The whole "it's just a question of understanding and then engineering" argument does not acknowledge that something like human consciousness may not be magic, but it might be unreproducable due to acting at a lower level than we can perceive or manipulate.

I know Roger Penrose gets a lot of stick here, but there may be something in his idea that at the quantum level we will simply never be able to model a human brain fully.

The easiest way to disprove this would, of course, be to build an artificial conscious entity.

But only 2 years to walk and talk, so I think using "we will have to wait 16 years even if we do develop AI" is a bit of a feeble excuse. (Never mind that there is no obvious reason why an AI should have to follow human development exactly).

If the human brain (and more importantly human consciousness) is just a very big software model, we should be able to duplicate one already, shouldn't we? There is a huge amount of computing power available nowadays, why waste it on trivialities like predicting the weather slightly more accurately?

If you asked a sample of Americans whether violence was never justified to defend themslelves, I imagine a lot less than 64% would agree.

It depends on what question you ask, and how you ask it.

In Britain, it's even harder than in France to acquire guns. The two psychos who killed Lee Rigby had to run him down in a car and use blades.

You can't stop desperate people murdering other people, but you can certainly make it more difficult for them to commit mass atrocities.

Do you seriously believe that machine guns and high explosives should be available to buy anonymously off the shelf in a supermarket?

As this wasn't in the US, it's not very likely.

Sieg fucking Heil.

Just because Uber themselves have public liability insurance (and you're right, it would be extraordinary if a business didn't) doesn't mean that an individual driving for Uber is insured to take paying passengers.

They are two totally different things, and my understanding was that drivers don't actually work for Uber, but that Uber act as a middle man between driver and passenger. I hope I'm wrong.

And the idea that autonomous vehicles will replace taxis and cars within a decade is frankly laughable. Even if self-driving cars were a technically solved problem, the economics do not stack up, unless someone magically finds a way of making them cheap enough.

Just because I write in my terms and conditions "any attempt at unauthorised access to my computer systems means I can murder you" does not grant me immunity from the laws against murdering people.

No, they're not. A bunch of billionaires are funding them handsomely, presumably on the basis that if enough laws get broken, everyone will just give up with the rule of law, and revert to a pure laissez faire system. At which point the billionaires will be happy.

There is no other logical explanation for investing so much in a fucking taxi company.

PS what is up with the slashdot layout? There are huge slabs of unlovely grey everywhere, it looks like Day One of a "build yourself a website in 7 days" course.