Excellent troll post, my good man!

You win 100 Internets, and a certificate entitling the bearer to lifelong virginity!

But seriously, before I saw your second post, I had typed up a huge rant with a dozen peer reviewed citations and plenty of swearing. On the off chance you were actually looking for serious information, you'll be happy to know that you can find tons of studies about this from Google, Pubmed, and the isi Web of Knowledge. Try "self ratings peer ratings" or "self ratings above average". Alternatively, you could pick up any intro psych book and look in the index under self-ratings.

Nixon had a pretty good speech, too. It's still around, and certainly worth reading. Would you like to know more?.

You're spot on, but I doubt we'll need wetware once we have robots. Lots of replies below you, I'm going to reply to all of them here.

Bongo: Warp drive has been theorized, but relatively little revolutionary has happened on it since Alcubierre proposed it in 1994.

Meanwhile, we can already map parts of the human brain; we're advancing techniques for monitoring neurotransmitter and Ca2+ levels, fMRI and related technologies are proving game-changing, and neuroscience as a field is the fastest growing area in science.

our consciousness is our body.

Right, specifically, the chemical and physical structures of neurotransmitters, synapses, neurons, and glial cells in our brains. I predict that within 10 years, we'll be able to "upload" the consciousness of nematodes, within 50, mice, and within 200 years, we'll have humans living inside computers. If I'm wrong, either it'll happen sooner, religious people will have blocked the technology (not gonna happen), or the human race as we know it will no longer exist.

Damek:

I want my feelings, my senses, and everything else my brain needs in order to be "me."

That's an essential piece of a complete transfer of consciousness. There's not much point to doing it if you can't still feel human (otherwise, just create an AI, it's much easier). You'll find that most everything is stored in your brain, however, with you extremities just being used to send signals back to your brain. There's no reason a robotic body equipped with a few million touch sensors, smell sensors, etc, couldn't do as well (indeed, without this body, you would experience complete sensory deprivation, an extremely painful experience).

khallow: Our wetware sucks. We get old, we get diseases, we've spend a million years (OK, maybe 4+ billion) adapting to 1G, standard temperature and pressure. Space does not have this. Other issues with space, including radiation, long travel times, recycling oxygen, maintaining food and water supplies, simply disappear if you use AI or brain-in-a-bots to explore space. Seriously, this is going to be the future. Not in our lifetimes, but perhaps in our grandchildren's.

AC: of course we'll still be human. The definition for human changes every few thousand years, but essentially, if you can have emotions, reason, have memories, and -- you know what? Fuck it, I can't be bothered to define the term, it's just to ethereal even today. If you give me a good definition for human, I'll tell you how a consciousness in a computer upholds it.

Yes, newegg users are paragons of intellect and their reviews are universally useful.

Pros: Why is everyone so hung up on overclocking??The truth is that the performance of your P/C depends on the combination of a lot of things. Although this MB's awardbios software is awesome, to much emphasize is placed on overclocking. I had some bottleneck issues that were solved by buying this motherboard and a 550w power supply with 25a on 12v rail. I have a dual core athlon 175 opteron! and a 10,000rpm Western Digital SATA drive to boot. Why in the world would I need to overclock that??

Cons: None! I hear a lot of people complaing about instructions. Well, I think that most mother boards are pretty much the same installation wise. A first timer would have issues with any mb, not just this one. The only issue is that the board is kinda picky about what slots you put the ram in. I used matching ram sticks and placed each one in a yellow slot. The mb booted up just fine after that.

Other Thoughts: Don't believe the hype about Overclocking! Its overrated and frankly doesnt do much for the performance of you PC.

Another:

Quote: Pros: Works like a tank and has full integration.

Cons: After removal of computer clock speed jumpers the system would not boot. The 80mm fan & heatsync we purchased did not fit & snap onto the processor & motherboard.

Other Thoughts: We now are looking into refund of the heatsync & fan for another future purchase from newegg.com

Wait, there's more (this one can't be serious):

Pros: This thing is great! Before I could only play Solitare and Minesweeper on their lowest settings but now I can play as many as 4 games of Solitare at the same time.

Cons: I can't figure out where to install the second core.

One more, then, just to prove that a CPU is more important than your internet connection:

Pros: MY GOSH WHAT AN IMPROVEMENT OVER MY HYPER THREAD 2.8..I GOT THIS STRICLY FOR GAMING (BF2). I HAVE BEEN FIRST IN THE SERVER EVERY TIME..I DOWNLOADED 3 MAPS AND A PATCH (9 GIGS) IN UNDER 15MINS.

Cons: THIS THING NEEDS TO COME WITH A GIRLFRIEND ....

