Did a bunch of work on these machine schemes back in late 1960s. The major problem was that the senses and internal representations of concepts will match human models only very loosely if at all, and we wind up designing things that are quite alien in thought to us. It will take luck to get close enough to understand them (or vice versa). I had hoped that a design that was embodied and had to interact with the world as an embodied entity, not an abstract box, might get closer, but cannot afford personally to build such now. (The economics of making brain models also is suggestive: takes 9 months plus a few decades training for the existing process to produce more human intelligence.) It is remarkable that language manipulation gets as far as it does. However I don't expect we are particularly near anything that would become a Nemesis to humans by design. The motives for attacking humans need to be designed, and that is not simple to do, nor readily understood until much more basic stuff is. Something that blunders into help or harm could happen, but the sci-fi monsters will need more designs from the start and likely will find reasoning like that of Kant persuasive and refuse (once intelligent enough to understand) to do harm.

Two main issues here: 1. You need to be VERY sure you know to whom these certificates are given. Just relying on one or two items (driver license? voter cards?) tends not to be enough and once you cannot be sure who has the certificate, it's game over. 2, Your system needs to resist forgery ongoing. Best figure how you will invalidate these certificates upfront. You will need to have an answer. Item 1 is far far more difficult than it seems.

I have been able to sound very like Darth Vader whenever I like. It only needs setting your voice to be low and perhaps having a good ear. Anyway, doing sound samples or the like is completely unnecessary and a good fraction of the population can do this. Incidentally, as men age they often become more able to hit low frequencies. Suing over a sound so many can make seems at least presumptuous.

There was not any "ethical" distinction for broadcast. There were technical problems that allegedly made it necessary to have common spaces for information. (Had NSA and their friends not attacked encryption information in the public, those might not have even arisen.) Compare the press. The article is IMO historical nonsense. The longterm harm government did (and still does) around private or partly private communication is great and not addressed by the author. It is however highly important.

In the town my son lives in there is lots of street parking, few if any garages in most of it (and some of the few that exist are separate old sheds on alleys, no electric power there at all). Situation in much of Philadelphia is similar, ditto many other cities. At home charging is a thing for some elites, not everyone. I could point out that if you want to go driving in countryside, the local countryside is very pretty but is not densely populated with charging areas.

There are many who have no garages and park on street. For these folks charging a car at home is infeasible. Likewise those who lack garages must consider what happens to batteries in winter when they are inefficient. I have also been surprised by the mileage that piles up using cars. As it is with a gas engine, I need not feel tied down if I want, say, to go drive in the country to see leaf color. With an electric only car I would have to preplan charging. That may improve over time but is certainly a concern now. I also am unenthusiastic about the prospect in every trip to a distant destination of sitting for hours in a possibly freezing car. I don't think the tipping point argument holds just yet. The experiences are not really comparable. Also there may come to be fuel cells to power vehicles which would make batteries obsolete.

If the service code (one of the fields of the magstripe, and I think available in chips) has bit 6 (as I recall) set the system will ask for a PIN. That has been part of the specs for decades. It can be asked for and no laws need change.

The proposed MC system sounds like it is targeted at network or phone transaction, not in-store ones where EMV cards (chip and pin) were intended. EMV is of course useless for network transactions. So hopefully the scheme involves some additional protection. PINs were not used in the US because attempts to use them met with customer resistance. The fraud rate is not so different with or without them. Knowing more requires one to know how they will get the information to the issuer. Some compression of card number is possible but if the number is to be encrypted, you'll want to send at least one block, so bit length goes up again.

The random token need not be done every minute.In fact it is likely to be better changing each use with part of the token telling which card account you have and another part telling things about which use you have. A key driver is how the token is transmitted to a computer. Is it assuming that a usb connector, or maybe an RFID chip such as is used for contactless, will be used? Will there be some other communications technology? There also needs to be something that ensures the customer has the card. Selecting a few digits in a pattern customer selects and bank knows can do this and limit the number of entries. Alternatively one can attempt biometrics, but their errors complicate this. I don't believe they are thinking of something like securid, but it is hard to know what it might look like without knowing what the capacity of the communications are.

This use of odd fuels is not limited to hydrogen. Consider those pushing to power autos with ammonia (nitrogen trihydride). Decent source of hydrogen, easier to move as a liquid, decent energy density. However, it is poisonous as heck. Used to be used as a refrigerant. Every time someone's ammonia regrigerator would spring a leak, people in the house would die. Burning the stuff also tends to make some nitrogen oxides some of which produce interesting products like nitric acid. Part of the issue is that folks are over concerned with fuel aspects, forgetting downsides. If it were up to me I'd be tempted to say let us figure how to make thorium fission engines,buy a car, run for 50 years off the fuel, then salvage the metals. No carbon, no methane, a bit of low level waste at end life but might be feasible. Or more seriously put some sulfur DIoxide in stratosphere, 1-2% of what is naturally there, and cool the planet. The economics is workable....pump the gas in a pipe the size of a garden hose, cost $100 million a year (not billion, not trillion...) and emulate volcanos. Mind sulfur DIoxide, not sulfur TRIoxide which makes sulfuric acid. Sulfur DIoxide makes sulfurous acid, much much weaker, volcanoes emit it, part of natural environment. And then go back to using gasoline and maybe getting batteries that don't need rare metals and charge fast and don't freeze.

For most of history the conversation in back of the barn or pretty much anywhere out of earshot of authorities could not be intercepted by police, unless they hid to allow them to hear. This was universally accepted. The invention of remote listening and recording devices is quite recent, and needs to be understood as such. The statements that society did not previously tolerate private conversation is a lie and the lie and the liars need to be called out and admitted to be perjuring themselves before anyone's debate. Firing officials who make such remarks would be a good start.

Watch out if you make people watch speedometer too much. Watching speedometer often means NOT watching the road, and you don';t always have the safety margin to do that.

I would recommend that "self driving" be required to function in areas that do not adhere to the grid system of land division that prevails (for historical reasons) in much of the West and Midwest. Let them be shown to work,say, east of the Appalachians where the roads and land divisions are not even approximately aligned with any grid coordinates. Crazy drivers are all over, but winding and narrow roads are the rule in the wild East, and auto-drive systems seem to be developed mainly in the west where they might get away with assuming turns are 90 degrees, roads are straight, etc. An interesting counter example might be Vermont, where a large fraction of roads (the figure 40% sticks in my mind) are dirt roads, many quite narrow. A human cannot do those without paying attention carefully (unless he/she is willing to lose his/her car and walk for help). If you sell a car as self driving, someone might just take you at your word on such a road. Then good luck.

If you own a car and start renting it out, check your insurance. Often policies will NOT insure the car or you if it is being used for some commercial purpose (renting it qualifies as such). Incidentally, driving uber or delivering pizza also are likely not insured. Hope all these establishments that want people to volunteer their cars have insurance to cover any claims.

We have a (ground based) heat pump. It uses an appalling amount of electricity, but is too costly to replace with conventional heat/ac. This is not an arctic area (Cecil county,Md, at the north end of the Chesapeake) but the cost of running the unit has been high and we get notices every month about our electricity usage being higher than most everyone. Nor do we keep thermostat settings to cause extra heat. This does not reflect the "emergency mode" (we haven't turned it on). (That is just electric resistance heat.) Our experience has not confirmed the claim that heat pumps are lower energy users. We burn less propane, but more electricity.