EdEarl

I hope Nevada type anti-solar home laws aren't passed elsewhere, and that one is repealed.

There is no absolute answer to your question. Suppose a fetus will become a terrorist and mass murderer, and once born cannot be dissuaded from that fate; to minimize deaths the fetus should be aborted. Some questions cannot be answered with a single word.

Science = ideas - fiction is true, but reading all fiction would not teach you anything about science. The connection between science and mathematics is remarkable--as beautiful as it is difficult, but worth an effort IMO. Many speculation threads will have references to science that invalidates the speculation. Some speculations cannot be invalidated; they tend to be well documented elsewhere and referenced in related speculation threads.

I believe everyone is welcome here, as long as you follow the rules. and etiquette. Welcome to SFN. I like Sci Fi, and I believe many other members do too, but I feel unqualified to advise anyone on storytelling or literature.

TY for your good eye and enterprise. Perhaps it is karma.

I was about twelve when I realized I was alone; it was later when I realized we are all alone. I'm sure I had many more, but none come to mind.

Musk expresses his concern as AI not being democratic; that is, under the control of a person or few people. He created OpenAI to counter that threat. We are cyborgs already, if not in fact, at least in essence, because we are dependent on computers, including cell phones. The next generation is supposed to be wearable, and several futurists envision implantable computers with links to the WWW. Whether the information on the internet makes us free or a slave will probably vary from person to person and issue to issue. There is a plethora of information on the internet that people can peruse, from news to encyclopedias. What a person knows depends on what they peruse. Someone trying to understand the facts as realistically as possible may not succeed, and many people are biased. I think AI will sometimes misunderstand, especially in the beginning, and that makes them dangerous. I'm not particularly concerned about terminators.

Yes, ... see my PS on previous post.

According to the inventor of Deep Mind, it is a general purpose AI. In other words the same program that won Go also makes unbreakable encryption. The difference is its training for Go was millions of games (first ones on the internet, then playing against itself), and its training for encryption IDK but analogous to Go training. PS Deep Mind gets its input visually, which means that as hardware improves, smaller server farms will be required to run it, and it will be capable of training for several things without forgetting the previous training. It will need sensors for acceleration, sound, smell, touch, etc. Otherwise, it seems close to being a software solution that may become aware of itself, except the hardware isn't ready. One day, it might be trained to design a server for itself.

Your overbalanced wheel is an illusion, as the following is an illusion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Impossible_staircase.svg

Your pic: shows 4 and 8 spoke wheels. Simplify to 2 spokes. If a 2 spoke wheel won't turn, adding spokes will not make it turn.

Simulations can be wrong. Gravity pulls down. The weights are always at the lowest possible position, because of gravity. In other words, the wheel is unbalanced on the down side. "Overbalanced" is nonsense to confuse people.

One of the common mating scenarios for people is to select a life-long partner, except few relationships are life long compared to serially monogamous relationships. Many men and women have children with several partners. But, there are a few other scenarios, including the following: Some species mate for life; man is not one of them. Moreover, I believe infidelity is not uncommon in other species that mate for life.

The weights are at the lowest possible point in their respective boxes, which means the wheel is bottom heavy and will no turn by itself.

Considering how many people believe the nightly news represents world accurately, or at least doesn't seriously question it as biased, is not entirely rational. Unfortunately, it seems like there are fewer rational people than not rational in the world. Even people who try to be rational aren't always. In general, I think more decisions are made emotionally than rationally for any democracy.

@wheel Hint, simplify to 2 balls. Then, double and maybe double again. I think you will see that 2 can't spin without adding energy, and any multiples cannot either.

It shifts all the time, slowly. When Alexander conquered the world, philosophy by Europeans was insignificant. I think you are looking through European tented glasses because Europeans and their descendents in the Americas won some big wars and wrote a lot of history in the past few centuries. Not only is change inevitable and unpredictable in many ways; change is occurring now very rapidly and accelerating.

Musk is a pretty good business man. He seems to think he can make money at $250M+ per trip, or at least find investors who will bankroll setting up a colony on Mars. On the other hand, AI and robotics are driving manufacturing costs down, and at some point in the not too distant future, economics will fundamentally change.

Musk says he will reduce the trip price to under $250,000.

According to mars-one.com more than 200,000 people have already signed up to move to mars. According to nasaspaceflight.com Boeing intends to put men on Mars before SpaceX. According to businessinsider.com China plans to reach mars by 2020 and build a base. Perhaps a second space race is about to start.

Our record of habitat destruction for beauty and business puts us in the parasite-malefactor category rather than paladin.

I meant animal dominance, similar to top of the pecking order.

Debris left in orbit between the Moon and Earth may have taken a while to fall either into the Moon or Earth; maybe it orbited for a while before landing.

You haven't made any rational argument that computers will not become self aware; I agree with Strange.