There is a serious lack of details. Essentially all that's been said is that Google will throw money at the problem. Well... I don't have high expectations that this will be a game-changer.

working hard and learning things can just leave you digging ditches and able to quote every Simpsons episode verbatim.

http://www.engadget.com/2011/12/01/geeks-lose-minds-recreate-first-level-of-super-mario-land-with/

There's homage and there's homage. And then there's three guys spending over 500 hours to recreate the first two minutes and twenty seconds of Super Mario Land using more than 18 million Minecraft blocks. The movie, made by carpenter James Wright, Joe Ciappa and a gamer known as Tempusmori, had the guys running the classic monochrome platformer in an emulator and replicating it pixel-for-wool-block-pixel inside a giant Minecraft Game Boy. The team spent approximately four weeks, working six to seven hours a day with no days off...

Lovecraft directly taps into my own madness and fears. He is psychologically quite similar to me and manages to actually express how bad xenophobia and the utter indifference of the cosmos feel. Worst of all, his more madness-focused stories like The Dreams in the Witch-House directly remind me of my own periods of insanity and paranoia. So it's really horrifying through its realism, at least for a certain kind of person.

(And he is the only one I know who does that, though I'm (intentionally) not very familiar with some related authors like Ligotti.)

Plus, violations of the natural order are much worse than anything in traditional horror. A color that doesn't fit in the light spectrum is more terrifying and disgusting to me than serial killers, torture or 2girls1cup. Not sure I can explain that one.

What would be the point of criticizing technology on the basis of its appropriate use?

Technologies do not exist in a vacuum, and even if they did, there'd be nobody around to use them. Thus restricting to only the "technology itself" is bound to miss the point of the criticism of technology. When considering the potential effects of future technology we need to take into account how the technologies will be used, and it is certainly reasonable to believe that some technologies have been and will be used to cause more harm than good. That a critical argument takes into account the relevant features of the society that uses the technology is not a flaw of the argument, but rather the opposite.

Lots of things, but some off the top of my head:

Communication technologies probably top the list. Sure, the Internet has given birth to lots of great communities, like the one where I'm typing this comment. But it has also created a hugely polarized environment. (See the picture on page 4 of this study.) It's ever easier to follow your biases and only read the opinions of people who agree with you, and to think that anyone who disagrees is stupid or evil or both. On one hand, it's great that people can withdraw to their own subcultures where they feel comfortable, but the groupthink that this allows...

"Television is the first truly democratic culture - the first culture available to everybody and entirely governed by what the people want. The most terrifying thing is what people do want." -- Clive Barnes. That's even more true for the Internet.

Also, it's getting easier and easier to work, study and live for weeks without talking to anyone else than the grocery store clerk. I don't think that's a particularly good thing from a mental health perspective.

This reminded me of the post on connectionism. I tried searching "a person who isn't Genghis Khan" and surely enough, the first things it comes up with are all related to Genghis Kahn.

I think that "imagine you're using Google" could be a fairly useful heuristic for trying to phrase queries to your brain.

Laplace's friend Bouvard used his method to calculate the masses of Jupiter and Saturn from a wide variety of observations. Laplace was so impressed that he offered his readers a famous bet: 11,000 to 1 odds that Bouvard's results for Saturn were within 1% of the correct answer, and a million to one odds for Jupiter. Nobody seems to have taken Laplace's bet, but today's technology confirms that Laplace should have won both bets.

How were they to determine the correct answer?

I don't think "neutral" is quite the right word for the audience in question. It may be the best one, but there is more to it, as it only captures the group's view of itself, and not how others might see it.

The Bayesians (vegetarians) see the "neutrals" (omnivores) as non-understanding (animal-killers). The neutrals see themselves as partaking of the best tools (foods) there are, both Bayesian and frequentist (vegetable and animal), and think that when Bayesians call them "non-Bayesians" (animal-killers) the Bayesians are making a mistake of fact by thinking that they are frequentists (carnivores). Sometimes Bayesians even say "frequentist" when context makes it obvious they mean "non-Bayesian" (or that they are making a silly mistake, which is what the threatened "neutrals" are motivated to assume).

As neutrals is absolutely how those in the group in question see themselves, but also true is that Bayesians see them as heretics, (murderers of Bambi, Thumper, and Lambchop), or what have you, without them making a mistake of fact. The Bayesian theoretical criticisms should not be brushed aside on the grounds that they are out of touch with how things are done, and do not understand that it that most use all available tools (are omnivorous). They can be addressed by invoking the outside view against the inside view, or practice against theory, etc. (these are arguments in which Bayesians and frequentists are joined against neutrals) and subsequently (if the "neutrals" (omnivores) do not win against the Bayesians [and their frequentist allies {those favoring pure diets}] outright in that round) on the well worn Bayesian (vegetarian) v. frequentist (carnivore) battlegrounds.

If ending the game quickly or slowly is part of the objective, in what way is it not included in the victory conditions?

Human games (of the explicit recreational kind) tend to have stopping rules isomorphic with the game's victory conditions. We would typically refer to those victory conditions as the objective of the game, and the goal of the participants. Given a complete decision tree for a game, even a messy stochastic one like Canasta, it seems possible to deduce the conditions necessary for the game to end.

An algorithm that doesn't stop (such as the blue-minimising robot) can't have anything analogous to the victory condition of a game. In that sense, its goals can't be analysed in the same way as those of a Connect Four-playing agent.