I'm sure I'll have to do something major to it eventually, but for the last decade or so, it's cost me less than 100 dollars a year
I think the USA is pretty unique in that regard. Here, if you intended to drive it on the roads, you'd need it to be taxed and insured (third-party, at least), which would make the cost per year far more than $100.
The people who think that self-driving cars and not owning cars are a good idea tend to be people who live in dense urban areas and know little to nothing about the rest of the world.
I grew up in the countryside and now live in a small city where I can cycle verywhere, so I've seen both sides of this. The problem with this argument is that you forget how population density works. The people who live deep in the countryside are basically noise, statistically speaking. If a solution works for everyone else, then no one cares if they're going to keep needing private cars - it's just one more expense to counter their very low property prices.
Like it or not, any self-driving highway is going to have to make accommodations for human guided vehicles.
Or some people are going to have to flip their switch from manual to automatic when they get near populated areas.
In addition, I somehow don't think that police, fire, ambulance, politicians, etc. would be willing to use self-driving cars
Politicians already have other people drive them. Ambulances and fire engines would be a lot safer if they plugged into a control system that made other cars get out of their way, rather than relying on humans to react sensibly to a siren in the distance. Police would almost certainly want a non-networked version with a manual override, as they are very likely to have an active adversary.
You can't remove my State's direct democracy by simply believing we don't have it
The only places I am aware that practice direct democracy are the Swiss Cantons and some parts of Israel. Which state do you live in the I should add to this list?
Already, computers are waaay more powerful than human minds, we just haven't figured out how to steer all this power towards actual intelligence
In terms of number of switches, not really (we're getting close though). In terms of interconnect, you're orders of magnitude off. The big difference between a brain and a microprocessor is the number of interconnects between discrete components. Neurons in a human brain have as many as 7,000 connections to other neurons. The state of the art for hardware neural network simulations have 700. And don't expect that to scale linearly - doubling the number of connections is really hard. Latency goes up dramatically.
There are 4k (3840x2160 pixels for a 16:9 aspect ratio) monitors out there although you will pay for them
You won't pay much. We're now buying them as our default monitor because reasonable ones are down to about £300 - if you're using the machine for work, that's a negligible cost.
640kB ought to be enough for anyone
640KB is enough for some things. Every time you increase it by an order of magnitude, it becomes enough for more things. Eventually, the set of things that it's not enough for becomes too small a market to justify the R&D investment.
Behind every great computer sits a skinny little geek.