I doubt it will go that bad, but I wouldn't be surprised if the end result of the War on General Purpose Computing will be laws limiting access to turing-complete machines to licensed software engineers. For everyone else, playing with a compiler will be illegal.

As I suspect the "unique digital exhaust" tracking problem will only get worse as machine learning improves, sometimes a proper Butlerian Jihad seems like the only solution. So I remind myself often that such an extreme solution can always happen later, so there's no excuse not to fight for a better solution in the meantime.

When faced with a very difficult task, there is a tendency in humans to feel helpless and unable to affect any meaningful change. This quickly spirals into a nasty form of learned helplessness. This feedback loop can lead to a nihilistic attitude. If you can't win, why bother trying. Even Feynman succumbed to this problem[1] after the Manhattan Project.

One thing I do know about the people trying to put the General Purpose Computer back in it's bottle, and the people who are so terrified of their fellow citizens they create a surveillance state to try to preserve their status quo: every person that succumbs to a defeatist or nihilistic attitude is one less person is one less person standing in their way.

[1] sigh - it seems the BBC took down the video I had bookmarked. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bgaw9qe7DEE#t=1114 ). A quick search found the video at dailymotion (jump to 18:34 for the comment I'm referencing): http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x24gwgc_richard-feynman-the...

Your vision of the future sounds like hell to me! It's sortof like gun control ... only the bad guys will have access to development rigs.

Yes. It terrifies me. But that's exactly what we'll have if we actually get "programmer professionalization". This is a part of the War on General Purpose Computing; on one hand, as software runs more and more life-critical systems like cars or energy infrastructure, you see a push from both security professionals and big companies towards turning programming into real engineering discipline; on the other hand, you have media companies fighting to limit public's access to turing-complete computation. Unfortunately in this context, while everyone hates the big media shops, infosec has a lot of good karma currently, and they're also against us in this war.

"heart cells: interact in a way allowing logic gates and hence are Turing Complete" - http://www.gwern.net/Turing-complete

That's mostly the scenario I was writing about.

Take that bit of dialog and plug in a smart kid making their own stuff...

Your hands are deadly weapons.

As is the brain. Just talking to someone, in what we consider an ordinary way today, could be trouble.