From my experience (almost 20 years now as a developer) anyone who's been working in the field has business knowledge simply as a result of working. How to deal with people, coworkers and customers, is something not normally taught in school.

I can understand the sentiment that PMs are useless, but I've worked with a few that have been amazing. In a lot of ways I treat them as my secretary, dealing with the customers, getting assets, keeping me on time, mediating arguments, etc.

I also think a PM with a technical background is superior because they have more realistic goals & timelines. The best PMs are the ones that can say no to customers.

Agreed. Your selling point is your knowledge of business as well as technical skills. That combination is ideal for project management or business analyst, and you can get certified relatively quickly.

  http://www.pmi.org/certificati...

General "Buck" Turgidson: Doctor, you mentioned the ratio of ten women to each man. Now, wouldn't that necessitate the abandonment of the so-called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned?

Dr. Strangelove: Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious... service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.

Ambassador de Sadesky: I must confess, you have an astonishingly good idea there, Doctor.

Divide by 12 for each person to give a yes or no and a comment, and that's about 2 minutes per person.

Thank you for the thorough response. This discussion has been extremely interesting to me.

I asked my friend what she thought about your comment and this was her response:

" This guy just has old information, although he is saying stuff that we believed within the last ten years. Here are two main points on which I would contend with him, based on recent research:

- The idea that the primary difference between human brains and non-human brains is our “overdeveloped” neocortex has been highly questioned lately. As of the last 5 years, there is strong evidence that the human brain is a scaled up primate brain:

1. Azevedo, F. A., Carvalho, L. R., Grinberg, L. T., Farfel, J. M., Ferretti, R. E., Leite, R. E., ... & HerculanoHouzel, S. (2009). Equal numbers of neuronal and nonneuronal cells make the human brain an isometrically scaledup primate brain. Journal of Comparative Neurology, 513, 532-541.

2. Herculano-Houzel, S. (2009). The human brain in numbers: a linearly scaled-up primate brain. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 3, 31.

- The idea that humans don’t experience much neurogenesis outside of older structures in the brain. Of course it depends on what you consider “old,” but the point is that humans show neurogenesis throughout their lifespan across the brain. However, in defence of the commenter’s point, this is indeed a hotly debated area, especially as to whether primates don’t show neurogenesis in adulthood (see the third citation below):

1. Eriksson, P. S., Perfilieva, E., Björk-Eriksson, T., Alborn, A. M., Nordborg, C., Peterson, D. A., & Gage, F. H. (1998). Neurogenesis in the adult human hippocampus. Nature medicine, 4, 1313-1317.

2. Jin, K., Wang, X., Xie, L., Mao, X. O., Zhu, W., Wang, Y., ... & Greenberg, D. A. (2006). Evidence for stroke-induced neurogenesis in the human brain.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 103, 13198-13202.

3. Rakic, P. (2002). Neurogenesis in adult primate neocortex: an evaluation of the evidence. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 3, 65-71.
"

Communication & efficiency are a bit generic terms. With 'massively parallel computations' you can increase communication speeds & efficiency for processing unsorted information. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...

The first 'species' we create will probably not solve those problems either, but at the very least it could build a newer better species. The moment we create something better than ourselves, we will have beaten the game of evolution.

I think the main benefit would be to solve Grover's Algorithm, since an AI would be dealing with a large amount of unsorted information.

I was just having this discussion with a friend of mine who is a professor in this area. We were discussing the foundations of intelligence and this was her response:

" From my perspective, the best place to look for the basis of human intelligence would be the comparison of other animals’ brains to humans’ — because we are obviously the most intelligent animal, or at least the most agentic with our civilization-across-all-climates thing. Number of neurons alone cannot be the biological substrate of intelligence, because animals like whales have more neurons than we do*. It seems like the “scale” of the brain matters very much, too. Primates (e.g., humans) rule the intelligence hierarchy, and all primates have much more compact brains than other mammals; our neurons can communicate much faster, because they are closer together and properly insulated. However, among primates, humans have the same scale of neurons as other primates but we also have the most neurons out of all the primates (i.e., our brain efficiency is the same as chimps, but our brain is larger in size). So, it’s clearly a little bit of both: having a lot of neurons is good, but the efficiency of those neurons is of fundamental importance.

Human brains still have a few interesting differences from other primate brains, which I think further hint at the basis of intelligence: humans continue to generate new neurons (“neurogenesis”) throughout our lives, whereas primates have very little if any neurogenesis after birth! That’s got to count for something. Also, it seems that connections between the neurons in human brains change more rapidly in some areas of the cortex than other areas, whereas we are pretty positive that changes between neuronal connections occur at an equal rate throughout all areas of primates’ brains. This means that different areas of human brains can mature at different rates, which is probably rather helpful for us. Conversely, primates’ brains mature constantly across all regions, no matter what their function and when in development it is needed."

Assuming she is correct, quantum computing would greatly increase the amount of connections & speed between computer 'neurons', assuming we are talking about an AI programmed with a neural network.

I have been living in Costa Rica for over five years now and have never had problems with the cops. The few times I've been pulled over (for legitimate reasons) I was able to bribe my way out of it. To speak of 'intrusions' shows your lack of experience here. I have never felt more free than in this country and I grew up in the United States.

Maybe fine money should be donated to charity instead of given to the police department.

It's the beginning of Pinky and the Brain.

Actually the 2008 economic crisis can largely be blamed on the Clinton administration. They deregulated the financial market, specifically the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall law. And, to state that the economy has been fixed by President Obama greatly exaggerates both the recovery and his influence on it.