... There is no benefit to Microsoft to do this unless they want to get out of the OS business, and that isn't happening when they have 90% of the market.
You pulled that figure out of your ass.
Good communication skills are one of my key criteria when I'm hiring.
Software development is a team sport these days. I've rejected technically very strong hires in the past simply because they either couldn't, or didn't appear to want, to work collaboratively within in a team. Some of my biggest hiring failures were smart, competent developers who just didn't get along with their team.
The final part of my interview process was always getting the prospective hire to do a 15 minute presentation on any technical subject that like to the entire development team and then take questions from the floor. It was the best test I've seen for team fit and general ability to communicate and collaborate with their colleagues. But there were a few candidates who found the idea so scary they took themselves out of the running rather than stand up and talk in front of a dozen of their peers.
As a Kiwi, I can tell you that all speech recognition software that I've tried struggles with my accent. I really do try putting on an American accent to get round it sometimes.
Amazon and some others now offer an Australian accent option, which is usually close enough to solve the problem for me.
I remember when I was a kid, political refugees used to escape Russia and seek asylum in the United States.
Some time in the last 10 or 20 years that got turned upside down.
I hung on to my old 2011 17" Macbook Pro till it would no longer reliably boot up, purely for that screen form factor. I would buy this just for that screen, regardless of other specs.
It may be an interesting philosophical question, but it has little to do with reality. A scenario like that is almost never going to happen, and even if it did, a human driver would be faced with the same split second dilemma and be no more likely to make the "correct" decision (whatever that is).
It's not just a philosophical question. A team of engineers has to sit down and write code, or at the very least models for machine learning, that will allow a self-driving car to make a reasonable decision in any conceivable scenario. The choice you give is just a marker for a whole class of decisions that some cars will have to make at some time. This is a real problem that these engineers have to face before these cars are on the road.
The fact that human drivers in the same situation could make a poor choice is actually irrelevant.
A cockroach has the same mental capacity as a rodent
Citation please.
Understanding is always the understanding of a smaller problem in relation to a bigger problem. -- P.D. Ouspensky