a bad thing. (How many negatives can you get in a sentence?)

Why the hell not? I was doing quite well at forgetting France till you reminded me!

It is a recurring thing... and the polls show that this issue is a generational thing.

No one is reading 10,000 emails. You're going to want someone to pick an email interest out of the flock. for closer scrutiny.

As to WSJ being non-credible... tell us MR AC why is that?

You do realize that they're saying the same thing on this issue that the New York Times and MSNBC are saying right? There is no political division in so far as the facts are concerned here. The left wing media is turning on hillary. Its already over. All that remains is stripping anyone in her coalition dumb enough to think they can shrug this off of any remaining credibility. This is going to get uglier and uglier. And you're not going to be able to count on any credible media allies to back you up. The establishment media has already abandoned you. And most leftwing alternative media has also abandoned you. That includes politico and huffington post. Its over.

Do as your allies already did... turn on hillary and save what remains of your credibility. If you don't... you'll just lose.

Honestly, I hope as many of you refuse to listen to that sage advice as possible. It will just make the political bloodbath to come all the more complete. ;)

I'm starting to understand why fire axes are so popular in the zombie apocalypse... they don't run out of ammo. These people are so fucking stupid. They just come at me drooling all over themselves while chewing their own tongues. I load another shell of logic into my boomstick of reason... blow the top of their rotten face off with an obvious fatal counter argument... then cock another logic shell and move on.

But my god there are a lot of these idiots.

Wow.

No. Tautology means you're defining a given with itself.

If I say someone is a thief because they're a thief then that is tautology.

It is a kind of circular logic.

You're saying news corp is untrustworthy... this is a given from you. You're not offering any justification for it.

Then you use that given to say that subsidiaries of news corp must be untrustworthy as well because news corp is untrustworthy. This is one of the several false association fallacies.

And then you're saying that because those subsidiaries are untrustworthy a given story from those subsidiaries is untrustworthy... even though the story in question is a FUCKING RAW DATA DUMP. This is another false association fallacy compounded with blind fucking pigheaded mulishness when confronted with fucking facts. That isn't even a fallacy. That is just some retard pointing at the Sun and saying it isn't there.

That's bullshit. And if you don't see the several logical fallacies in that then you're an idiot.

First, the entire line of logic is fallacious.

Second, even if news corp -> WSJ -> this story were untrustworthy, the issue is that this is a RAW data dump and therefore the trustworthiness of the people posting it is irrelevant unless you're claiming that the data itself has been tampered with?

Your entire position is laughable from any rational stand point. You're wrong. And I just validated that position above quite firmly. I am not interested in you wasting any more of my time. You can either apologize for being a jackass or I will just say "good day, sir".

Your choice. Either way, I'm done with you.

And IBM wanted to charge silly money for the licence to make peripherals.

This was the ultimate demonstration of locking out third parties as a way to derail your project. Shame the lesson has not penetrated a few console manufacturers.