I have some bones to pick with this talk, especially when it comes to the 'insane' singularity parts. But damn if I'm not on team user. The truth of the matter

I have some bones to pick with this talk, especially when it comes to the 'insane' singularity parts. But damn if I'm not on team user. The truth of the matter is that our software is gratuitous in features, lazy in performance, but the most important issue that gets overlooked is that it requires a great expenditure of effort to configure understand and use. I spent hours today trying to set up prosody XMPP on a local LAN and found I couldn't do it with the server software that promises to have you 'up and running in minutes'. It made me think that perhaps in the same way you have test cases for features, you might have test situations to determine what features you should have in the first place. Does your software work if I'm in environment X? How about environment/situation Y? I at this point feel so disgusted with the entire experience that I would prefer to just write my own, the cost of creating a new code has become lower than fully understanding an old one: "It is easier to write a new code than to understand an old one." - John Von Neumann to Marston Morse, 1952 as quoted in Turing's Cathedral EDIT (Mon Jul 20 23:30:32 PDT 2015): Lots of people citing Nick Bostrom on the AI stuff, for a different perspective I'd like to recommend Scott Alexander's (Looong) Meditations on Moloch: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ "They broke their back lifting Moloch to heaven!"