Other Thoughts: PAIR IT WITH SOME KICKBUTT RAM, AND YOULL BE KILLIN EVERYONE IN NO TIME

There's one more I really like that I can't seem to find now. It was regarding a new processor and went something like:

The installation was a little tough, I needed to use a hammer to get it installed, but I think most new CPUs are a little tough to install nowadays.

Of course, if someone makes a mistake, there's always someone willing to help you out:

Pros: Great Cards, howeevr witht he R600 series coming out shrotly, I would save your money for those.

Cons: Not DX10 as CpuLouie said

Other Thoughts: CpuLouie while DX10 is software, the ability to run DX10 is in the hardware. Why do you think the 8800 series are so big? Your 7950 will not run DX10 either. sorry

The point of this is just to use a little common sense with the reviews. Most of them are fine.

Also, I just realized that this has run on pretty long. It this EVER shows up as one of those stupid email chains in my inbox, I'm personally going to hunt down and destroy everyone who forwarded it.

Core i7? What is this, the middle ages?

What you need is this bad boy. You aren't really having fun unless you're playing on Xeon E7450.

Act now, and the shipping is 299% more free than on that outdated POS the i7. That's right, 299%! [Hey, anyone spending that kind of money on a single processor has got to be bad at math].

If you're asking seriously, no, the EU would not go after MS for reduced pricing. They only care if companies are abusing their monopoly position in operating systems to break into other markets (like media players or web browsers). Maintaining control of their existing monopoly in OSs is fine.

(Personally, I wish these prices were twice as high, and that the OS included some sort of truly unbreakable DRM (yeah, right). Linux could use a boost in its market share.

Sadly, it's not legal. You just can't do stuff (even nice stuff) to people's computers without their consent.

I'd be interested to know if it would be legal so long as you provided a clickthrough EULA. I'm inclined to think it would be, and no one reads those anyway.

I should also link to Welchia, as that's somewhat on-topic here.

Once our society begins selecting and/or rejecting offspring based on their genes, or we begin manipulating our genetic codes, evolution stops.

EPIC FAIL!!!

Evolution is simply change in gene frequency over time. Nothing more, nothing less (there are other definitions, but the differences are semantic). Perhaps you meant natural selection? That's already been largely reduced or even eliminated by medications, sanitation, and increased quality of living.

If we start doing these types of genetic manipulations, you're correct, we will lose some diversity. Maybe these alleles do poses some hidden benefit. But if we have the technology to take them out of a population, so do we have the technology to replace them should they become necessary. In the oft sited case of malaria and sickle cell anemia (which someone will bring up in response to this), there happens to be another point mutation, one which grants both resistance to malaria and RBCs fully capable of binding to oxygen. This mutation is rare, indeed so much so that it is likely to be eliminated by drift in favor of the more common sickle cell anemia heterozygote. With the type of selective breeding that is done in fertility clinics, we could ensure that the gene becomes more common, effectively eliminating malaria from the human population over the course of [quite] a few generations.

Additionally, there will always be Luddites and religious nuts who refuse to take advantage of this technology, so even in the extremely unlikely event that some virus comes around that all designer babies are susceptible to, the human race will live on.

Genetic manipulation is nothing like inbreeding. We're selecting perfectly viable offspring that could have been produced anyway. Yes, we lose a few alleles here and there, and it's troubling, but I'm not going to lose any sleep over it. Or would you prefer that your offspring live with cystic fibrosis or phenylketonuria on the off chance that it might, a few generations later, be somewhat effective in fighting off a flu? These mutations are around because many of them are point mutations (one base pair changed in the DNA leading to a single different protein being coded), and are constantly reintroduced into the gene pool through the process of, uh, mutation. They'll be back, like it or not.

Lastly, and most directly related to today's story, have you ever though about a world where everyone could look like a supermodel? Someone who doesn't conform to the norm would begin to look extremely unique and attractive. Increased fitness for them, reduced fitness for the designer babies. The end result of this is (at least the one that seems logical to me, I can clarify if anyone disagrees), is a society which judges based on personality, not appearance. That can only be a good thing, IMHO.

Also, if these views make me a eugenicist, fine, call me one. Please remember, though, I'm not advocating forcing designer children on anyone, I'm simply advocating against society telling people that they can't raise a certain type of child.

If anyone wants citations for anything, I can find them.

This is quite correct; after doing a tiny bit of research, I found this and this (also plenty more if you're interested).

While it's nothing conclusive, it would appear that EMR can indeed mess with neurons.

I forgot to note that the "I know Kung-Fu" suit would have a response time of ~.5 to 1 second, because you need to think "block punch", the implant needs to translate it into the proper signal to send, and push that signal out to your arm. Subconscious processes tend to be faster, so you'd never be able to defeat someone who had learned Kung-Fu the natural way.

