I think that is totally doable, but I'm not holding my breath for it to actually happen. If it worked, traffic would flow a few percent more smoothly, and only the traffic engineers would notice the difference. If it went wrong, anyone involved with the project would be mercilessly mocked, and their careers curtailed. Given that (combined with AIs' well-known penchant for occasionally going wrong), there's not a whole lot of motivation to implement such a system. Traffic engineers would prefer a system that works just okay 100% of the time, over a system that works optimally 99.9% of the time and does something crazy 0.1% of the time.

Well, if Russia "already won", then there shouldn't be anything preventing Putin from declaring victory and going home. I await his proclamation and the parades of returning troops in Moscow. /s

Agreed, that is a scenario straight out of a Terminator movie.

That said, it won't happen (much) until they get the energy budget of all that AI down to something that can be powered by a drone battery for a sufficient period of time.

China always aspired to be the world's undisputed leader in science and technology, and Trump is giving them what they want.

Oh, we can figure out a way easily enough. Figuring out a way to do it that doesn't quintuple food prices is the more difficult part.

A lot of people don't realize how valuable "environmental services" (like crop-friendly weather) are to the economy until suddenly they don't have them anymore, and have to start spending money to try to reproduce those same conditions artificially. Building air-conditioned indoor farms is going to be hell of a lot of capital-intensive than just essentially planting seeds in the ground and gathering the result food afterwards.

Hmm, sounds like you've caused an underflow on an unsigned value. I recommend restarting the simulation from the top and hoping it goes better on the next iteration.

What made the decision so difficult was that they decided they had to give refunds to everyone whose devices no longer functioned properly, because their customers were no longer getting the functionality they had paid for.

Right?

At some point they'll have AI-controlled robots going through the waste streams and the landfills and sorting all the useful materials out of them. Once you have robots capable of doing the tedious work, landfill becomes a valuable ore, full of useful materials.

Between Bitcoin and AI, "too much electricity" shouldn't be an insurmountable problem for anyone. Either of things will happily consume as much electricity as you can throw at it, and want more. Of course, if you think those things are a waste of power, you could start using excess power to synthesize fuel to sell.

China's economy can always sell product to Chinese people. There are a lot of them. Not to mention the rest of the world, which is happy to trade with China, if only because China isn't constantly making unreasonable and incoherent demands on everyone.

"Mad Max" seems to have seriously underestimated the creativity of Australians regarding energy production :)

I think they expected that since they had paid to purchase the game, they would be able to play that game for as long as they cared to, i.e. same as the deal you get when you purchase a book or a DVD.

You can argue that they were wrong to expect that, but that's the usual way of thinking about items that you buy, so that's what people (who haven't yet thought through the implications of software shrink-wrap licensing agreements) naturally expect.

If being able to play the game perpetually isn't a viable business model, then perhaps the publisher should be required to specify up-front how long (at minimum) they will guarantee purchasers access to the game; that way nobody will be surprised when their access goes away, because they understood the time-limit on what they were purchasing before they made the purchase.

... and in 2020 it was "anyone but Trump", as it will be again in 2028, assuming we still have elections then.

Step back a bit, and you realize the real voting pattern is "anyone but the incumbent", because the system has deteriorated to the point where problems don't get solved anymore, so voters are just blindly switching back and forth from one party to the other in the hopes that doing that will somehow lead to improvement. American Democracy has devolved into the world's most elaborate ring oscillator.

That's true, but some people might be sad if they previously were able to pay their rent and now they cannot. Hopefully there will be other jobs available for them to move to.

Scene: Lunchtime at the Central Market, a trendy/tourist-trappy food-court/market area in downtown Los Angeles. Waiting in line to buy a gourmet sandwich from the sandwich vendor.

In front of the counter: lots of hungry customers. Behind the counter, three bemused-looking sandwich-makers standing idle, because the order-taker at the register is holding a cell-phone to one ear, conversing furiously with the tech support line of the company that provides their cashless ordering system, while at the same time waving off customers because he can't accept their cash and his order-taking tablet's server is down so he can't accept their credit cards either.

My takeaway is that cashless transactions are fine, right up until the moment they suddenly stop working for whatever reason, and at that point everyone involved will either fall back to cash as a work-around, or wish that they could.