I think you're underestimating the complexity of the human brain. Neurons come in hundreds of different types, and make synapses with up to 100,000 different neurons. That's so may decades ahead of the nanotech we have today that talking about it is more fiction than science.

The brain doesn't make all the synaptic connections perfectly the first time around, either, and they need to be adjusted when learning - that's why we have stuff like long term potentiation and depression. Oh, and neurotransmitters (more properly neuropeptides) can alter existing functional (metabolic) properties of neurons. So for this type of thing to work, you've got to have nanotechnology that works on a level that is on par with our "crappy human cells". If they're more efficient, they won't be 100% compatible with the existing connections, and therefore nothing will work. So right, we can't use computer-based cells; everything will have to be done in wet-ware. And again, the brain has serious problems integrating new neurons into existing systems unless they evolved specifically to be able to incorporate new neurons, like the olfactory system and hippocampus.

I'm not saying that such a system is impossible, just that it's at least a hundred years off. If you want immortality, you're better off betting on advances in labeling techniques that will allow the mystical "brain-scan and upload" just like Ray Kurtzweil. Yeah, you have the same continuity of consciousness problem that everyone is discussing here, but that's more a philosophical discussion than a scientific one. My real concern is that early transfer techniques will be piss-poor and not copy all synaptic connections, leading to early transfers not being themselves, and people dismissing the whole technology as evil and worthless.

One final point:

We have already made BCIs (brain computer interface) before, we know how it all works.

We do not know very much at all about BCIs (if we did, cochlear implants would be better than regular hearing), and they are not related - not by a long shot - to what you're talking about.

Speaking as someone who has no option of anything other than dial-up, I can tell you that it most certainly is worthless.

Remember back in 1999 how it would take 15 seconds to load a page? Now imagine that every page has flash instead of pictures and most serves will decide to give you a timeout message if you take longer than 45 seconds to respond to a request. Youtube, torrents, the whole digital distribution revolution is totally useless.

I dare you, go back to dial-up for two weeks. Completely worthless Internet. Yeah, I've still got Internet at the library, but that doesn't allow me to get patches for my OS or watch Youtube, now does it?

You're way out of my league on this one, but if I had to guess I'd say that any alteration to an observable property will have a similar effect on the particle as observing the spin. Check the Wikipedia article on quantum entanglement.

Also, you can (probably) get information out of a singularity. See here.

A physicist will be able to explain better than I can why entanglement can't be used for information transfer (such as FTL or what you describe), but my simplistic understanding is that in order to observe the spin on the particle, you have to actually observe it, and by observing, you might alter its spin. You have no way of knowing whether the spin you just observed is a legit signal, or a bunk one induced by your measurement.

Any signal transmitted becomes indistinguishable from a random number generator, and you're back to square one.

On the topic of the linked "paper", this seems like the sort of utterly ridiculous nonsense that Penrose or Novikov would cook up (especially the latter). I'm not going to dignify it with a response other than to predict that Occam's Razor will slice it apart.

Whether he was disbarred or not doesn't really seem to matter.

Slashdot (and the gaming media in general) are doing a fantastic job feeding his narcissism just by reporting on every frivolous lawsuit. He's just a really skilled troll, and everyone always falls for him.

(Of course, if we ignored him, he'd probably go away only to be replaced by an anti-gaming figurehead that wasn't batshit fucking insane, so maybe it's best for everyone to just keep him around for the amusement factor.)

If you believe that, I suggest you reread history (start with some peer reviewed stuff, not just Wikipedia).

There is only evidence of a single incident of this, and perhaps a couple of letters suggesting that it might be possible to spread smallpox (doesn't mean it actually happened). So, yes, towards the end of the 1700's a couple of people realized that it could be used as a weapon, but it never actually was. While you can't trust everything you read on the internet, Google might be a good place to start.

A number is hard to get, 90% is really, really high though. I've heard everywhere from 35% to 70% before.

But the big difference is that they did that unintentionally - imagine the impact the disease could have had if the intent had been malevolent; 95% casualty rates followed up by systematic elimination of survivors. Moreover, imagine how quickly society could collapse if any single individual had the capability to create a disease like smallpox and decided to use it.

I'm not saying that smallpox wasn't bad, I'm saying that it was a technology that wasn't understood, and was certainly never used as a weapon.

That downside isn't just restricted to this computer; it's a symptom of technology advancing faster than human nature.

