"My impression is that law enforcement has gotten entirely too lazy and to disrespectful of the rights and well-being of the citizens that are supposed to protect."

You have no clue what's really going on in the world... the elites are afraid of political awakening. This (mass surveillance) by the NSA and abuse by law enforcement is just more part and parcel of state suppression of dissent against corporate interests. They're worried that the more people are going to wake up and corporate centers like the US and canada may be among those who also awaken. See this vid with Zbigniew Brzezinski, former United States National Security Advisor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Science on reasoning, reason doesn't work the way we thought it did:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Brezinski at a press conferenec conference

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

The real news:
http://therealnews.com/t2/ [therealnews.com]

http://www.amazon.com/Democrac...

Look at the following graphs:

http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...

And then...

WIKILEAKS: U.S. Fought To Lower Minimum Wage In Haiti So Hanes And Levis Would Stay Cheap

http://www.businessinsider.com...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Free markets?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

http://www.amazon.com/Empire-I...

"We now live in two Americas. One—now the minority—functions in a print-based, literate world that can cope with complexity and can separate illusion from truth. The other—the majority—is retreating from a reality-based world into one of false certainty and magic. To this majority—which crosses social class lines, though the poor are overwhelmingly affected—presidential debate and political rhetoric is pitched at a sixth-grade reading level. In this “other America,” serious film and theater, as well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins of society.

In the tradition of Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism and Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, Pulitzer Prize-winner Chris Hedges navigates this culture—attending WWF contests, the Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas, and Ivy League graduation ceremonies—to expose an age of terrifying decline and heightened self-delusion."

"“A witty saying proves nothing.” --Voltaire"

The problem you're not seeing is, you have no facts and are not even qualified to ask the question (aka feasability) all you are doing is making shit up in your imagination, this universe works according to the laws of nature. It's not a magical god device. Any intelligence is going to have major trade offs, for instance certain animals are better than us at certain tasks because they traded one skill for another. The same will apply to any future intelligence because it is made of matter and energy. Not only that, you can't ask the question intelligibly until the facts showing its possible and feasible are there to begin with.

“The technotronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities. ”--Zbigniew Brzezinski, Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technetronic Era, Former United States National Security Advisor.

http://www.amazon.com/Between-...

The (mass surveillance) by the NSA is just more part and parcel of state suppression of dissent against corporate interests. They're worried that the more people are going to wake up and corporate centers like the US and canada may be among those who also awaken. See this vid with Zbigniew Brzezinski, former United States National Security Advisor.

http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...

http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...

http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...

And then...

WIKILEAKS: U.S. Fought To Lower Minimum Wage In Haiti So Hanes And Levis Would Stay Cheap

http://www.businessinsider.com...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Free markets?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

http://www.amazon.com/Empire-I...

http://www.amazon.com/Democrac...

"We now live in two Americas. One—now the minority—functions in a print-based, literate world that can cope with complexity and can separate illusion from truth. The other—the majority—is retreating from a reality-based world into one of false certainty and magic. To this majority—which crosses social class lines, though the poor are overwhelmingly affected—presidential debate and political rhetoric is pitched at a sixth-grade reading level. In this “other America,” serious film and theater, as well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins of society.

In the tradition of Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism and Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, Pulitzer Prize-winner Chris Hedges navigates this culture—attending WWF contests, the Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas, and Ivy League graduation ceremonies—to expose an age of terrifying decline and heightened self-delusion."

On reason:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

"You're objecting to a hypothetical discussion about possible future technologies by demanding evidence that we can produce that technology today"

That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.– Christopher Hitchens.

The problem is your suppositions are not based on evidence, they are fantasy based fear mongering. The only "AI" you know of is electronic chip based, you don't know of any other. Therefore your argument is without any evidence, and hence can safely be rejected. It's like "Supposing leprechauns exists, what can be done to stop them?" It's a nonsensical question because if I asked you what "real AI" was you couldn't even define it, so you're asking an undefined question because you think the word "real AI" has some real meaning but if I asked you to point to a "real AI" you couldn't. Words are not reality if you can't point to an example.

"I was amazed to read major American newspapers and to see for myself how drastically what they were reporting was different than what was actually going on."

The elites are afraid of political awakening, and you really don't understand what science has discovered about the brian... you dear sir, don't live in 'reality'. See the science:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Also a real news site:

http://therealnews.com/t2/

The (mass surveillance) by the NSA is just more part and parcel of state suppression of dissent against corporate interests. They're worried that the more people are going to wake up and corporate centers like the US and canada may be among those who also awaken. See this vid with Zbigniew Brzezinski, former United States National Security Advisor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Look at the following graphs:

http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...

And then...

