It's worth remembering that headlines with "may" in them can be replaced with the same headline reading "may not" without changing the meaning. While we can im

It's worth remembering that headlines with "may" in them can be replaced with the same headline reading "may not" without changing the meaning. While we can imagine a lot of things--like, for example, that everything interesting has already been invented, or that physics consists of cleaning up a few loose ends in classical mechanics, or that anyone going on about nuclear power is talking moonshine--the history of science has shown repeatedly and in great detail that what we imagine and what we can imagine doesn't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. The world is the way it is, and our imagination is pretty much an anti-tool for extrapolating from what we know into what we don't. Utopians and distopians of all political and technological stripes tend to forget this. Which is OK so long as they keep their visions to themselves, or present them as the fictions they are (self-serving example: http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Theorem-TJ-Radcliffe-ebook/dp/B00KBH5O8K/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1419020077&sr=8-1&keywords=darwin%27s+theorem http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Theorem-TJ-Radcliffe-ebook/dp/...). When they ask us to take them seriously they shouldn't be surprised that we respond skeptically, or with laughter. It's fun to think about this stuff, but funny that anyone thinks their imaginings have a greater-than-epsilon chance of being true. I'm hoping this doesn't come across as excessively mean-spirited, but I get tired of these high-flown fantasies being presented as if they had a non-negligible chance of being true. It promotes the idea that our unaided imagination is useful for prediction, and the data shows overwhelmingly that it is not, and that believing otherwise results in a considerable amount of preventable failure and human misery. The most dangerous four words in any language are: "It just makes sense!" While there is a limited value in such speculations, and they make a great basis for fiction, there is a tendency to take them far more seriously than they deserve. Science--the discipline of publicly testing ideas by systematic observation, controlled experiment and Bayesian inference--will tell us about the nature of the universe. Imagination is vital to coming up with ideas to test, but the silent universe--which isn't even mentioned in the article--is actual evidence that rather than super-intelligent AI, the dominant intelligence in the cosmos may (or may not) be us.