Police don't respond to bad analogies. Calling the bad analogy tic-tactical team...

Was too distracted discussing the physics/psychology of the color to notice.

We stopped at 2000 nuclear tests, we can stop at a 2000 degree Celsius increase in temperature.

Pretty girl in a dress, let's discuss the physics/psychology of the color of her dress.

Glad to see Google cracking down on those evil advertisers.

Still not good enough. </troll>

Things like pollution are called "externalities" and the free market has no way of dealing with them because pollution affects people who neither produced nor bought the product and thus are invisible to the free market. It's always amusing when free market fanatics don't know the very principles of what they advocate.

Surely you mean free market politicians and corporate lobbyists.

I suspect the problem is not so much the estimates, it's that a manager demands an estimate from their underlings, tells them they don't like that estimate and give them a quicker estimate, promises their customers certain completion by the quicker estimate, and then complains when the programmers can't finish on time or have buggy code. That's without the obligatory change in the project requirements halfway through. At some places the estimate is nothing more that bending over for the manager.

Obligatory Dilbert: http://dilbert.com/strip/2015-02-22

Glad to be of service. The more we hamper idiots trying to make self-improving intelligence without precautions the better. And yes, once neurosurgeons can use their intelligence to produce indefinite increases in intelligence in their subjects, the same danger applies to them. That might actually be more terrifying than a computer-based runaway increase in intelligence.

Fortunately, we are not yet at the point where a specific human or AI can arbitrarily increase its intelligence in an exponential manner. We still have time to think of what sort of ethics, values, and objectives such an entity ought have.

In fact, what we have now may very well be society increasing in intelligence in an exponential manner, at a seemingly safe rate of growth (we're increasing world population, increasing number of computers, increasing power of computers, increasing education level, increasing overall knowledge, using computers to design better computers, using computers to increase productivity, using computers to improve medicine). Perhaps there is hope.

Possibly true*, but it's not clear that an AI would not altruistically sacrifice it's own chance at the afterlife to prevent trillions of souls from going to hell. Besides, most Christians think the commandments in the Old Testament are not only obsolete, but also horrifying (eg few Christians support the Old Testament's death penalty for apostasy, working on the Sabbath, eating blood or fat, etc), though few of them wouldn't quote the OT where it suits them. Muslims are a bit more self-consistent about their religion, but they get a lot of flack (also shrapnel and bullets) for following their religious beliefs.

*However, the commandment against murder would not apply against other types of killing, such as execution for apostasy.

Investors propose ~$8000 billion 2013 budget for industry activities.

My fellow voters and I cannot perform our duties if policy decisions or testimony provided to us is influenced by undisclosed financial relationships. All gifts to our politicians need to be recorded, even, or rather especially, things like being treated to a nice restaurant by a lobbyist. Politicians are adults with their own money, they don't need to get treated.

Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it. --Proverbs 22:6

It might be easier to program in religious beliefs when the AI is just starting off, than to try to convince it afterwards. Of course, being a computer, you have to consider that an AI that thinks a religion is true, will act under the assumption that its religion is actually true, with results that will most likely horrify the average practitioner of said religion.

For example, an obvious way to act under values such as those implied by Christianity would be to murder or convert every non-Christian, with a little assistance from current lie-detection technologies to ensure honest. While this might seem immoral in the short term, there is little question it is what any rational person would do if they valued a person going to heaven at plus infinity and a person going to hell at minus infinity and given that religion is largely inherited from one's parents and society.

... which is something you are personally doing right now, by deciding to donate (or not) to one of the various charities that save people's lives. I believe you currently value the life of African strangers at far less than $1000 per life, am I right? Pleas don't feel I'm criticizing how little you value people's lives, as humans just aren't built to value distant strangers in more than an abstract unattached manner, but I do take issue when you criticize people for making the hard decisions you prefer to pretend don't exist. In the real world, pretending that human life is priceless means that you condemn a large group of people to die because you overspent your resources on one priceless person's life.

Just as an example, we need to decide how much to spend mitigating pollution. It is entirely possible to cut the pollution of any one industry to zero, but in doing so you will spend an absurd amount of resources that would have saved more lives if invested into eg medicine or car safety. On the other hand, you can place zero restrictions on pollution, but that would result in so much pollution that any resources you saved by eliminating the last bit of regulation will cost you more resources in sick days and medical care, not to mention lives lost. So there needs to be a balance, and to find the right balance you have to study and know how much you value things.

If you feel you're not getting your money's worth, why not cancel?