The prediction here is made by extending the present, but the future is never that predictable. Look at snapchat and google allowing deletion of entries. The demand for ephemeral data is growing, and this directly contradicts the premises. What this doesn't take into account is the people NOT wanting this who will invent ways to serve those who don't want it either... and when that market surpasses the Timeline reseller market, this prophecy will not be fulfilled.

Timeline is a technology that is already here and it already has a market. In the future, we will be able to own our timeline, and we would not want others to own our timeline. The government will try, but we will fight them, like always. And once there are better alternatives, we will get off facebook and google and all the timeline reselling monopolies....

Timelines aren't just for people though... Phones, toasters, forks... anything could have a timeline, and this is where non-right-violating timeline technology has a huge upside. But I'd be wary of any company banking on the timelines of people, especially those that disregard basic user rights and user voices, such as facebook and google.

The movie was great, but it was a romantic drama, if anything. Well made, but touche.

A more inspiring movie would have been one that would delve into universal computers and the underlying "code" that appears to dictate the real "computational" nature of the universe itself. All modern computers are Turing machines. But without the fundamental capacity of computation embedded within nature itself, computers would no be. Alan Turing didn't just crack the code of Enigma. He cracked the universe first. The machine he created tapped into the computational universe, just as those who split atoms tapped into the atomic universe.

Sony just sucks right now. No matter what it does, it's failing. And when they fail, companies like to glorify their exits as some forward thinking strategic move, but it's all just spin. If they didn't suck, they'd be doing it. Sony already "exited" their Vaio business, and they also "exited" my neighborhood mall by closing the Sony store... When Sony was awesome, it "entered" the TV market, the computer market, the game console market... This is all just signs that the company sucks, and a company that can't stop bleeding money is forced to take it up a notch. It has to start cutting of its limbs.

IBM is a good US example. They spun off their hard drive business, their computer business... they had a bunch of commercials about what I could hardly tell, and now they are firing a bunch of people, whilst denying it of course, saying they're just "moving people around while dropping a few". But whatever. Companies that are successful hardly ever fire. Toyota keeps hiring. Google keeps hiring. All these stories written for shareholders are moot.

There are infinite ways of encoding communication or circumventing contaminated channels. So trying to regulate communication or spying on data pipes is absolutely pointless. The NSA is only good for catching idiots and careless mistakes, and is at serious risk of being manipulated by those who can fabricate evidence. That's a low bar considering their cost and their cost on human rights.

Exactly. This is the conversation that is relevant. Scientists repeating their finding like a broken record only reinforces the notion that what they say has little effect. Anyone even talking about the science at this point is offtopic.

The issue here is the science of money and of politics, and the true scientists of these fields wear suits and work as executives, as lobbyists, and as congressmen. And they're rich because they know what they're doing. Al Gore was our greatest weapon, but even with an Oscar winning documentary and all that exposure, he didn't do enough in Washington. He couldn't. He showed that Washington cannot be educating. It can only be bought.

By saying the models are out of range, you have already admitted the models are correct, just out of range.

Scientists have no incentive to be wrong or inaccurate, and given evidence, they will incorporate it into whatever it is they are working on. If you're holding on to evidence no one has, please share it. If you're repeating what you read somewhere, well, then we've all heard it before.

> Try arguing about evidence rather than your feelings.

Nothing I said was emotional, but if it moved you, then maybe your exposed buttons got pressed.

Tell me, are you a scientist?

How would they get pissed off? That would be a trait of a person.

I never suggested nature was a person. I merely suggested it has a voice. Take any analogy far enough and they will always break. That's why they're called analogies.

Despite what we're led to believe, science is not a democracy. Science is a totalitarian, authoritarian, oppressive regime in which only nature has a say in anything. And nature only speaks through evidence.

Society is not governed by science. We've made it to democracy and capitalism in which vote count and bank account reign supreme. And in our society, science is still poor and a minority. The truth does not ultimately win in a democracy. "It's about votes, not truth, dumb ass." And it's easier to buy votes than to inspire them with education.

Scientists completely underestimate the opposition. And the worst part is, the science doesn't even matter. It matters to scientists of course, but it doesn't matter to the deniers. They are on a mission to make money and serve their cause. And all they really need is to buy time. That is all they want. As long as they can postpone action, the more money they make. So even if they believed in the inevitability of scientific conclusion and of actual global warming, they aren't even concerned about those outcomes until they happen. All they have in mind is immediate gratification. So they've already won, and they keep winning. The battle scientists are fighting over "minds" is moot. There are no minds to find. They need to fight the money.

