You could befriend one by feeding it a doughnut every day for a week, but if you miss a day 3 generations of your descendants will be haunted by crows, racoons, and crowcoons

Now I’m imagining these scrawny ass war boys with calves the size of grapefruits from cycling on sand all day

data retention

It’s the opposite - most regulatory frameworks require that you only retain data if you have a “legitimate purpose” for holding on to it; providing app features absolutely is a legitimate purpose, so by having a “wrapped” you can justify holding on to everything a user does - after all, you need it to provide features.

I’m surprised it’s not already in place for rail freight. Pre-defined, well known routes, automatic right-of-way. You’d need some exception detection - spot things on the line or if any part of the train is behaving abnormally, but like cars you can “fail safe” - do an emergency stop if the computer or a remote operator decides that something has gone sufficiently wrong which you can’t do in a plane

Technology wise, aircraft are already 90+% automated - autopilot does basically the whole cruise phase, pilots are there to do the communication with ATC, manage the autopilot, and be hands on for taxi, takeoff and landing.

From a legal/policy perspective, the aviation industry is held to a much higher standard of reliability and safety than the automotive industry - the AI driven YOLO that companies like Waymo get away with. It’s not just that autopilot systems have to always work, it’s that they have to always behave in a predictable way.

Plus a bunch of old equipment and documents that are definitely secret and too valuable to just destroy, but no-one is entirely clear exactly how secret and valuable so it’s safer to leave it guarded in place than to try and move it