As has been said before, both on this site and elsewhere, for the first few thousand years of human existence, the extermination of humanity was well out of reach of everyone. As technology advanced it became possible for a group of people, working together, to develop a technology for mass destruction (the specific tech often referenced is nukes). Eventually, the group of people became smaller and smaller (theoretically, larger groups of people won't let each other actually use such weapons. Today, a handful of dedicated malicious individuals could develop a lethal retrovirus, a new biotoxin, well, heck, pretty much anything that we don't already have antibodies for would be devastating. But even this requires the cooperation of a few people, hopefully at least one of which would be sane enough to pull the plug before the plan was finished.

The thing that scares me is that within the next decade, projects like personal supercomputers are going to make the development of WMDs a one-man-one-weekend project. I'm not worried about nukes per-se, because a supercomputer won't magically grant you access to 99.99% pure uranium, but there are a lot of companies that would happily sell you the RNA sequence you request from them, no questions asked. Couple that with a supercomputer to calculate the most deadly strains of RNA, the best mechanisms to prevent mutation towards non-lethality, etc., and you're looking at a single person being able to wipe out humanity.

There's no easy way out of this without sacrificing personal freedom and anonymity (and without those there's really no point to having civilization at all). Obviously regulation will only take us so far (scientists debated - actually the US Government tried to step in and prevent Science magazine from publishing - access to early sequences of virus genomes, but information wants to be free, and someone else would figure it out eventually, so there was deemed to be no real point in hiding the information).

I wonder if one of the terms of the Drake equation should be the odds that a single wacko will take it upon himself to wipe out the species, multiplied by the probability of him succeeding, which is of course proportional to the advancement of the technology.

And true virgins are hard to come by these days.

Uh, are you aware of which site you're on?

And when Google decides to shut down the export functionality, you'll be left high and dry, with no other option than to keep using GMail or lose your messages.

Disclaimer: I use and rather like GMail, and I trust that Google will not do such a thing, but I suspect that other providers of "the cloud" might do something like I just described.

The third position will often code for the same amino acid no matter it is (IE, only the first two matter), and if it codes for a different aa, it's often one which is functionally similar (both will be polar, or nonpolar).

Also, all amino acids are D-isomers in life forms.

I'm sure there's a fascinating story behind the multiple stop codons, too, but I don't know it off the top of my head.

A nematode has 302 neurons, all hardwired from birth, with extremely limited capabilities for learning. If you put a nematode in an environment where it cannot recognize potential food, it will starve.

I fail to see how such a system is "orders of magnitude" more intelligent than a NN with a similar number of neurons controlling an agent. Both have a similar inability to adapt to new situations -- however, you can use a genetic algorithm to create newer, better NNs to control the agent, whereas the nematode must rely on (slower) physical reproduction to evolve new strains of worm to deal with very alien situations. If you define one parameter of intelligence as the speed with which an organism adapts to new environments, then NNs are already vastly more intelligent than a nematode (not that that's saying a lot).

But hey, maybe I'm just overestimating my favorite algorithm :)

Also, I'd like to dispute your claim that strong AI is achieving realistic behavior intrinsically. If that were so, any learned task would not be part of intelligence. A more accurate definition would include the ability to learn/adapt to new tasks as one intrinsic behavior.

Since no one else appears to have called you out on this, I feel compelled to do so.

GP is 100% correct if a bit oversimplified; the brain is a mix of both genetic components and learned stuff (largely seen as synapse rearrangements).

Take for example a chick: there's a strong genetic component, which you can see in a hilariously cruel experiment where you cut the spinal cord and swap the bottom segment (that goes to the wings) with the bottom segment (that goes to the feet). When the chick hatches, it will move its legs synchronously (jumping) and its wings in an alternating pattern.

Of course, then there's tons of stuff that chickens learn, varying from contact calls to good roost sites to Skinner Box type stuff. (Don't bother to reply saying that chicken brains are nothing like human ones, I just picked chickens as a model because I'm pretty familiar with them).

None of this requires anything metaphysical, it's all well documented in textbooks and the literature. Getting the genetic part right is going to be a huge problem, perhaps even the largest problem, but once you've got it, most stuff should be "just" a matter of spending a few thousand hours exposing the brain to the right stimuli.

Also, someone else has called you on your imaging tools claim. It's theoretically possible, but it's not gonna happen in the 10 year time frame proposed without some serious game changing imaging technologies.

Engine goes GPL, artwork, textures, models etc., are still owned by company. Homeworld also used this same scheme, as did Freespace. This means that the game becomes free as in open, not free as in gratis (in this case, however, it appears that the game itself will be free as in beer too, which is awesome.)

This allows the open source community to use a cool new engine, builds goodwill amongst the game's fan/mod community and lets the company keep their IP exclusive for new titles. At least, this is what I think they're doing. I can't seem to find details anywhere.