News is, by definition, anything new or recent. Regardless of how frequently it happens or has happened in the past.

There is no strict mandate that news be interesting.

Anyone else see the irony here?

A good portion of the people who are highly interested in psychology are people who want to understand themselves better. The reason people want to understand themselves better is usually because they're having some kind of problem that they think will be solved by analyzing themselves.

Sometimes the problems they're trying to solve are enough to say they're crazy. If not, the self-obsessed hypochondriatic naval-gazing is itself a kind of craziness.

The problem of proving a machine is or is not sentient is actually very very old. At least 10,000 years old.

After all, can you prove to me you are sentient or conscious?

And I don't mean that as an insult. I can't prove that I am sentient or conscious to you either.
But if it is accepted that all humans are sentient, there is still the fact any one individual can not prove they are, let alone we as in humanity can't prove anyone else is.

Can we show even a lower species is sentient? I believe my pet dog is as sentient as I am, as well as is intelligent although not as much so as a human. I can not prove this at all however.

The same problem exists with software. A program created by a human will always have the Chinese Room issue at hand, and I agree would be extremely unlikely (and definitely not at all required) to be sentient simply to hold a conversation in a way to sound plausibly human.

The flip side to that would be YouTube comments. From that text alone, I'm sure YouTube only has about 100 actual users and a few million bots running around pretending :P
Not all humans could pass the turning test themselves!

But taken to the logical extreme, say we have a computer that is capable and powerful enough to run a simulation of our universe, with all laws of physics accounted for (a trick we still can't pull off, as we do not know all the laws of nature yet, despite how accurate and detailed our nuclear simulations have proven to be)

Simulating a meter cubed block of universe, containing an exact replica of your brain, would be equally as sentient as your current brain is within our matching non-simulated universe.
Would that simulation be sentient?
I would say, no more than you are right now. Some might say that is a 'yes', others might say that is a 'no'. But either way, that is currently our best bet for truly sentient and conscious software.

As for our current standing?

- We can currently simulate most aspects of reality, out of the subset of aspects we know of, down to subatomic levels in a large enough area to perform nuclear simulations that match perfectly to the real thing.
- We do not know enough about the interaction of atoms within the human (or any) brain to recreate one within a simulation (or the real universe either for that matter) however we know it is possible because it happens many times a day as new babies are born.
- The brain alone would not be enough. Enough sensory 'emulation' from a simulated environment would also be required. A child born and locked into a dark and silent 3x3x3 box with a feeding tube for years will not come out "human" by most non-genetic definitions.
- The above also requires simulating environment, enough so to at least emulate a functional body and world to explore both in.
- Even if some day possible, this is not Creating AI, this is Copying AI (Or would that be copying just I?)

Personally I think, despite our progression with computing technology and knowledge levels of both the universe as well as organic brains, we are so far from the level that would be required to even test concepts out, let alone the entire system, that any current test today is a joke.
It will be even longer after that before computers can do it all fast enough to approach simulating in real time. Nuclear simulations spend many many months and a great many resources simulating what in reality would be at best a couple seconds.

If nothing stops our progression, this all should be very possible some day. The laws of nature do not exclude it as possible, and in fact what we know so far shows it to be possible. Aka what we call "in theory."
Unfortunately for AI researchers, "some day" is likely not going to be any time they or their family line will still exist in.

Agreed. First some p0rn and some video games are the same thing. When I was young and took a sex education class there was one statement made against excessive alone time for teenagers. That if one was enjoying oneself, then there was going to be less incentive to find others to play with. To be clear, not everyone is sex crazy or crowd crazy. Those of us that do not like people need to be pushed a bit to leave the nest. At least before the internet and video games one often had to leave the house to interact. Now we don't. We can fulfill our need for graphic violence and graphic sex all alone.

Now, to justify that above paragraph, one has to agree being housebound abusing one's person physically and mentally is bad. I am not going to be so judgmental as to say it is wrong, but is certainly not considered typical. OTOH, just going out there a randomly hooking is not something that society wants to be typical either. So this is certainly one of those cases that has been set up and propagated by a delusional and psychologically disjointed society. We are only supposed to be controlled in what we do.

But ultimately a person who doesn't play well with others done need computers or videos games. A book can be a perfect evening companion. To say that the video games are exacerbating the situation is say that kids are bringing prospects home to play video games under the guise of bringing on more physical play. In my experience, any excuse will do between interested parties. In this case i would say the sex porn is going to do more damage because it promotes unrealistic expectation. In reality, i would say the image that come up in a safe google search for 'girls' or 'boys' is going to do more damage than any porn as if anyone actually thinks they are going to date those people, they are going to lose many prospects of people that can actually provide for an entertaining afternoon.

Porn has been around since, well... the dawn of humanity. Heck, there are cave drawings that were probably considered porn back then.

I would say the closest "app" to what you describe, that would still fall under the category of specialized AI, would be Watson.
It too is a huge information retrieval system, but specifically designed to play Jeopardy and play it well. It already bested the top two human players.

Of course it is still only a specialized AI engine, no where NEAR expert AI, and it most certainly does not think. Hell, it can't even read visually, see, hear, or a lot of other things required to truly play a game of Jeopardy. But it is leaps and bounds more complex and advanced than Siri currently is!

To me, Siri is nothing more than a good voice recognition app combined with Wolfram Alpha.
I don't mean to be belittling Siri in general, but in this comparison it is hard not to.

It's open source. Fix it yourself.

You have a point, but this isn't the right way to think about it either. It's all about assessing the treats and liabilities that you're dealing with, and making good risk/benefit decisions. Yes, everything you type into Google goes somewhere, but what are you likely to be searching about? What is the likelihood of someone going through your search history to find those things? I would guess that if someone went through each of my search queries individually, they wouldn't find anything remotely interesting. If they went through my entire search history and tied it to me specifically, it could be embarrassing, but not terrible.

On the other hand, I know people using dropbox to store *all* of their documents. Of the documents on my hard drive, there are documents that contain some very sensitive information, much worse than anything in my search history. Just to give a few examples, I have a personal journal (i.e. a diary) with a lot of personal thoughts. I have my tax returns, and other documents which contain my name, SSN, date of birth, mother's maiden name, and a bunch of other stuff. If someone got ahold of all of that in an unencrypted form, it could be really bad.

Now I'm not saying you can't trust dropbox, but security is not an all-or-nothing proposition. It's not "either things are secure or they're not." It's about balancing the need to prevent unauthorized access with the need to make authorized access easy and robust.

Or they wanted the user base more than they wanted the app itself.

By buying Instagram, they can now choose to port the stuff they like about their own app over to Instagram, or port the stuff they like about Instagram over to their own app. But the bigger win is probably that now everyone using Instagram will be moved over to keeping all of that information in their Facebook profile instead. I still don't know whether that's worth it, since I have a hard time imagining how Facebook makes enough money to be able to buy Instagram for $1 billion.