All it will take for the inflexion point to happen is that the AI computer designs better AI computers than humans can.

It would be so easy for big software-based companies like Google and Disney to put the funds they pay for lobbyists and politics into continuous training for their developers and to set up intern programs. What they actually want is no-risk freeze-dried instant developers such as those turned out by many schools in India, rather than the broadly based theory-up grads of the US schools. Employers have few compunctions about warehousing those one-trick hires after their skills are obsolete, or subtly brokering them off to another company.

People who can solve problems they have never seen before are not a dime a dozen and will command high salaries wherever they come from.

Ten years ago I designed a "smart gun" with the kind of fingerprint detection that could not be fooled (even by cutting off a finger) and a ballistics marking device that identified a bullet to a particular gun, and thus to the owner of the finger that fired it. I thought it was a real sweet system. I called it "the citizens gun" and tried to market it to Colt and S&W. Both refused. S&W wrote me a fairly nasty letter about the whole idea.

On after thought, as a gun owner with a carry permit, they were right. I wouldn't carry such a weapon. When you need it, you need it NOW. There are no second chances, no way to change the battery, and if anything goes wrong your backup plan is to throw the gun like a brick. Anyone who does actual self defense drills learns this real fast.

Uranium based fission power has its problems, and although the newer reactors are safer, costs and licensing are still prohibitive.
Liquid thorium salt reactors are much cheaper, quite safe, easier to build as they have fewer moving parts, and look like the optimum solution to base power generation. There is no shortage of the thorium ore in the USA. We hardly ever hear thorium considered by the climate media. Why is that? Is thorium the industry-buster I think it is?

Hlaf the problems with traffic are not the cars but the roads. Smart cars need smart roads, and mixed traffic ought to be separated as much as possible.

Label all autonomous cars with flashing lights and restrict them to AI lanes on crowded highways that have right turn exits only. Set AI cars to cruise bumper to bumper in phalanxes once they are on a freeway to save space. Allow phalanxes to travel faster than the regular speed limit. Eliminate contention intersections from those routes as far as possible. AI cars ought to communicate route info and traffic conditions in a network that encompasses their route and destination.

With smart route planning, AI designated routes, and community planning for this technology, AI cars will gain advantages in convenience and travel time over other cars..

You can't separate the vehicles from the system, and that system includes roads and other drivers.

Actually, matter gives rise to consciousness, not the reverse. Any computational substrate, meat-engine or silicon, is made of matter. In the creation of any simulation of the physical world, the same laws of physics must ultimately apply. I am paraphrarsing Dr. David Deutsch, Oxford University.

Hah! Told you so! (recursion is the key to self awareness, also see "I Am A Strange Loop" by Hofstaeder) http://tinyurl.com/h8dww8n.

Kiribati.

Why not copyright original insults. They can be directed to a subset of the offended group for rating, and then follow Hasselton's scheme. Any AC insults from this site that are passed on without retribution would be sent to Hasselton directly. Then he can repost them as Hassetons, a class of stolen insults.

Iff black holes can briefly upset the Higgs energy balance and put it in a new state, there is at least a possibility that that same process can be used to harvest very large energies from the vacuum state. Of course, I don't know whether the new temporary Higgs state will be at higher or lower energies that the nromal state, but I assume they will be higher.

Does it involve a new tax? Hmmm.

The instruments measuring the stances of US political parties, need a recalibration. The bucket-type sensors do not agree with the pocketbook-type sensors. Furthermore, there are no error bands, so the statistics must be based on a sample size of 1.

Political science is an oxymoron.

10% significance level is not enough to support a carbon tax. 90% might be.

Does any billion dollar company get that big without government support? Microsoft's original MS-DOS contract, IBM's slaes to every agency, Apple's presumed security backdoor, GM's Hummer sales, Ford Aerospace, etc, etc.

The complex relations among government agencies and large corporations is endemic. Elon Musk is no exception.

One solution is to wire communities with DC micronets, and the electronics to connect those to controlled phased grid transformers at one central location. DC micronets save the home owners the expense of sync circuits in each house, and their installations are cheap enough to save the cost of the micronet in at least some communities.

Later, the DC micronets can implement their own energy storage solutions at the same grid connection site.