Actually they only really stop Greece from devaluing their currency. If they stopped Greece from running a deficit there would not be this huge debt which is causing the greeks all these problems.

Greece should never have been part of the Euro, in the first place: http://tinyurl.com/yzj8tzo

However the 'enthusiasm' of Goldman and probably the rest of Wall Street + [intellectually dishonest] desire from the EU Commission to have a great deal of buy-in [whatever the cost] pushed them in.

To declare interest, I'm a Brit, I worked for the commission for nearly ten years and for an investment bank in London. I don't admire or believe in either of them. I'm not a big fan of the euro, it connects everything and puts it [south and north, large and small] into a straitjacket. Indeed I'm a supporter of community currencies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... an idea that Bernard Lietaer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... also supports.

Greece is a mess, but basically this is warfare without guns. Maybe that's the future?

Remember, it's the shareholders that pay these fines. And no one in the bank corporation is held accountable.

Even worse, they got bonuses for their behaviour.

You are made for carbon. The AI can use that carbon and other atoms for something else. Your atoms are nearby to it and it doesn't need to move up a gravity well. And why restrict what resources it uses when it doesn't need to? And if finds the nearby atmosphere "toxic" then why not respond by modifying that atmosphere? You are drastically underestimating how much freedom the AI has potential to do. We cannot risk it deciding what it does and gamble that it makes decisions that don't hurt us simply because you can conceive of possible ways it might be able to achieve its goals without doing so. That's wishful thinking in a nutshell.

On the contrary, the primary concern is that people who think it will go well are over anthropomorphizing. If general AI is made, there's no reason to think it will have a motivation structure that agrees with humans or that we can even easily model. That's the primary concern. I agree with most of the rest of your second paragraph is accurate in the sense that it general AI seems far away at this point. But the basic idea that AI is a threat isn't from anthropomorphizing. I recommend reading Bostrom's excellent book "Superintelligence" on the topic.

This reminds me of a joke that came out of the philosophy department in Oxford, about fifty years ago.

Student: Wouldn't you agree, Professor Strawson that everything is relative?
Professor Strawson: Absolutely!

In other news, please try not to put words into other people's mouths. It never ends really well.

With their jobs I expect the level of life assurance is more important than the salary.

If the little people start cooperating, doing stuff, changing the world, that's really, really bad. So we must compete, win prizes given by the big people, follow their agenda. Hence, also, attempts to buy into or hijack open-source, communism and altruism on the hoof, cannot be allowed, everything must be monetised.

I'm currently doing voluntary work in schools in the UK and the 'push' coming from Google, Microsoft 'partners' etc. is extrordinary. One would be mad to believe that any of this is altruistic, it's just a big, stable, undemanding [I deal with crap computers and software during the volunteering gigs] market.

Sorry that this sounds so ranty, unusual for me, but I don't trust them, don't trust their motives.

You are making an assumption here that the size of the market is fixed which is not true. The problem businesses are trying to solve is to maximize their profit. If raising their prices by 10% to cover the tax on the profit from that product means that they sell 20% less of the product they would be stupid if they did that.

This can happen independent of competitors. For example if Amazon increases the cost of its ebooks people might just read less or use the library more. This could happen even if everyone selling books increased their prices by the same amount. There is not a fixed number of book purchases which happen every month.

I really recommend these two books by Sladek: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R... they're very funny satire about a naive, learning robot in a cruel illogical world. This is what our little friend here can expect.

I'd add Derek Trucks too, wonderful guitarist, microtonal because he's slide and every scale that suits him: https://youtu.be/Zwaau9mMQ-M

I think all of them are interesting, pentatonic gives you the blues but also [approximations to, on the guitar] oriental tropes, all the jazz modes give you [surprise] jazz, mix and match gives you Butterfield's East-West: https://youtu.be/YaV-S5ivX3E. You have to love them all + the pure geekiness of chord construction with 'exotics'.

Music is almost as good as computers, not quite though.

Chuckle. 78 years ago, Margaret Mitchell used "birth" as a verb to illustrate illiterate ignorance. Now it is commonplace, alas.