What a coincidence! I've heard managers say the same thing about their staff.

Both of you are wrong, keep it up and whatever project/task you're working on will be unpleasant, and at best limp to the finish line. Just about everyone has a manager, a professional in any field will get their manager's respect by learning and solving their manager's problems with minimal fuss. If after 12 months or so, that doesn't work, find a new job/manager. If your manager doesn't have problems it's probably because you're both about to be put out to pasture on the next payroll cycle.

At 55, I've been on both sides of the managerial fence and I've hired and fired programmers. I rejected the project managers job when my current employer offered it to me 4-5yrs years ago, having "been there before" I decided to keep my more interesting and less stressful role as the resident CVS Nazi. My overall goal has always been to automate my way out of whatever tedious task confronts me, I've been lucky enough to work with several professional managers who ensured I never ran out of tedious, annoying, tasks.

Skimmed the article, conspiratorial themes aside, it seems like a good general history of neural nets.

To answer what I see as the main question in TFA - Here's the difference "this time around".

I've been interested in AI and automata since the early 80's, sporadically following closely over the years. Life distracted me from this interest for most of the noughties. The first time I watched IBM's Jeopardy stunt with Watson I was blown away, the missus shrugged and said "It's impressive but what's the big deal, it's just looking up the answers, like google with talking, right?" I tried to explain why my jaw was on the floor, but all I got was a blank look and a change of subject.

Far from being overhyped I think the general public simply don't comprehend the significance of these developments. They see it as 'hype' because like my missus they simply don't comprehend the problem and tend to grossly underestimate the difficulty of solving it. IMO the Watson stunt is one of the most significant technological feats I've witnessed since the moon landings, and possibly the start of a new Apollo style arms race based on the same old fears. That doesn't mean I think all the problems in AI have been solved, but machines like Watson are very strong evidence that we have recently cleared a significant hurdle (that few in the general public have even noticed).

To me, this period in AI is very reminiscent of where digital comms were in the early 90's. Most of the bits for the comms revolution existed but rarely talked to each other; pagers, email, mobile phones, computers, printers, fax, GPS, fibre optics, etc. Just a few years later everyone was talking about "convergence", "as foretold" pretty much all of those things and more have now converged into the ubiquitous smart phone. In 1990, virtually nobody on the planet saw the internet coming (including me), I was at Uni, mature age CS/Math student, 88-91. I was perfectly placed in space and time to see it born but didn't notice it.

I first heard about HTML and Mosaic at Uni, one of our CS lectures was very impressed and went on a tangential rant about it one day in a networking lecture. Still, nobody in his hijacked audience I talked to afterwards could figure out why he was so impressed. "What's wrong with zmodem?" was a typical comment that I would have agreed with then.

I think we are more or less at that "1990" point where everyone will soon start talking more and more about "convergence" in AI. The Watson that won Jeopardy in 2011(?) required 20 tons of air-conditioning alone, today an instance of Watson fits on a "pizza box" server and you can try out your own Watson instance for free with a web based developer's API (google it). Their goal is to squeeze Watson into a smart phone.

A couple of things that a Watson style AI may "converge" with aside from phones are, "Big Dog" which has pretty much solved the autonomous movement/balance problem, and face recognition software which has also made big strides in the past few years. What the end result will be when it all converges and evolves, or even when it will converge, I have no idea, but a dystopian SkyNet style future is no longer purely fiction. From a less pessimistic POV, AI could serve as a "check and balance" in a democracy full of bullshitters, a tool to fact check the waffle and make evidence based, transparent, recommendations on public policy free from partisan politics, in other words "speak truth to power", like the public service in a democracy is supposed to be doing now.

Disclaimer: The "missus" is far from dumb, she has a Phd in Business and Marketing, she lectures to several hundred students at a time. I sometimes fail to see why she is interested/impressed by some obscure event in the Business News and politely change the subject :)

Agree, what good is a robot maid that won't fetch a beer? - However if we follow your logic to the extreme, you see a drunk fall overboard on a party cruise and you do nothing because it's his own damned fault?

Take 5min to read this short essay by Asimov, you won't be dissapointed. Asimov was more than just the guy who wrote about fictional robot laws, for example, he was also well known skeptic. Not the modern anti-science kind, a real skeptic, spelt the old fashioned way!

None of it is about robot ethics, it's a metaphor about the folly of thinking that a list of rules, such as the ten commandments, could ever encapsulate all the vagaries of human morality.

Yeah, because that's how we buy cars and fridges, right?

Sounds like Kryton from Red Dwarf.

