A whole lot of cancers are preventable, or at least the odds of getting them can be substantially reduced. But they require lifestyle changes, like getting more exercise and eating less and healthier, that affluent westerners don't like making. Much easier to heap blame on others for not changing THEIR lifestyles in a way to prevent diseases, while we rely on pharmaceutical corporations to find cures to the diseases that affect us.

Might want to ask Nintendo how the Virtual Boy worked out for them.

The two aren't even the same skillset. I've known plenty of security experts who could rattle off the math behind a prng or the algorithm for a secure cryptographic hashing function or how to correctly use java.security, but who couldn't write shippable code to save their life. I've also known plenty of developers who could build a great mobile game in a few hours or an efficient and realistic crowd simulator or a massively scalable data layer, but don't know the first thing about security. I know very, very few people who are both security experts AND badass devs, and they are mostly either superstar academics or principal engineers at the tech giants.

I disagree that not knowing both makes them bad devs, as security is just one specialization in many. As long as a dev can build quality software and either has a working knowledge of a lot of aspects of software engineering or is an expert in one or two areas, they are a good dev in my book. What IS worrying is that a lot of people who seem to think they are security experts clearly aren't. Papers like this one point to the need for more devs to specialize in security, which is a totally different issue than the one OP brings up: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm...

think that men are definitely the authorities on why women aren't in CS and should not be encouraged to enter CS. Their suitability for the task is underscored by around 98% of the preceding posts amounting to "We have nothing against more women entering CS, but for some reason the stupid incompetent bitches don't want to have anything to do with us."

This is a great development in a field that will likely save billions of lives. But do they really need to portray it as "produced from human waste", rather than "filtered out of sewage"? The former makes me imagine some sort of artificial process that involves bleaching poop until it's transparent then bottling it.

He didn't speculate about strong AI other than to say that it isn't a realistic possibility within the next couple decades, something I think he's as informed about as anyone. The rest of the article detailed why current and near-future AI isn't going to turn threatening (in the Hollywood/Hawking sense) anytime soon.

Don't really have a response to all that other than to suggest that your tinfoil hat might be on too tight.

This is probably the only legitimate fear of contemporary (and near-future) AI that I have seen in all the recent threads about it. Congratulations!

Fortunately, there is a lot of research in the fields of verification of expert systems and HCI to decrease (but definitely not eliminate) the risk of humans making bad decisions based on faulty or misunderstood AI.

Actually, the current roadblock isn't in silico->in vitro, it's in vitro->in vivo. There are plenty of really cool mechanical or "electronic" devices built with DNA/RNA/proteins in wetlabs. You are absolutely correct that the stochasticity makes the goal reaction(s) unreliable, but that's why they make extensive use of amplifiers to replicate desired outputs to the point that they will reliably continue the reaction or report the result. It takes a lot of redundancy and it's not fast (at least as compared to artificial nanotech), but it has the advantages of being dirt cheap, self-correcting in many ways (biological systems have eons of fine tuning while artificial systems have, at most, decades), and very scalable.

The problem is getting these methods to work in actual cellular environments, as the aforementioned eons of fine tuning also mean that there are a lot of mechanisms dedicated to identifying and destroying unusual DNA in cells.

You clearly either didn't read or didn't understand the article.

(title was intended to be science fiction > science)

This all boils down to people *wanting* to take over humanity, at least on some level. Otherwise, people who know basically nothing about the field beyond what they've skimmed in a few mass media stories would see that actual experts are saying this is all bunk and settle down. Instead, every time a non-expert raises the issue, there's an orgy of doomsday anticipation.

Just to make his "calculator calculating by itself" analogy clearer: yes, a sentient AI with human-level intelligence would probably be impossible to control. But we're so far from that, not a breakthrough or two or a hundred, but thousands of major breakthroughs in dozens of fields, that fearmongering on this topic given our current tech is akin to worrying that our four function calculators are going to start doing differential equations in their spare time.

Except that Etzioni is

1) already rich
2) the head of an extremely well-funded (Paul Allen money) NON-PROFIT, with the business model of "let's try to do some cutting edge AI research with open source code"
and 3) an actual world-class expert in the field, rather than a smart person prognosticating about something he only casually understands

No one would claim that AI autonomy is a threat down the road. But down the road is decades from now, minimum. Fearmongering about it, rather than actual pressing scientific issues like climate change, terrible science education, research funding, etc, is irresponsible grandstanding for publicity.

I wouldn't put it anywhere close to the top of my "best games" list. I've always felt that a lot of its difficulty is the false difficulty of figuring out how everything works, as once you understand the game's mechanics it's not terribly hard to grind out an ascension if you're willing to play slow and methodical. The game also gets stale pretty fast, as the mid- and especially late-games tend to be very similar in each playthrough.

Finally, with no story to speak of and no window dressing at all, it has felt increasingly sterile as I've gotten older. And I'm not saying that all games need to have melodramatic AAA-style cinematics to be worthwhile, Dwarf Fortress is a great example of a roguelike that manages to be beautiful and compelling without any pre-rendered settings or stories.

The roguelikes I've enjoyed most recently, even if they only fit the mold loosely, are FTL, Binding of Isaac, Risk of Rain, and Rogue Legacy.

#1 - Local head-to-head or co-op video games only require a single copy. There are also lots of video games that are free, which is definitely never the case with board games.

#2 - This is a ridiculous point. Even way back when most games were on CD/DVD, hundreds of digital games would have the same physical dimensions as a single board game. Now with ubiquitous WiFi and Steam et al you have your entire library of games literally anywhere.

#3 - This is somewhat true, but with a couple caveats. First, there are plenty of video games with 10 year+ longevity, and I'm not just talking about continuously-developed ones. I just replayed Star Control 2, a game that is over 20 years old, and loved it. Second, it's more a function of expectations and business models than anything else. Board games are re-released with expanded rules, better art, better pieces, etc, and many board gamers will sneer at older versions, but it's an exception rather than a rule as it is with video games.

#4 - True, but again this is just an issue with a subset of computer games. I'll point out that there's still, despite DRM etc, a huge thriving used video game market.

#5 - Definitely true, and unquestionably a huge draw for board games imo.

#6 - Back to #1, there are plenty of video games that you play socially, and it's an antiquated view that online interactions are not real socializing. I don't fundamentally disagree with you that in-person is better, but as I've gotten older I've found video games to be far better social engines simply because they are less failure-prone. Now that I'm in my 30s and have kids and most of my board gaming friends are in a similar state, actually getting 4+ people together in the same place to play a game is challenging. Digital games have much less overhead and are not totally shut down by someone needing to stop for 10 minutes.