You're not wrong, but I think the last few decades have demonstrated what peoples' de facto priorities are. Maybe after we've lost the great majority of biodiversity, we'll regret not having done more to prevent that loss, but for now the common mindset is "I want my goods and services today, and if there's any tradeoff at all between my day-to-day comfort and the natural world's long-term existence, then I'll take the former now and hope that the latter works itself out somehow". :(

The people don't want it, but the companies do. As for why the companies want it, I'll just quote a bit of dialog from a Douglas Adams novel:

It's not "overwhelming the biosphere" that's the primary cause for concern, though. The primary concerns are human-centric: cities flooding or catching fire, crops not growing, hurricanes and tornadoes destroying infrastructure, people dying of heat exhaustion, etc. All of these things are problems already and will get worse the higher the CO2 concentration is allowed to get. Knowing that the total amount of carbon on Earth is finite doesn't help with that.

Is it an AI trying to mimic human artistry, or a human artist trying to mimic AI's mimicry of human artistry?

In the end, does it matter which?

Not if Waymo is clever (which they are). A Waymo's car can and should go into a failsafe mode where it maneuvers its way out of traffic and parks, and also moves out of the way of emergency vehicles when possible/necessary. Basically the same things a responsible human being would do in the same situation. It's not rocket science.

Robots can also let a firetruck through until the road is hopeless -- they just need to be programmed to do so. Assuming Waymo isn't completely insensate, that will be the case going forward.

Let's ask that the other way -- what other power generation systems have depopulated entire cities as a result of not being adequately maintained? I think hydroelectric dams might be one answer.

That's likely a factor. Not a whole lot of liability lawsuits to worry about there, I imagine.

Other factors include:

1. A government that is happy to throw money at anything that helps them look modern and cool
2. Wide, empty, logically-laid-out streets that are easy to drive on (if self-driving were a video game, Abu Dhabi would be the tutorial level)
3. Minimal weather/visibility concerns

Probably they'll deal with that sort of misbehavior the same way hotels do... by always having someone's credit card on file before allowing access to the shared resource, and charging service/cleanup fees to that card as necessary to recover costs and discourage bad behavior.

That's been the go-to strategy for decades now; the problem is that it doesn't work.

The speed at which news (gossip, really) spreads on social media is proportional to how effective it is at getting social media users to re-post it, rather than proportional to how accurate it is.

The problem with that is that the truth is sometimes compelling but often not particularly interesting, while a well-crafted lie is (by definition) always compelling.

Therefore we constantly see the scenario where "a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes". Usually by the time the ethical people have posted their followup corrections, it's too late, the damage has been done and half of the Internet thinks the lie is true and the corrections are "just a cover-up".

I don't have a solution for this problem, I can only unhelpfully note that simply "drowning out the lies with the truth" isn't a solution that works anymore, if it ever did.

Some talented film-maker needs to take these rules and create a movie that is required to break every single one of them. Dunno what that would look like, but it might be fun.

I'm going with "malicious compliance" -- when you task 1000+ FBI agents to grovel over a mountain of data with the express instruction to cover up anything that makes the boss look like the pedophile he is, at least a few of them are going to take exception to that and "forget" how to properly redact things.

I'm reminded of ancient Egypt, where each new Pharoah's first order of business was to destroy the monuments created by (and for) his predecessor, and then to start building new ones by (and for) himself. Have we reached that level of narcissism?

The word you're thinking of is "terrorists" (i.e. people who employ terror as a political tactic).

"Extremists" simply means people whose views lie at the extreme end of a range of views on an issue.

Sometimes terrorists are also extremists, and sometimes extremists are also terrorists, but they are nevertheless two different words with different meanings.

Do these scraper guys qualify as extremists? I don't know -- their position on copyright law seems to be that it can and should be ignored. Is that the most extreme position one can have on that issue?

Well, that, and because humans require oxygen to remain conscious. If there's so little oxygen in the air that your car won't start, your car won't be the worst of your problems.

OTOH your self-driving EV could perhaps evacuate your unconscious body from the area :)