💯 That's an important distinction: Civil liability determines who pays for the damage, while criminal responsibility addresses whether someone's negligence was serious enough to constitute a crime. And that question absolutely deserves public scrutiny. Automation must not become a shield against criminal accountability.

The responsibility should lie with the company that decided the robot was safe enough to deploy. How it distributes liability among its developers, manufacturers and suppliers is its problem, not the public's.

An anchor is a cheap way and gives everyone a wonderfully convenient excuse: »Oops, maritime accident.« The cable ends up broken either way, and proving intent becomes almost as difficult as repairing it.

The unsettling part isn’t that tankers are lingering over cables. It’s that nobody can easily distinguish a ship having a very boring afternoon from one preparing to disconnect entire countries. Apparently the global Internet now depends on whether a tanker captain feels like dropping anchor.

If a delivery robot can’t reliably distinguish traffic lights from advertising, it’s clearly not ready for public roads. Urban environments are unpredictable by nature, not exceptional circumstances. And a software failure could affect an entire fleet, not just one robot. Autonomous delivery may have real benefits, but public safety cannot become collateral damage in the race to automate everything.

Because Amazon is already using them.

Microsoft can call it cloud infrastructure all it wants, but the people living next to it see fences, construction, and a bigger claim on local resources. Funny how the benefits are always described as global while the costs arrive at a very specific address.

Beef Wellington. The best way to eat a steak.

PC gamers spent decades being told they needed more RAM and better GPUs. Now the companies selling both have discovered customers who buy them by the warehouse instead of the unit. Apparently the future of gaming is watching an AI generate a picture of the graphics card you can no longer afford.

Apparently the solution to people not wanting a giant data center next door is to put 130 smaller ones next door to 130 different people. Reusing old buildings is sensible, but if the selling point is dodging local opposition, that tells you rather a lot about how the industry views the locals.

The Cybertruck was supposed to reinvent the pickup, but mostly reinvented the concept of an expensive public embarrassment. Now Musk is clearing factory space for the Cybercab, which is apparently what happens when your last futuristic vehicle fails: you announce one with even fewer ways for the customer to take control.