I'm a bit busy for a detailed response, but let me clarify impossible: what I meant was that it would be more practical to try a different solution (robot body, emulate brain in software). While alchemy is technically possible, it is effectively impossible because it's cheaper to just mine the damned gold.

The "pins" system is precisely how it works, however there is much synaptic plasticity in areas outside the spinal cord (Schwab factor prevents axon growth there). So you could learn to use an "I know Kung-Fu" suit, but it would take a month or two, and would cause semi-permanent rearrangements in the arrangement of axons and synapses in your extremities. It shouldn't really affect your ability to function in life, but I imagine the ignorant/anti-science/Luddite crowd would be scared shitless by the idea of [artificial] physical rearrangement of nerves.

He has not contradicted himself. We know very little about the brain, but everything we know indicates that the arrangement of synapses and even neurons themselves is different in different individuals. It is literally impossible to make a single drug that can create new memories for everyone. In time, a nano-bot type of thing might allow for a drug tailored to the individual, but such a thing would be far too expensive and difficult to engineer in my lifetime. (I can't even envision how such a system would work. Most axons are put in place during the early years in life, and are immovable, limiting you to synapses for these neurons. To make matters worse, some other neurons do regenerate throughout life, destroying whatever changes you've made to the synapses.) Besides, if you can create custom nanobots that alter the brain, why not just dump the brain into a computer and emulate the entire thing? Much easier, and you get to live forever as a bonus.

The wet-ware system will be equally difficult to implement, again, synapses and nerves are arranged differently, albeit in a much more regular system than in the brain. Still, I think it would be easier to just transfer the entire brain to software and use a robotic body to act out whatever you wanted to do. Or skip the robotic body and head straight for the singularity.

The brain is really nothing more than a computer

The brain is much more than a computer. It is a computer running at only a couple hertz, massively parallelized (billions of cores), and interconnected by trillions of synapses. It is often compared to a computer, but it is different to the point of being unrecognizable to the quad core beast sitting on your desk.

You are correct, however, that all this stuff is decades or centuries off.

The article I linked to suggests otherwise. Evolutionary algorithms are good at picking out workable solutions; and I would say that long-term strategic thinking would win a greater percentage of the time over taking short term successes (unless the game is based around short term success, in which case the best AI for the job still wins). Really, if you don't mind a computationally expensive solution, this is the way to go.

Yes, I realize it is possible that the computer can get "stuck" at being very good at playing with itself (har har), but recombination (a simple explanation for in layman's terms is: give me this pathfinding, this target selection, and that retreat scheme. OK, that retreat scheme doesn't work because the human can use special abilities, let's try a different one next game.) would allow it to adapt to any human player in a matter of 1-2 games.

The second article is much better, thank you.

You're solution is indeed very fine for what you're doing, and uses a fraction of the computational resources that a NN solution would. If you're looking for a solution that is more adaptable (the NNs I proposed would learn what strategy you use, and find better and better ways of countering it, forcing you to constantly shift your strategy) and has broader applications in the AI world, NNs are clearly superior.

I should probably have been a bit less technical in my original post, let me try to clarify here:

Neural networks are something that works like a biological organism, it's a type of fuzzy logic. It's similar to your database system, but a bit more abstract, making it easy to change randomly (evolve). These accept inputs based on local surroundings just like your database. They work as a sort of black box, (similar to human consciousness, they are poorly understood) but will generally find a best output for the given inputs. Wikipedia has a good article on artificial neural networks that's worth skimming if you're interested.
The evolutionary algorithm I would apply simply changes a few of the weights at random. The good changes are kept, while the bad ones get discarded. What's good and bad is determined by the competition of neural networks against each other. Eventually (a few hundred games) later, you'll get an AI that's learned to play in exactly the same way* humans do, making it almost indistinguishable from a human player.

*OK, I lied. The human brain uses a different learning rule (Hebbian and Antihebbian) which is less efficient computationally than a evolutionary algorithm. Consult Wikipedia or Pubmed if you really care about the semantic differences.

Evolutionary algorithms tied to your NNs (they're competing, remember?) seem like a good way to eliminate that problem. You can also use a separate NN for each function, such as path-finding, targeting, and cover, and use recombination to pull out the best NN for each from the population.

The case you mention - you're stuck at a local maxima and can't reach the global one - can be overcome via the introduction of NNs which have evolved in a different environment: take an AI from one population and have it compete in another. If you've designed your game correctly, there will be no perfect strategy, and an AI that builds artillery will quickly wipe out the one that uses defensive structures (you're worried about a tied game - that provides less "fitness" than a win).

Also remember that you can trade AIs between players, so it can keep on learning and improving indefinitely.