I put mantraps on my lawn, why is it my fault if a pregnant woman steps on one?

The three laws demonstrates that morality cannot be codified, it's a critique of the 10 commandments and other such lists of rules that attempt to do the same thing for humans.

As for TFA, what good is a robot that won't fetch a beer? - Might as well get a cat.

If you can remember going to school with polio victims we must be in the same age bracket, there's no plague but I did meet a 5yo in the 80's who had mild retardation due to an allergy to cows milk, never met a child that was allergic to nuts. A child gets all the antibodies it's going to get in the first few feeds from mum, after that it's just food. These days too many nurses subscribe to the dogma that if you stop breastfeeding at 3-6 months you're a bad mother, because..???

Rather than berating young mums about choosing not to have their nipples chewed off, it would be more helpful if nurses simply gave common-sense advice about the transition, ie: dilute it with expressed milk, experiment with different formula, do it gradually, and watch out for adverse reactions. I felt sorry for that 5yo boy in the same way one feels sorry for a polio victim but making his mother feel responsible for a freak medical condition is not helping. Sooner or later the kid would have taken a big swig of fresh cows milk anyway.

Never heard the one about honey and botulism mentioned in the comments above, surising but I'm assuming that is also very rare. "Surprising" because honey is a natural antibacterial preservative and who doesn't dip their baby's dummy in honey when a new tooth is on the way? - Yeah, I know, dummies are evil too. Rare as it may be, I don't see anything wrong with informing people to go easy on honey and advising jam instead (my kids had "Bongella" when teething, I don't think you can buy it anymore, it was basically alcoholic jelly, worked wonders).

To me the allergy plague is motivated by the same irrational fear the anti-vaxers have - what if that one in a billion is my child? Problem is, that's the only question they ask. Also there's big money in selling household anti-bacterial gels/sprays, not that long ago obsessing about hand washing and germs was considered a serious mental disorder, hard to pinpoint the change but for the last couple of decades(?) we have been bombarded with adverts telling us that obsessing about hand washing and germs is a "healthy" and desirable middle-class behaviour, and of course every second ad has cartoon characters and a cute kid with a sparkling toilet shoved in their face.

So when they are disobeyed like in the Rwandan genocide, what happens? Seems to me, universal rights are a good idea that's ultimately impossible to enforce.

The land mines themselves could easily be defined as "autonomous killing bots". Unfortunately there are no universal bounds to the atrocities of war and I doubt legal semantics can ever fundamentally change that equation.

Volcanos also provide a repeatable aerosol experiment, about once a decade there's an eruption large enough to very slightly dip the global temperature for a year or two after the event, Mt Pinatubo is the classic example.

We have had experimental results for quite some time. Ronald Reagan and Maggie Thatcher pushed for an international cap and trade on sulphur emissions in the late 80's and won. Sulphur emissions were having a slight cooling effect on the planet as do the current aerosol emissions from China. However, the reason the emissions were curbed under international treaties was to reduce acid rain that had become a serious problem in the N hemisphere. I'm not a fan of Reagan or Thatcher but this is one thing they got right (probably because Maggie was a Chemist at Oxford). Thatcher was also the first world leader to take AGW seriously.

Aerosols are the grain of truth in the misleading denier claim that "in the 70's they predicted global cooling". The various "clean air" acts of western nations in the 60's and 70's contributed to AGW by removing much of the aerosols but they still have a significant effect on climate. The clean air acts themselves were introduced because too many people were dying early from respiratory problems, the "pea soup" fog phenomena of the first half of the 20th century was so named because of it's greenish-yellow colour, not because it was thick.

In other words: We know from past experience that sulfur and other some other aerosols from coal fired plants will cool the planet, but we also know that the "aerosol fix" is worse than the current problem. Conversely the same plants will output soot and CO2 which both warm the planet. The obvious fix is to stop the current "experiment" of burning coal for energy as quickly as possible by focusing on renewables, but that frightens some people's wallets so much that they are willing to consider any option that is not the obvious fix, even a suicidal one such as that proposed in TFA. (while claiming it's the greenies who want to kill all humans).

If WP's facts don't line up with your political preconceptions, try Conservapedia

Bullshit. Both the victims and perpetrators of random violence are overwhelmingly male. However, domestic violence is not random violence, victims of domestic violence are overwhelmingly female. The sexes are NOT equal in physical strength, the average male has 1.5X the upper body strength of a similar sized female and twice the strength of grip in their hands, it's almost always the unarmed female who ends up in hospital when push turns to shove.