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.)

iot != cloud

No. "IoT" most definately == cloud. Everything that actually respects your privacy came out before "IoT" was a thing.

"IoT" is a euphemism for "home automation, except trojaned so we can steal your data."

The trouble is that just about every fucking "IoT" device is designed to communicate over the Internet to the manufacturer's servers, even when it would make more sense for it to just communicate with a base station/server over the LAN and have the data never leave your house. Allegedly it's for ease of use, but that's bullshit -- it's for data-mining.

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.

Yeah I know code should be efficient with memory but these days there is no excuse for having less than 4Gb.

Okay, so smartphones, tablets, Chromebooks / "streambooks" and the like aren't valid devices anymore?

I'm a pack-rat and would like to archive whole tab trees for later, see them among the other pages, but not take memory+CPU now.

It's funny how the mobile (Android) versions of both Chrome and Firefox already manage to do this -- I can have 50+ tabs going on my phone and not run out of memory, although some of them will reload when I switch back to them -- but the desktop versions don't.

Though there was a good reason for the original compact Macs to discourage users from opening them up -- there were exposed high voltage monitor electronics in there which could give you a hell of a zap of not properly discharged.

The later all in one Macs of the 90s were better in that regard. Their user suitable parts (motherboard, drives) all were easy to get at, but the monitors and power supplies were fully enclosed.

I immediately thought one of the intelligence orginizations, US, British, or Australian.

If it's sufficiently isolated from the rest of the hardware (so that it can't snoop on RAM or anything like that, so it can't override any firewall, and so that when the OS says it's off it's off), that's good enough for me. If the modem can't access any data I don't want it to have in the first place, then I don't have to worry about what it's doing with it.

With some services, movies can be captured. Streaming or saving look the same.

Phones, tablets and micro SD cards. What big brother can't see..

The ease of online file sharing has become risky. Other avenues are much less risky in a schoolyard.

My kids had no problem loading their devices to the max without using the home internet connection.