True scientists only echo the voice of nature. Today, nature is our slave. And nature has no voice. Global warming is inevitable. It's nature's revenge. I'd invest in a post warm economy than any attempts in saving it. Science will never have enough money to win the war on global warming.

Exactly. To predict something you need to already know it. Science is unpredictable and only reliable once it is here. You cannot schedule a scientific breakthrough.

Get rid of the stocks of companies that decide to bank on research. Research makes a company cool, not profitable. It's where they gamble, for those who can afford it, but not where they succeed.

To get anything done, you have to be intentional. You need the person doing it to want to do it. And once they decide they need it bad enough, they won't need that many tools. Heck, they'll even make their own. Heck, they might even break the law to do it. Intentions trump all. Too bad not wanting to do something or not giving a fuck has never been a crime...

Bottom-line. We can't program general intelligence and all these systems are following hard coded rules of conduct. So if the robot lacks intelligence, all that is is a reflection of the lack of intelligence in the coder. A program is only as smart as the smartest programmer, because with today's tools and technology, the programmer is the only source of intelligence.

So either the robot was stuck in a moral dilemma and was regretting its failures, or the guy who built the thing has no idea what he's doing. I wonder which is more probable? Well, he admits it, so it's obvious.

But I will give the Mr. Winfield the benefit of the doubt and assert partial blame on the journalist who sensationalized the story and his research. The truth here is so boring, it would have never made it to press.

There are no degrees in soundness here. Hunches are not scientific, period. And "unknown until you know" is not circular reasoning. It's a tautology, not reasoning. Unknown == State before you know. There is nothing circular. It's two ways of saying the same thing.

They need money, but have no money, hence they have no choice if they want to do science. That's what this whole topic is about. Money is only given to those who play it safe or those that lie. And if they didn't have to play it safe, more would be willing to take greater chances. And if they didn't have to lie, there wouldn't be less fake science.

Right. Because good hunches are the fundamentally sound foundations of modern science.

They promised blood pressure medication and got a boner pill. That is science. The evidence backs the statement that science is unpredictable. If we could predict science, we could predict the future. We can do neither. But that is precisely why science is so exciting. The hunch is exhilarating and it's worth enough to pursue it even at great risk. The original article here is talking precisely why those risks are becoming harder to accept, and how we have systematically discouraged courageous science. I'm not referring to crackpots. Real scientists who know what they're doing want to go on long journeys into the unknown. But they are only permitted to venture into where the light somewhat shines already. The personal and scientific rewards here are mediocre. You only get the occasional wow when you find your pill just cured ED.

You cannot predict what you do not know, and to measure how long something takes, it turns out you need to know it pretty darn well. So if anyone claiming to be a scientist claims they need x dollars to get you something amazing in y days, they are talking straight out of their ass. All they have is their curiosity and a hunch. The journey is unknown, and so are the results. To know you will succeed, you have had to have succeeded already. This isn't to be confused with engineering. Engineering is different because you already know the technology and have the tools. You can simulate what you're building before you build it. But the science that gives way to technology no one can predict. If anyone should admit to this, it should be the scientists. The only reason they can't is for political and financial reasons.

You can create programs that write rules or code or draw or make music. You can create them so their output is random or unpredictable or based on something other than explicit programmer or use input. Set the input to data and you can call it Machine Learning. Big whoop.

But how this is done must still be explicitly defined and coded. That is what is meant by "go an abstraction layer higher". You can create code that writes code, but that isn't a breakthrough, and that isn't where the breakthrough will lie.

If we fully understood the nature of general intelligence, we would be able to code it, or at least know why we can't. And if we do code it, anyone could read that code and understand the nature of general intelligence.

If someone finds a way to randomly generate code and test it until the produced code is general intelligence, then wow, that'd be amazing. But given the code, it will tell us the answer. Just because our bodies are the product of evolution it doesn't mean we can't understand it. We understand how our eyes work, our ears work, etc... We have yet to understand how our brain works, or how intelligence works. But only armed with understanding, would we be able to engineer it intentionally. And if armed with understanding, we would be able to engineer it intentionally.