Your framing fits well for the Nexus era and even the earliest Pixel iterations, where Google’s hardware largely functioned as a reference implementation and ecosystem lever, nudging OEMs into making better devices.

However, the current Pixel strategy appears materially (no pun intended) different. Rather than serving as an “early adopter” pathfinder for the broader ecosystem, Pixel increasingly positions itself as the canonical expression of Android—the device on which the “true” Android experience is defined and delivered. Far from nudging OEMs, it's Google desperately reclaiming strategic control over their own platform.

By tightening the integration between hardware, software, and first-party silicon, Google appears to be pursuing the same structural advantages that underpin Apple’s hardware–software symbiosis. The last few generations of Pixel are, effectively, Google becoming more like Apple.

I think "judge AI" would be better if it also had access to a complete legislative record of debate surrounding the establishment of said laws, so that it could perform a "sanity check" whether its determinations are also consistent with the stated intent of lawmakers.

One might imagine a distant future where laws could be dramatically simplified into plain-spoken declarations, to be interpreted by a very advanced (and ideally true open source) future LLM. So instead of 18 U.S.C. §§ 2251–2260 the law could be as straightforward as:

"In order to protect children from sexual exploitation and eliminate all incentive for it, no child may be used, depicted, or represented for sexual arousal or gratification. Responsibility extends to those who create, assist, enable, profit from, or access such material for sexual purposes. Sanctions must be proportionate to culpability and sufficient to deter comparable conduct."

...and the AI will fill in the gaps.

Obviously both will exist and compete with each other on the margins. The thing to appreciate is that our physical world is already built like an API for adult humans. Swinging doors, stairs, cupboards, benchtops. If you want a robot to traverse the space and be useful for more than one task, the humanoid form makes sense.

The key question is whether general purpose robots can outcompete on sheer economies of scale alone.

There are a sizeable number of deaths associated with the abuse of Tesla’s adaptive cruise control with lane cantering (publicly marketed as “autopilot”). Such features are commonplace on many new cars and it is unclear whether Tesla is an outlier, because no one is interested in obsessively researching cruise control abuse among other brands.

There are two deaths associated with FSD.

I doubt you’d wish for it if the price was the limitations and incompleteness of MenuetOS. While hobby operating systems are great for exploring possibilities, you quickly bump into an endless stream of tiny frustrating inconveniences.

    an endless stream of tiny frustrating inconveniences

That sounds suspiciously like OS X, especially the newer releases.

Try being frustrated by a really basic USB stack with no hot-plug USB support. Or by no unicode support, no vector fonts, or a multi-user security model. Is that frustrating enough for you? Okay, how about no process isolation or memory protection? Does that sound like macOS to you?

Pretty much it. An modern OS is more than just a window and file manager, 90% of the work is in all the edge cases that we take for granted.

Even more weirdly, pumpkins are berries. But that’s a botanical definition. In the kitchen they (and tomatoes) are classified as vegetables.

Same with cucumbers and a lot more "plants" :-)

The most effective way to "save lives" would be to sterilize the entire population, reducing fatalities to zero within 100 years or so.

That is even LESS reasonable than my idea. Society is a delicate balance between individual and group rights.

As opposed to drunk drivers who treat a non-roundabout intersection as a game of Russian roulette?

You're not. All you need to do is look around a typical car park and count witness marks on car bumpers to know that accidents are extremely common. One study put the estimate at one "driving mistake" every 500 miles and one crash every 60,000 miles.

An insurance policy study estimates that the average person is involved in 3–4 collisions in their lifetime.