RE: Engineering Trust with Charles Hoskinson
There is fully autonomous and partially autonomous. Fully autonomous could only work if you have an absolute ability to trust the code. All Turing complete undecidable code has the potential to be buggy, which means all programming languages which produce smart contracts of that type are black boxes. Engineers know this and I'm sure you know this. Unfortunately the general public doesn't and so they believe you can trust bugged code to be reliable when in reality it's a black box.
Making bug free code is non-trivial. It's not impossible because NASA and others do it. It's what powers pacemakers, self driving cars, autopilot in planes, and more. These are not likely to be powered by Ethereum though and never by Solidity as it is now. People asking for autonomous are trusting their lives with the code and people demanding immutability aren't understanding what that could mean when code is protecting lives directly or costing it.
You would not believe the number of unmanned air vehicles and space probes I've seen lost due to Murphy's Law for Unmanned Systems:
"There is always one more bug."
Working with blockchains is much better. The shame of a hard fork pales compared to the shame of a smoking crater on Mars.
Trusting their lives with a smart contract code?? Who wants to trust their life with a smart-contract? Smart contracts are not meant to "protect lives directly". That's the point - use a smart contracts reasonably and within their limitations and be aware that things might go wrong.
Actually, there are products that do kill people and still we choose to use them. Cars have the ability to kill and injure people. Whenever I choose to drive I take a little bit of risk of seriously and irreversibly hurting myself (even due to no fault on my side) but still millions of people every day choose this little amount of risk to get a bit of convenience and fun in return.
The same applies to smart contracts. Just make sure that everybody is properly informed about the risk, but let people make the choice and then bear the consequences of that choice. Smart contracts can be immutable and thus not fully reliable, and still widely used, just as cars are. Let the user decide if he wants a safety net or not. If you want a safety net - stick to the legacy system, if you want to enjoy your freedom (and bear the responsibility) - use a smart contract. By adding a hard-fork option to a smart contract, we end up recreating what we already have - we introduce a third party which has the power to intervene. It's no longer a peer-to-peer relationship.