Yeah, it's weird that this is being bragged about, considering Demis Hassabis and DeepMind trained their game-playing AI so that the only input it received was the pixels on-screen. You'd think advances in game-playing / learning AI would build on top of that, not go backwards.

For anyone who hasn't seen this yet, here's footage of some of the technology behind DeepMind's AlphaGo (the AI that beat Lee Sedol at Go last year) learning to play old arcade games, eventually becoming superhuman at them. I jumped ahead to right before the demo: https://youtu.be/rbsqaJwpu6A?t...

It just occurred to me how appropriate New Zealand's name might be in this context: it's a New Sea-Land.

Considering the fact that defining "consciousness" is proving very slippery, I'd say it's a big assumption to say that we know it exists, considering we can't even agree on what we mean by "it."

And another big assumption. Just because we can't define consciousness yet doesn't mean we can't subject whatever it is (if it exists) to empirical tests. We simply don't know yet. Just because we don't know something now doesn't mean we never will. It's too early to invoke hand-waving.

I vaguely remember buying somewhere between 2 and 500,000 PCs in that time period. To be safe, I'll claim the 500,000.

sales of that Chromebooks overtook Macs in the first quarter of this year

Um, holy shit?

I LOLed.

This is hilarious, regardless of anyone's politics. Why was it downvoted into oblivion? Modders can be capricious and unfair sometimes.

I take it you haven't seen Humans Need Not Apply? It's a good 15-minute overview of the coming automation boom, and explains why the jobs that are going to be lost won't be coming back, and the people who lose them won't necessarily find something new to do for work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Yep. I've been using the same black and white laser printer for 11 years now. On top of that, it's still using .... *drumroll* ... the same cartridge it originally came with. I haven't had to replace it yet. Insanity.

Of course, as others have said, people don't print nearly as much these days, which explains the long life. But I've always preferred lasers to inkjets. No nozzle cleaning, no warmup.

FWIW, it's a cheapo HP.

Large but very dim, eh? I submit that these galaxies are composed primarily of your momma.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't voice recognition performed by the cloud? The phone simply records and transmits your voice to the cloud for processing.

My money's on the idea that our universe is just an incubator for new life. A nursery. Stars are heat lamps, planets are nests, etc. Eventually, technological civilizations grow out of childhood, learn enough about their surroundings to realize there's much more out there, and their tech develops enough to let them escape and join the party outside the universe, where all the other super-old civilizations are. Crazy rambling, I know, but it's a good seed for ideas.

You get a measure of immortality. (If you're good enough at whatever it is you do, and enough people know about it or buy it.)

One of the best comments I've read on here. Heartwarming.

Epic comment. I approve.