The Engineer had agency. The AI (or google search, or a stack of text books) does not.

Of course, if the mad bomber instead posed as a student and found some non-evil reason for wanting the exits to collapse first (even a thin one like directing the dust upwards), the engineer is less culpable or not culpable at all.

But we need to be very careful about imagining an AI has agency. There are many legal and philosophical implications behind that.

If books aren't your speed then how about the somewhat okayish Bruce Willis action flick Surrogates? A 2009 film that asks the question, "What happens when every human in the world lives their entire life through the eyes of a human operated android?"

I don't get it either, but then I'm sure some of the tings I do in my life don't make sense to those pushing for peak physical fitness. Though this does remind me of a documentary I'd seen years ago, I really wish I could remember the name right now, where they'd discussed how humans had evolved over the millennia to run as part of our need to hunt for food.

Since humanity started in Africa the typical animals being hunted were large, nomadic, and often faster than humans so we needed to evolve to keep up. Some evolved to run in rapid, short sprints, so they could get in with the spears and get a couple hits in. Once the animal was running the next group needed to keep pace with the wounded prey over long distances so they could finish it off once it'd collapsed. Because the tribes were nomadic and followed the migration of their food the rest of the tribe needed be able to run long distances to keep up with the hunters so, once the animal was down, they could start processing the carcass and frighten off any predators or scavengers looking for a free meal before they'd finished their work.

Just because we don't have to hunt for our food the same way anymore doesn't mean the evolutionary drive goes away.

It's crucial at the moment but, as pointed out in other comments, we'd gone from a concept in the 70's to Asimo in the 2010s to a robot that can autonomously complete a half marathon in the span of 50 years. How long will it take researchers to improve the perception engine and energy storage before they're able to strap on an integrated sealed backpack and use them as short haul delivery 'bots in compounds / cities with lots of stairs and / or traffic congestion?

I'm not worried right now but I've got nieces and nephews and I worry about their future where, as the tech improves, we'll see bits and pieces of the economy being increasingly replaced with 'bot labour which will have them fighting amongst an ever growing pool of job seekers competing for the last remaining specialty jobs 'bots can't do... yet.

The winning 'bot autonomously ran 25kph over a 21km course, that's a lot of computation to keep track of location while avoiding obstacles, especially at speed, but the article doesn't mention how tall / big this thing is. How much battery capacity did it have? Did it need to be recharged part way through the trip? What kind of processing did it have, was it on board or did it communicate via cell to an offsite server brute forcing the 'bot's movement?

I have to say it's an impressive feat of engineering and programming, but every time I read these stories I can't help but feel like we're inching ever closer toward the society outlined in Mana by Marshall Brain. Except, in our case, I don't see anyone with means volunteering to step up and create a society where everyone benefits over the small minority who are rushing headlong toward creating a global dystopia for the rest of us.

The real problem is "connected", not un-encrypted.

Greed is amazing, when you're the business owner... those greedy serfs generating the owner's wealth demanding higher wages and benefits, not so much.

So the addresses are bigger, so what?

In most cases, all you care about is the prefix, which is just 64 bits, expressed as 4 groups of 4 hex digits. This is IT, is hex really beyond people's grasp?

Most of the admin is done one terminals that support cut and paste anyway.

What if I voted for a cat but the election went to a pit bull with a brain injury?

Sounds like it's time for U.S. auto makers to figure out how Chines manufacturers are making their cars so inexpensive.

And no, it's NOT all from cheap labor. It's also from efficiency, making a fair profit rather than hand over fist, less marble and mahogany in the executive suite, and paying a reasonable amount to upper management. Also less jet setting for execs.

Do we REALLY have to repeat the '70s and '80s when the Japanese manufacturers spanked the big three?

What happened to "free trade" and "deregulate all the things!"

AI has been running at a big loss to get the users hooked. It was inevitable that prices would start climbing. That process is nowhere near done, running AI is expensive as hell.

Once the market starts reflecting the actual costs, you can bet the cost/benefit will not be nearly as rosy as it looks now. But some customers will already have gotten themselves between a rock and a hard place and will be sucked dry, then discarded. Those "expensive" people that are getting dumped will start looking like a bargain, but they will have already been snapped up by smarter companies by the time management that can't see past their own toes figures that out.

All of this makes me remember a short story reading assignment in the 5th grade. It was about kids growing up in a society where machines did all of the intellectual work. To them, writing was 'squiggles'. They managed to disable a filter on their "bard" (a story teller for children) and had it tell them a tale of machines ruling over Man.

Nobody expects prophesy from a 5th grade reading assignment.

The problem is that the people who could afford this and would do it are exactly the people the rest of society is better off without.

As a counterpoint, The Linux kernel and much of the userspace in various distros is done remote. It can work, even on highly collaborative projects. Like anything, some will enjoy that more than others.

Required physical equipment can be a limiting factor, of course. Though I have done firmware development from home because the dev board wasn't expensive nor is a debugger for that hardware.

Where do you apply the tariffs?

Does every nation in the IP chain get a cut, you did use their infrastructure after all, or do you only pay at the point of consumption? What happens when it's a multi-port stream being sent in pieces from mirrors across the globe, are there different tariff rates based on the source of each specific portion of the stream or does it only count from the nation which runs the service and where you're buying from?

What happens when you're redownloading a file you already "own", do you need to pay tariffs again or will the stream be flagged as already bought? If an "already bought" flag exists, how do you prevent someone from spoofing it to avoid paying the tariff?

To prevent that kind of fraud at the national taxation level wouldn't they require regulatory bodies in each nation to have a repository, tied to your legal name, containing a list of all the digital goods you "own", so you're not charged a second time? Wouldn't every single potential nation worldwide need to have this list in case your file request is somehow routed through one of their country's servers, stopping them from charging their portion of the tariff? What if some of those less reputable nations magically "loses" your purchase history and charges you the tariff anyway, who do you go to to get that recovered? Or will the amount be so small no one bothers, thus leading to rampant fraud by the third party corporations paid to administer the program who'll just add those "illegal" overcharges to their bottom line?

How would something like this align with global privacy and the protection of human rights? Some might not care if the feds know they bought "Paw Patrol" for their kids, but what about authoritarian regimes - would you want some dictatorial nation state's loyalty office targeting your family who might still live in their police state hellhole because you'd dared read Orwell's 1984, Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, or Attwood's Handmaid's Tale in a nation which has a stable democracy and might talk about it with your oppressed family?