Oh no, we can -- and should -- speculate. Consider everything we can think of. Consider.

What we should NOT do is create a self-fulfilling prophecy by taking the verbal fecal output of doom-criers as the inevitable or even as the likely.

Since you mention cats, would you like an AI treating you like you treat the cats?

Frankly, that would be awesome.

Except that the opinion of people like Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates and Elon Musk is definitely worth more than any "majority" thinking differently.

Nosense. That's just hero worship mentality. Very much like listening to Barbara Streisand quack about her favorite obsessions.

Bill Gates' opinion is worth more than the average person's when it comes to running Microsoft. Elon Musk's opinion is worth more than the average person's when building Teslas and the like. Neither one of them (nor anyone else, for that matter) has anything but the known behavior of the only high intelligence we've ever met to go on (that's us, of course.) So it's purest guesswork, completely blind specuation. It definitely isn't a careful, measured evaluation. Because there's nothing to evaluate!

And while I'm not inclined to draw a conclusion from this, it is interesting that we've had quite a few very high intelligences in our society over time. None of them have posed an "existential crisis" for the the planet, the the human race, or my cats. Smart people tend ot have better things to do than annoy others... also, they can anticipate consequences. Will this apply to "very smart machines"? Your guess (might be) as good as mine. It's almost certainly better than Musk's or Gates', since we know they were clueless enough to speak out definitively on a subject they don't (can't) know anything about. Hawking likewise, didn't mean to leave him out.

Within the context of our recorded history, it's not the really smart ones that usually cause us trouble. It's the moderately intelligent fucktards who gravitate to power. [stares off in the general direction of Washington] (I know, I've giving some of them more credit than they deserve.)

You are crazy. Here is an example of the democratic process working, yet you desperately have to search for some conspiracy theory to continue your irrational hatred of the USA.

No. It's an example of a republic not working. What history books tend to call "decline and fall" when it's happened in the past. It is what happens when governments completely lose sight of, and concern with, and respect for, the principles that brought them into being.

This is real life, not a Tom Clancy novel.

Oh, we know. In Clancy's works the US TLAs are the good guys. That's not been the case for decades now.

It's deep, but it's dry. And it has a sharp rock floor at about the 100 foot level.

It's just from breathing Google's hot air for too long. Don't worry, I've quit.

I guess you haven't tried to actually use a Google product from the inside. Fundamentally broken, obvious and repeatable bugs have gone unfixed for years, but as they tell us: "they're working on it." (cough[Shopping]cough)

If it's in a Google car, they'll claim it isn't evil, while being really underhanded (cough[IP rights]cough), but it won't work right (cough[Shopping]cough), and just as you you commit a significant amount of resources to it, they'll either discontinue it (cough[cough]cough) or sideline it. Or never, ever add the features that would make it something actually reasonable (cough[Gmail]cough) Or simply blow out the decent features (cough[Maps]cough) Or never bother to bring it to a level of performance that is even moderately reasonable (cough[Google+]cough)

Unless it never becomes popular. In that case, it might hang around forever. But still under-performing / broken / evil, etc.

No, I'm not bitter. I love when a company wastes my time as if it's worth nothing. Finally I realized that trying to work with Google was making my time worth nothing. So in a way, they had the right idea from the start.

The only car analogy I can come up with is the insufficiently Humvees the government gave our soldiers to drive over IEDs in.

Not a tech dinosaur.

A tech prokaryote-like organism from the Archean.

Even a new instance of Firefox is laggy and slow on my 8-core, 3 GHz, OS X machine. Browsing Amazon has become an extreme exercise in patience.

Starting it fresh with about 6 GB of RAM free, Firefox continuously and greedily consumes memory until I have to quit it to make it give back the gigabytes it has swallowed like an overweight, crazed hot-dog eating contest professional.

