You can get a very basic laptop for around $200 which is rather cheaper, in real terms, than a decade ago. So you are wrong on this too. It's a boon for those of us doing live music work, using them to control light shows, as it's much easier to get a couple of basic machines, running in parallel, as redundancy. And it's not such a tragedy if one gets beer in it.

Your example did indeed suck as it seems to have been ignorant of history. 200 years ago businesses used armies of navvies to dig big holes in the ground like canals. The machines to do it. Now the machines exist and those are used. All your example really showed with the contention that businesses do not use such machines is that the machines are not yet perfected. But even that is wrong as businesses already use fence post machines. I know someone who runs a business which involves putting in fences and they use such a machine.

People require more education to be employable and people live longer in retirement,especially men. That's basically almost all the change in male participation rates. Do you propose increasing the retirement age to 77 or something? And if so, what would the average oldie be doing? And if they become too ill to work, do you have a modest proposal?

Gold? That's to defeat Cybermen.

Ah, so you need to blow the snow up instead?

You want to imprison children?

Untrue, they are poorly defined. If you think that they are well defined, tell me what you think they are and how you would test for them.

Untrue. I would certainly like a solid definition.

Like isn't part of it, it's that some past definitions have ended up including things that most people would agree aren't intelligent being included. When that happens it tends to be the case that the definition is wanting, not general opinion, although that's not always the case.

I don't subscribe to such beliefs. I did spent nearly 25 years working in the area of AI and the issue of a definition of intelligence did crop up. We didn't let us bother us much, though, as we focused on utility not whether it counted as intelligent or not.

The reality is that a number of things in science lack a 100% solid definition: what is intelligence, what is life, and even what is a species.

No, I don't. And by similar measure, I don't believe that 'uploading' yourself into a machine transfers your consciousness. You brain dies, there is a replica. Only in the thought-experiment scenario of progressive replacement and continuous consciousness is there a possibility of the original consciousness (ignoring that we don't have a good definition for what it is) and even then you might argue that although there was a continuous process, the end point consciousness might not be the same as the starting point one. But then, since brains change over time, to what extent is a human at 80 the same consciousness as that same person at 8?

Do identical twins share the same consciousness? Or do they have one each?

Ah, blackbirds seem to love the heavy cropping thornless blackberries. I have trees that produce berries and get popular. Sadly, I am also allergic to the pollen and it's looking to be a bumper crop this year. I intend to invest in blackberries or blackcurrants when I have tidied up a bit. When it was even less tidy there was a big pile of twigs that had hedgehogs in. It was hard to pick a point to remove that between hibernation and breeding.

What intelligence is, like consciousness, is poorly defined, so it's hard to determine if you've arrived at an artificial version. But a program, whether or not it is executed by machine or a human can be self-modifying, so bringing that up doesn't distinguish between machines or a human enacting rules. And, indeed, a human could theoretically work through a neural network by hand, and I've done it for very simple ones for debugging purposes. People would not generally consider someone working through it as intelligent, which would suggest that no machine could be what people would consider to be intelligent. But since the brain is a physical device it would then suggest humans are not intelligent either. So we end up with three main choices: accept that intelligence is an illusion; lower the bar for defining intelligence; define intelligence as something only biological. None seem particularly good options. You can do a similar analysis with consciousness. But even if something isn't intelligent to a satisfying degree, it can still be useful.

Ah, the Battlestar Galactica reboot prequel, almost. It was a silly series.

So you die, but a copy of you survives. You are still dead. It makes you as alive as, say, a dire wolf from 10,000 years ago if you genetically manipulate a modern wolf to be a bit like a dire wolf.

I am sure you could simulate drunkeness, etc.

At least in terms of:

. The inputs might not be binary, but rather activation can be, just to be clear. It's not completely 0s and 1s as some might maintain, but more like 0s and 1s in some parts of the brain than others.