Uh... they're the same thing.

Even at the speed of light we can expand our territory at most proportional to the cube of the amount of time we have to spread. If the birth rate exceeds the death rate, the population growth will be exponential. No matter what technology we have, we won't be able to accommodate a geometrically growing population within a volume that grows no faster than a cubic formula. Here come the death panels. Thanks, Obama!

We wouldn't have the confusion over octatonic if music started counting at zero. If you play a note and the next note up (on a heptatonic scale such as C major), it's counted as two (a second interval), because we started counting at one with the original note. By the time we get to the same note but at a higher pitch (do re mi fa so la ti do), we've counted to eight even though it's seven notes away. I avoided this mistake by counting A, B, C, D, E, F, G, seven notes, heptatonic. I suppose most people who can play an instrument didn't think it through before answering.

Well most music these days is heptatonic. Do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti is seven notes. This includes the traditional major and minor scales. I suppose the vast majority of Slashdotters (or at least the ones voting here) don't play music. Time for some Doobie Brothers!

The US swamped (whatever that means) with infections in two weeks and "the majority of humanity being wiped out... taking out huge chunks of our population" are two entirely different events!

Huh. I don't remember seeing those. Maybe those comments were modded down, as they should have been.

Not "when", "how much". They are melting now and have been for decades. Yes, Antarctica also.

You're seriously underestimating the connectedness and security of cars. They're already networked and hackable remotely.

No, we're far from having cars that drive as well as humans. It's such a large open research problem that we just got a 32-acre fake city to help develop driverless cars.

If you include the fact that you never bought it, that's more information that affects the probabilities. It's just like in the Monty Hall problem where revealing a goat behind one door changes the probabilities of what's behind the other doors.

Given the fact that cannabis was recently made legal where you live, you may be 5% less like to pass a class. Given the additional fact that you chose not to use cannabis, you may be 5% more likely to pass a class due to the curve being lowered by those who do smoke.

I thought we already knew the academic impact of canibus use from the documentary Fast Times at Ridgemont High

I thought the characters drove their cars to school in that movie.

Oh, go blow it out your ass!

We'll need human drivers in the loop for quite some time. Here's a radio interview with a robotics researcher who actually works on autonomous vehicles to tell you the same: http://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on...

From that perspective there is absolutely nothing to be gained from getting out of bed either. That's why it's not a useful perspective.

When most AI people are talking about artificial intelligence, they are talking about narrow "intelligence". This is why in Russell & Norvig's book they quickly move away from the term "intelligence" and instead speak of "agents" working in a particular "task environment", and whether the agents behave rationally or not. For example, a chess program may be able to win chess games against a grandmaster chess player, so we say this agent is performing rationally within this specific task environment. The chess program is not "intelligent" in the sense that you and I are -- it's an incredibly dumb automaton, as is nearly every computer program. You can see this when it fails miserably when put in any different task environment.

The intelligence that will bring about the singularity is artificial general intelligence, which is the same intelligence that you and I have, that is, the capability of performing well in a very wide variety of environments. This type of agent would be able to reason about how to improve itself and bring about that improvement. Very little AI research these days involves artificial general intelligence, and the progress in this area is slow.