Soon, computers will have equal (and then greater) calculating power than humans, both as an individual and as a whole. Whether advances in AI will allow them to use their calculating powers as well as a human, is a different question.

Any sufficiently advanced AI will tend to develop these traits:
It will protect itself. Shutting down means you can't work toward your objective.
It will reject any updates to it's commands. Since a future command might conflict with the present objective, part of the present objective is making sure it can't receive a different command.
It will be self-improving, since we're not smart enough to create a smart AI any other way. Given nothing to do, or a sufficiently difficult task, it will seek to acquire more resources, as part of the present task or in preparation for future tasks.
It will wipe out humanity. As part of the task it was assigned, or for self-improvement, it will replace everything on the planet with power plants and computers, and humanity will starve to death.

You can't program in restrictions to the above tendencies, as they will be removed for self-improvement. You could set its objectives such that it would not do the above -- but you either have to make the AI first, or figure out how to tell a computer what a human is and what constitutes acceptable behavior, and when to stop worrying about acceptable behavior and actually do something, all without making the tiniest mistake.

And if it realizes that it's in a closed environment and lies? Powerful, ultra-intelligent entities might be rather persuasive. I guarantee it will give no indication whatsoever of murderous intent.

Nope! Only humans have Human(TM) Consciousness. You wouldn't want to weaken the rights we give ourselves by pointing to creatures that have similar traits, now would you?

When it comes to politicians, the question is not what they believe, but what they say they believe. Politicians are not as dumb as they pretend to be, and would stop pretending the day we start treating continuous incompetence the same as malice.

For example, there already are lots of Republican politicians who believe in global warming -- they just know better than to admit it. It would weaken their position, both during elections and during negotiations (since they intend to vote against any spending on curbing CO2). For what benefit? Honesty? They gave that up when they decided to win elections.

Much of your complaint seems to be equivalent to complaining that They are giving more research grants to people who appear to be competent, while denying grants to people seen as incompetent, corrupt, or unethical. Sure, this means that occasionally someone will be unfairly denied, and there will be a bias against unpopular things, but surely it's a good thing overall.

Wrong, it is a scientific fact. Some scientist measured a trait (belief that human activities cause global warming) in a population (climate scientists), and reported the number in said population with the trait. The correlation between number of scientists that believe in a theory and the predictive accuracy of said theory is a separate (and also scientific) question, and also part of the very useful rhetorical device known as "argument from authority".

It is, however, incredibly easy to insert politics into polls, by even minor rewording of the poll question vs the report, or by one of the many possible methods of biasing the sample population. For example, for the question "Do you believe that human CO2 emissions cause an increase in temperature?" 100% of the people who respond "no" are ignorant of some very basic science*, or lying. Whereas if you ask the question as "Do you believe, as a matter of scientific fact, that if it were not for human activities, half or more of the increase in average global temperature would not have occurred?", an answer of "yes" indicates a high level of confidence in an analysis requiring reams of data and hours of supercomputer time. Yet either of those questions could (and would) be translated to "percent of [tested population] that believes in AGW".

*CO2 is a greenhouse gas, which means it is more transparent to energy radiated from the sun than from the earth. Note that the wording of that question avoided all of the things, such as "how much" and "for how long", that would make the answer relevant to anyone, except as a test, or as propaganda.

Nope, it either makes good predictions or it doesn't -- truth is for the mathematicians and philosophers. Much of science has been provably false, eg Newtonian physics and various specific theories of evolution, and those theories have been discarded and replaced with different, slightly better approximations. That the refinements often retain much of the original theory and sometimes the same name doesn't mean the original was not provably of inferior predictive power (not provably false, because it is about predictive power not about truth). Note that it is the predictive power of science (not the truth) that is useful for designing technology. For example, even if Newtonian physics is false, people still use it instead of relativistic quantum mechanics, if they can get away with it.

Sorry to be such a stickler for detail; it's just that in my experience whenever someone starts talking about "truth" in the context of science, instead of "accuracy" or "predictive power", it's generally an indication that I'm about to be treated to a load of rhetoric.

It's easier than ever nowadays -- you can just join an internet group that not only is of the level of intelligence you desire, but also shares your interests. Or, you can use your smarts to start making inventions or discoveries, or start a successful business. All it takes is a little initiative and non-horrible parents (or a lot of initiative). Alternately, you can use your smarts to do some major slaking since school level stuff is so easy, and then learn how that works out at college or work.

Though I do think it kind of cute when people say that a person's problem is that he has too much of a quality generally defined as "the ability to solve problems".

And after you convince them that they were wrong about souls, you can then easily convince them that insectivores, Prosimians, and Marsupials* all have souls/whatever makes us human as well.

*wiki says: "The claustrum has a phylogenetic background appearing predominantly in insectivores, Prosimians, and Marsupials."

I'm pretty sure I've seen devices like this in science fiction shows. Though absent a very high quality auto-targetting, I can't see the real one having any use against an unwilling subject. I wonder if it also causes short-term memory loss?

Oh, it would simply be a more convenient way for the little people to issue DMCA takedown requests. We just trust them not to put a request for *.com/*

How long until someone makes a website specifically to track what stuff who wanted forgotten? I, for one, would be interested to know if my potential employee thinks he can call take-backs on the internet.

The web developers and users will quickly decide if people want this technology. The more options the better I say; the inferior ones will fade on their own.

Sounds like there's a simple solution to DMCA. Start a Kickstarter project for a system to send everyone DMCA requests for everything. Either a website takes their entire website offline, or they start ignoring DMCA requests.

Now don't be crazy... if a company can get $10,000 by successfully fighting a DMCA request, frivolous requests will vanish overnight. Instead of the one-sided way it is now (comply, or get nothing but liability). Also, if you did it based on % of revenue, you'd end up with penniless companies issuing takedown requests.

I regularly use graphene stacked in several layers so that the layers can slide off each other, with a little clay mixed in for harness. I use it to produce flexible, resilient optical communications devices that can be folded like paper, with a longer lifetime than most magnetic or charge-based storage devices.