💯 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.

Trump managed to turn political loyalty into an asset class where the voters take the losses and the insiders take the profits. Usually politicians wait until after leaving office to cash in on their supporters. This one offered a live ticker.

The real selling point is a machine that follows orders without hesitation, doesn't question authority and never files a complaint. Pretty much the ideal employee for an authoritarian government.

We somehow went from inventing robot dogs to carry groceries to developing genetically modified dogs for battle. Apparently humanity looked at man’s best friend and thought: nice, but could it be a defence contractor? At this point the only species that really needs obedience training is ours.

The irony is that the semiconductor industry became a miracle of global cooperation, and now every government wants its own miracle behind a tariff wall. You can subsidize a factory, but you can’t simply photocopy decades of expertise, suppliers and trust. Apparently interdependence was fine until politicians noticed it.

Funny how the AI boom is supposedly about replacing workers, yet the entire industry still depends on people keeping the chip factories running. Executives get record profits, shareholders get soaring valuations, and the people making it possible have to strike for a fair share. Perhaps the real disruption is workers discovering their leverage.

Spending $447 million to influence an election and then deleting the posts when it goes badly is quite a business model. Apparently you can buy a social network, an enormous megaphone and plenty of political access, but you still can’t buy the electorate. The delete button must be getting more use than Grok.

Turns out people aren’t thrilled about paying higher electricity bills so billionaires can build enormous server farms next door. The industry spent years calling every objection irrational fear of progress. Apparently voters have discovered a more effective feedback form: the ballot.

The unsettling part isn’t that kids ask chatbots for comfort. It’s that we’ve built a world where a machine that confidently makes things up is available 24/7, while actual human support often isn’t. And naturally, the business plan is to make the machine even more engaging.