You surrender your credibility when you make such ridiculously hyperbolic statements.

Wrong. Households are divided into quintiles according to their gross income. Each quintile represents 20%, or one fifth, of all households. It is mathematically impossible for an "ever increasing share of the population" to be pushed into the bottom 20%, which is, by definition, limited to only 20%.

She is a native born American citizen. Her parents came to America from Vietnam. She is ethnically Chinese. Calling her "Chinese" makes as much sense as calling Barack Obama "Kenyan".

I hope this is a joke. Otherwise you should never even consider becoming a mathematician.

Indeed. Articles like this are not just stupid, they are harmful. By declaring every routine event to be "privacy violation", they are creating confusion and "outrage fatigue" which leads to apathy about the real violations of privacy that people should actually care about.

Using Google+ for authentication is not the same as using it as a social network. I use my Google+ ID to log in to a number of Google services. I never use it for socializing.

Yes. Wealth is created by the production of goods and services, not by "keeping people busy". So if we can produce more, with less labor, that is a good thing.

Then you fix the imbalance. In America, the bottom quintile already get 40% of their income from redistribution. Providing something like an earned income tax credit to top up the income of people in service jobs makes a lot more sense than keeping people in make-work manufacturing jobs, doing things that a machine can do better.

Yes. Innovation occurs during conception and design, not manufacturing. Apple makes hundreds of dollars for every iPhone sold, because they own the design. Foxconn makes ten bucks for manufacturing it.

But this is a silly discussion, since manufacturing is NOT declining in America. America is the world's second biggest manufacturer, with nearly $2 trillion in annual output. What has declined, is not manufacturing, but manufacturing employment, due to automation, and offshoring of the most labor intensive sectors. Since 1975, manufacturing employment in America has declined by 30%, while manufacturing output has doubled.

This argument comes up every time people discuss American internet rates. It is nonsense. The overall population density makes NO difference. Only the local density matters. There is no reason that someone living in New York City should pay more for internet because there is a lot of empty space in Arizona. Furthermore, there is little correlation between density and cost. Small towns generally do not have more expensive internet than large cities. And there are plenty of countries with population densities lower than America, that nonetheless have cheaper and faster internet.

Partly. Moore's Law should continue for several more iterations. After that, who knows? But other factors will also make a huge difference. Much of the computing power in SDCs goes toward image processing. That is currently done with standard CPUs. In the future, there will be massively parallel custom hardware for vision. Even the human optic system has parallel low level wetware for things like edge detection, motion detection, etc. So far, we haven't deployed much custom hardware for vision, because it is still a niche application. But that is changing because of SDCs, general purpose robotics, security, automation, etc.

If he actually believes that, then yes, I think he is confused. He is 49. If even 10% of life extension research pans out, he should easily live to 90. That is 41 years. Computers will be thousands, if not millions, of times more capable. Even if we don't yet have general AI by then, huge progress will be made in algorithms for computer vision, pervasive sensors, etc. Even ten years ago, the car that won the DARPA Grand Challenge was able to navigate dirt roads through the desert. We can do far better than that today. Even if every road has to be pre-mapped, so what? Mapping a road is 0.1% the cost of building the road. So the lack of maps is not going to cause SDCs to not happen. Maybe we won't yet have SDCs in five years, but unlikely that we won't have them in ten. To think that we won't have them in 40 years is just silly.

The question isn't whether someone would "ever" do it, but whether people would do it often enough for it to matter. Snipers occasionally shoot into traffic. But we don't consider that when we design roads and cars. Nonetheless, the algorithm to handle a sabotaged location sensor (RFID, Magenetic, or whatever) is brain dead obvious: pull over and stop the car. Stolen stop signs cause a few deaths every year. Those deaths would be eliminated with SDCs, because they could access their database and know the stop sign was supposed to be there. SDCs would likely be more resistant than human drivers to most forms of sabotage.

The SDC would notice the conflict between the RFID and the sensor data, and pull over and stop, while alerting the human driver/passenger.

Someone with sufficient education and expertise to clone an RFID would probably have better things to do than pull a stupid juvenile prank that could send them to prison for a long time. There are numerous ways that people can sabotage infrastructure and kill people. We can't prevent that, but it is rarely a problem, because most people are not motivated to murder random strangers. You can make human drivers "freak out" if you shoot at them with a sniper rifle. How often does that happen?

It can use OCR to read signs. It also can make a decision about whether school is in session. Since it cannot reliably detect when children are present, it would most likely just default to the lower speed.

Hand signals are a problem. Google is working on it. But SDCs aren't going to just pop up on the road one day. Their release will be coordinated with the police. So one solution is for the police to use LED flashlight wands that the SDCs are programmed to recognize.

Sure. An SDC would know the same why a human would. By reading the sign, or by "remembering" by accessing the database on that intersection.

I very much disagree with this assessment. Google's SDC has been tested thousands of times with a huge range of pedestrian scenarios. It may not be better than an alert and primed human, but it is almost certainly better than an average human, which is the important criteria. If I was walking across an intersection, I would trust a Google SDC far more than someone late for an appointment, driving a Chevy Tahoe with a cellphone in one hand, a Starbucks latte in the other, and two screaming kids in the back seat.