One day, in the immediate future, you might very well witness this scene from your office window. A lawyer jaywalks across a Toronto street to avoid being late for a firm risk management committee meeting. While she does so, she texts her colleague in Calgary with instructions on containing the legal liabilities arising from a northern Alberta oil plant shut-down that has already occurred in the future (a reality of simultaneity across locally-logged events across a multi-timezone world) after an eco-terrorist hacked into the plant heating system. It is at this moment that she is struck by an autonomous delivery van. The van was travelling the wrong way down a one-way street because the city transportation department had not uploaded a temporary change to traffic direction to accommodate a condo developer. An algorithm built into the telephone service to warn the lawyer of oncoming traffic fails to alert her because the … Read More