Many couples have spent their life savings caring for a sick child - I view this as preventative medicine.

So the technology which allows selection for conditions also means parents can also choose hair color and such, what's the big deal?

If I get a cast for a broken arm, what's wrong with choosing a cool color too?

Still, in my moderate mode I must agree that the shallowness of individuals affecting the future of another person is sad, but as I phrased it there, it should be evident that this is nothing new.

http://thelazysci-fiauthor.blogspot.com/2007/07/observation-via-entangled-computers.html

but kind of different.

These 500+ page bills; how is it arguable that documents of that length are not asinine? I recently tried to read the Microsoft privacy statement and EULA for Office (kind of paltry legal docs, relatively speaking) and gave up after 10 minutes.

Something akin to cognitive dissonance had arisen, and like I do with any document/book which causes that - I tossed it.

I can understand when computer code achieves a size like this, or scientific studies, but really - law becomes more and more esoteric, even while it becomes slower and slower to adapt to modern technological and subsequent social conventions.

I await that hoped-for day when that mythical AI which is trillions of times smarter (or at least has trillions of times the patience and time) than us looks through these, to it, crayon drawings, and distills the circular reasonings, contradictions and plain nonsense into a succinctly digestible form understandable to that mythical 'reasonable person' so that we can all have a good laugh. ...or until it launches legions of red glowing-eyed, humanoid military robots to wipe us out.

Either outcome is fine with me.

Taking a military standpoint is a way to make progress.

Every day thousands take much greater than 5% risks undertaking missions far less glamorized, and perhaps really far less important than space exploration.

5% risk in a life-saving operation sounds ideal given the alternative. After all, in reality, isn't space exploration a life saving operation?

Thank goodness for you math geeks.

I'm a big singularity hopeful - however I must admit, begrudgingly, that there seems to be quite a bit of confirmation bias amongst the singularity luminaries.

I had seen this function, but couldn't recall the name.

A beautiful (and strongly supported) counter-example to run-away, or perpetual, exponential growth.

After all, in my mind at least it makes sense to draw at least some analogy between speciation & population growth and technologic progress & adoption.

I just hope the curve doesn't peeter-out before we can develop a mind just baaaarely smarter than us. that's all I think we need.