No doubt, but the significant worry isn't about Kim Jong-Un so much as about all the other people he'd likely take with him. The population of Seoul, for example, would probably not appreciate getting shelled and/or nuked.

That "certain class of problem" wouldn't happen to be "how to guarantee my continued employment by ensuring that nobody else can understand the codebase", would it? ;^)

It doesn't matter whether the person is drunk or not. Any person, no matter how loopy their mental state, is still bound by the laws of physics. So if the car sees the person at position X, it can be certain that 1 second from now, that person will be somewhere within a circle of radius N feet around point X (where N is the maximum running speed of a human being in feet/second, plus some safety factor). So the car just has to make sure to stay out of that circle (and re-calculate X every few milliseconds), and that's all there is to it.

A self-driving car's programming isn't trivial, but at the end of the day it's just a path-finding system using a simulation of well-known laws of physics. There's nothing impossible about it, that's why human beings are able to do a tolerably good job of it despite their limited cognitive abilities.

Don't forget the ones who will download and install the special aftermarket "racer AI" which is guaranteed to go at least 90 whenever physically possible, and to drift every turn... good times.

I think you've got it backwards -- if we intend to use AI driven cars, the cars have to be smart enough to do the right thing even in the absence of "smart infrastructure". Because there will always be a situation where the appropriate signal-broadcasting-device isn't installed, or isn't working today, or was hacked to give the wrong signal, or whatever, and the cars will still be required to work in that scenario. Given that, there's little point in designing a car that relies on such things, since it doesn't save you any work to do so.

Hmm, the de facto algorithm around here seems to be that you watch the order in which the other three drivers stopped, and whomever stopped first is the one who should go first. (of course that assumes all drivers actually do come to a complete stop, which isn't always the case ;))

I think a car could probably handle that logic at least as well as a human.

If they are really "deathtraps on wheels" that "don't work at all", how have they been able to drive so many miles without any actual, you know, deaths in their traps?

They might not be ready for consumer use yet, but clearly they do work at least somewhat.

Lifting weights is incredibly boring. Ride your bike :)

They don't steal your television to fund their habit, so that's one difference.

Yes, but it's less wasteful then it looks, because we use copy-on-write techniques to minimize overhead. That is, we store only the "root" universe, plus the tree of diffs necessary to reconstruct the various child universes as necessary.

Hmm, sounds like an appeal to consequences. I wouldn't worry though, chances are that everything is absolute pap regardless of whether this theory is true or false.

If you're going to pirate the software, you might as well go ahead and pirate the full version; then you won't have to poke at it.

OTOH, if you're going to legitimately use the software, you ought to pay for it.

It might destroy a few of the more brittle fundamentalist strains, but most religions would quickly adapt. People are quite capable of modifying their beliefs to deal with new facts, when necessary.

Which kind of begs the question, how did "clearly inferior hardware" become such a status symbol? Microsoft and Samsung would give their respective left testicles to do the same, but haven't quite been able to replicate the recipe.

Certainly part of it is effective marketing, but I think the other part is good execution -- regardless of what you think of the hardware (which is hidden inside the case and visible to the customer only through the device's observed behavior), the devices, as consumer products, work really, really well.

I think you have to give a lot of the credit credit to high-quality software.

Rand Paul for ScrumMaster 2016!

Dunno about obsolescence per se, but Scientology does have a policy of forced yearly upgrades, each more expensive than the last. Seems similar :)