WIKILEAKS: U.S. Fought To Lower Minimum Wage In Haiti So Hanes And Levis Would Stay Cheap

http://www.businessinsider.com...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Free markets?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

http://www.amazon.com/Empire-I...

http://www.amazon.com/Democrac...

"We now live in two Americas. One—now the minority—functions in a print-based, literate world that can cope with complexity and can separate illusion from truth. The other—the majority—is retreating from a reality-based world into one of false certainty and magic. To this majority—which crosses social class lines, though the poor are overwhelmingly affected—presidential debate and political rhetoric is pitched at a sixth-grade reading level. In this “other America,” serious film and theater, as well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins of society.

In the tradition of Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism and Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, Pulitzer Prize-winner Chris Hedges navigates this culture—attending WWF contests, the Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas, and Ivy League graduation ceremonies—to expose an age of terrifying decline and heightened self-delusion."

"The idea that it could be foolish should only add to the idea that it would be dangerous."

So is all life on planet earth, life on earth besides humanity are already "foreign AI". So I don't share your concerns because human beings are projecting their animal psyche on a piece of hardware that has no conscious awareness, it would be like misprogramming your toaster or the mars rover.

You're not thinking straight any intelligent AI built by human beings would be built to be robust or durable like our brains, our brains have massive redundancy. Consider our brains don't just keel over when they get damaged by stray cosmic rays or other problems like being tackled in contact sports, there is a slow degradation in ability. So all you'd have to do to an AI is discover it's strenghts and weaknesses no matter how intelligent it is because intelligence doesn't mean anything by itself, say your stephen hawking, suppose we gave him super AI, he'd still be in a wheel chair unable to do much of anything because in order to heal himself he is subject to the laws of physics and biology, aka there's no guarantee that there's this thing called infinite self-modifiable improvement since all improvements have trade offs, if you doubt this consider engineering CPU's like the pentium 4, the P4 had many stages to hit higher clock frequency. You can google "P4 Pipeline stages" or such things to figure out what the trade offs were, but you don't get everything. Many animals have superior abilities to human beings but there was a trade off because there is only so much space and limits on how certain matter can be configured in that space.

You're completely forgetting that the universe has limits, it's not this infinite god device. Life took billions of years to create human intelligence, that means that any improvement will have peaks and hard walls that are not easily jumped given the laws of physics. Look at what happened to CPU clock speed it hit a giant brick wall almost 10 years ago, around 2006 we topped out at 3.4-3.6 ghz, all CPU's are still released at 3-4ghz and can't even go little past 5 Ghz. AI will have massively similar problems because not all problems are parallelizable, same way GPU's won't replace CPU's because CPU's specialize in sequential instructions that are dependent on the order in which they are sequentially arranged. This puts a hard limit on AI's ability to solve problems. Check out ahmdal's law.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

"I think, however, that part of the reason scifi writers have written stories about out-of-control AIs so many times is that it should be a valid concern."

I don't considering that most human beings are incapable of higher level thought. Right now most citizens throughout the world are voting against their own interests. The ease at which mankind (a real intelligence) can be deluded and tricked means that any intelligence of sufficient complexity can be tricked, it costs resources to double check information. A significant amount of time and energy. The laws of physics put strict limits on AI and not to mention human beings have nuclear weapons, and can also simply deny AI a power source (shut off the electricity).

AI's will consume energy, just like any other form of life. All one has to do is deprive it of resources and starve the beast, or simply overwhelm it with false information. AI's are not gods, they are subject to the laws of nature and will have all sorts of bugs and special cases that can frustrate that intelligence. Just like human beings have serious flaws as a result of their evolutionary history. So too will AI's have limits defined by the universes structure.

"We humans are intelligent enough to form effective and equitable social structures, we just don't have the collective stomach for removing the saboteurs from our society."

But that means you're not intelligent if you leave the saboteurs alone. Some science on reasoning, someone can tell you what is true and you won't believe them!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

"Just because you assume something is "fundamentally irrational" doesn't mean it is."

There are countless examples of capitalisms fundamental irrationality and waste in terms of natural resources. You should learn some science, I can tell you the facts and you won't believe them!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

"Gradually, particularly over the past 75 years or so, most of these aspects of the original governmental structure have gradually been overruled -- often in the name of "democracy" or "protecting the people" or providing aid and help to the poor through a central system."

Without this helping the poor capitalism would have fallen, let's be honest here. The american/Europe/English capitalist governments all had these problems because capitalism is fundamentally irrational at based reflecting the irrationality of mankind. All these changes were required to keep the capitalist system going. Say what you want but Lenin was correct about imperalism being the highest stage of capitalism.

http://www.marxists.org/archiv...

The reality is human beings just aren't intelligent enough to form long lasting social orders because too many people have negative evolutionary characteristics they've inherited from the past. Our primate psychology is at the root of everything regardless of what collection of words and labels one flies under. The biology is still there.