One positive thing I will say about Firefox is that even with those major warts continuously unaddressed, it still performs better than Safari. And Firefox is*much* better at dealing with the whole "outdated flash" issue. It asks me instead of smacking me in the face with "you can't do that", so I'm inspired to raise digit #3 to Firefox far less often than I am with Safari.

Sigh.

I could really give the south end of a northbound rat for Netflix on a browser. I have a capable dedicated system which is much more pleasant to watch Netflix-y things on. But I sure do wish FF could just browse places like Amazon without killing off my resources. After all, it's a browser. It seems to me, naive and unduly optimistic fool that I am, that it should be able to do such things. Well.

When will application and OS vendors ever understand that it truly is their obligation to make what they release actually work properly before they slather on more features or proceed to a new version?

I know. Never. *Sigh*

I'd demand you FF enthusiasts to get off my virtual lawn now, but FireFox has grown so large and unwieldy, I can't even tell if you're out there any longer. Hello? Hello? Oh, hey, no RAM left. Again. [gets virtual shotgun out]

I really don't see how, in an age of universally available internet pron, anyone's going to get excited enough by a picture of some tits to care.

Perhaps some time studying the works of US legislators will be of use to you, then. According to them, it's quite obvious, and You Must Be Protected From This. Also, consider that the above cases are real people doing real things. Not actors in pixel-addled MPEGs. You can actually interact with them. Much more pleasantly, too.

Having said that, I think you might want to look a little closer at the last paragraph of my post. :)

My question: Is this trend a progression to the ultimate conclusion where the browser becomes the operating system and our physical hardware becomes little more than a web appliance?

No. And the "trend" referred to here is 99.999999% junkware. Slow junkware. Junkware that typically invades privacy and/or bombards with ads. You can't compete with my image editor. You can't compete with my word processor. You can't even compete with my text editor. You can't compete with my SDR software. You can't compete with my database. You can't compete with my media center. You can't compete with my fish tank controller. You can't guarantee that you, your ISP, my ISP, the connection(s) between them, the name servers, the competition for bandwidth at any one (or more points) will work to my satisfaction. Or at all. You can't even promise the app will BE there (cough, Google, cough) when I need it. Or that it will work properly in my chosen browser. And you're almost *certain* to screw it up so badly that it does all manner of things with rollovers, popping up garbage ads and menus without an instantiating click or drag or keypress from me.

And the other .000001% ??? Minimalist web-apps that never, ever hold a candle to a real app running on your own hardware.

Seriously, even the *speculation* is ridiculous.

From TFS:

...detect brain activity with EEG and translate it into what someone truly thinks about, say, a new product, advertising, or packaging.

Excellent. We'll be heading back into using sex to sell, then. I look
forward to the return of everything from short skirts on pretty airline
attendants, euro-style bare-top commercials, and of course booth
babes. And they'll probably FINALLY add a cheerleader channel to
the NFL stuff. :)

Bring it on.

Yesterday, I saw the most amazing "Joe Average" used to sell something.
Hardly worth my time, much less going to catch my interest.
But if there was a hot babe... I would have paid attention.
Totally.

Really? Are you that simpleminded?

All I can tell you is stay away from ice cream stands, and prep for the apocalypse.

You have completely mis-analyzed the cause here. Socialism isn't what killed those people. Psychotic lust for power, pathological levels of racism, and a massive dose of sociopathy is what killed them (and injured many others.) Same thing for atheism. Stalin was pro-atheist; but atheism was in no way the cause for any of his evil deeds. All atheism is, is a lack of belief in a god or gods. There is no collection of tenets, no canon, no holy book of advice. Those people who like to say "oh, but atheism caused all these deaths" are making the same mistake you are.

Too convoluted to understand? Try this:

When the ice cream vendor strangles the children who show up at his stand, you don't point the finger at Ben and Jerry's.

When people do crazy and evil things, you need to look at factors that actually dictate the behaviors you are seeing. Socialism doesn't dictate killing anyone. That's your first clue -- and it's a big one. It should be sufficient.