This seems to me a very American view of society. Your conclusion would perhaps be correct if the American way would be they only (or only feasible) way. In other countries, lawyers and money can typically buy you much less than in the US.

Now imagine what happens when someone else, e.g. China, starts manufacturing these cars. Imagine what happens when they are used there in large quantities. Imagine what happens when the US press catches wind of the extremely reduced number of accidents in countries that allow these AI cars.

Alternatively, it is not hard to write a law that assigns the liability unambiguously to the person using the car. Then, would you - as a consumer - use an AI taxi cab, if you where possibly liable for any malfunction? Perhaps you'd be urged to say you rather wouldn't. But what if you had the choice between a human driver - with an expected chance of death-by-accident of say 0.001% - and a robot driver - with an expected chance of death-by-accident of say 0.000001% and an expected chance of liability due to a non-lethal accident caused by the robot of say 0.0001%. Which would you choose?

I'm not saying such a law would or should be passed. I just don't share your conclusion that the question of liability will prevent these AI solution from reaching the general public.

And so I did.

Actually, having reread your initial post, I largely agree with you. I think RL should be able to solve Ms. Pacman without the need of higher level strategies that are either hand crafted or learned with the cross-entropy method described in the article. However, the article gives little useful information about this method so I cannot tell whether this can be sufficiently be descripted by the term 'scripting'. I feel sufficiently complex scripts can in fact be called AI. However, this is always a matter of subjective interpretation and valuation of algorithms.