"Because when you do this, you are giving google information on all the websites you visit."

You must be new here, almost every website you visit has ad/trackers embedded in the webpage. Go get ghostery and look at all the shit on slashdot by itself.

https://www.ghostery.com/en/

Go to other places on the web and see all "hidden servers" you're pulling data from. All the webpage has to do is refer to the server for them to track you. There is an infinite number of ways for you to be tracked without your consent. It's the nature of the internet itself unfortunately, any time you need to communicate (send a packet) you need a receiving address and a destination.

... regarding feedback, see bret Victor on this. Computer programming is different from building bridges because every time you change code you change everything that interacts with it. Whereas the laws of nature for bridge building don't change, every time you modify code you end up having network effects that effect every instruction afterward.

http://blog.codinghorror.com/v...

Since most (non multi-core) code happens sequentially. To see this, imagine an extremely simple computer with only a few KB of memory, all you are going to do is draw something. Every time you add more code, you change the nature of the problem, this is hard to see but the best way to visualize it is as a "ring" that expands or contracts vs the computers resouces. We'll use a metaphor for hitting targets for the goal you want to accomplish: Say the target you want to hit is a circle of a given size and everytime you grow the ring (code) you begin to miss the target (aka the ring grows because of more work/timing/etc). You have to stay roughly the size of the fixed target but you don't fully grasp the nature of the problem, partially because the feedback process is broken with coding tools and performance against the problem (requirements) you are trying to solve is unknown until implementation.

... people funding AAA kickstarters know nothing about AAA development costs. I knew Planetary annihilation was taking everyone for a ride because to make a real RTS you need 10 million minimum (thats whta supreme commander cost). Trying to do a full fledged RTS on 2.5 million isn't going to cut it. Same can be said for elite dangerous. Braben is taking his fans for a ride because he wants to ride the money into an MMO to make $. He damn well knows a AAA game costs a huge amount to create.

The problem is crowdfunding so far has only been able to get enough funding to get back to maybe mid 90's level games like Shadowrun, Wasteland 2 and Pillars of eternity. Both wasteland 2 and shadowrun ended up being short on content . Shadowrun and Faster than light have only been the few real kickstarter successes in terms of game quality. There are some others that have flown below the radar but I can't name them at the moment.

I'm looking forward to Next car game (Now wreckfest) and Star citizen. But I'm not holding my breath of star citizen.

... compiling dossiers on everyone. Since in order to use the internet you need to use a search engine, a good idea is to look at you chrome browser history and note the title, time, where you visited, is there, then combine this with analytics and cookies (machine identification) remember this is the kind of shit and more they got behind closed doors. This will be used to pro-actively deny employment to people and 'screen' people for their political views/sites/news they visit/any health problems/etc. i.e. it allows corporations unprecedented insight into the flaws of our evolved nervous system and minds. We are not "free" in any way or form our minds were shaped by evolution and they have a lot of problems reasoning or perceiving reality, if in doubt see here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

They are trying to map political dissident to pre-emptively strike against political change using science and big data they are fervently trying to figure out how to regain their control, since they know media's days are numbered with newer generations. So they are learning techniques in controlling populations and manipulating public opinion on social media, to socially engineer how people think, etc. The reality is america has been the greatest success in propaganda in human history, most americans were hyper capitalist, virulently anti-communist for the last few decades and the upper class would like the working classes to keep voting against their own interests to keep their ill gotten wealth. So if you vote for D&R you are one of the illusioned and the elites aren't worried about you at all because you are politically illiterate just like they want. They want you all to vote democrats and republicans so as not to rock the boat. They don't want political change to manifest outside the political system (aka threat to corporate power).

This (mass surveillance) is just more part and parcel of state suppression of dissent against corporate interests. They're worried that the more people are going to wake up and corporate centers like the US and canada may be among those who also awaken. See this vid with Zbigniew Brzezinski, former United States National Security Advisor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Look at the following graphs:

http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...

And then...

WIKILEAKS: U.S. Fought To Lower Minimum Wage In Haiti So Hanes And Levis Would Stay Cheap

http://www.businessinsider.com...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Free markets?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

http://www.amazon.com/Empire-I...

"We now live in two Americas. One—now the minority—functions in a print-based, literate world that can cope with complexity and can separate illusion from truth. The other—the majority—is retreating from a reality-based world into one of false certainty and magic. To this majority—which crosses social class lines, though the poor are overwhelmingly affected—presidential debate and political rhetoric is pitched at a sixth-grade reading level. In this “other America,” serious film and theater, as well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins of society.

In the tradition of Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism and Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, Pulitzer Prize-winner Chris Hedges navigates this culture—attending WWF contests, the Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas, and Ivy League graduation ceremonies—to expose an age of terrifying decline and heightened self-delusion."