If you find yourself at a stage of life where you have multiple domiciles, I strongly recommend buying duplicates of literally everything that isn't literally one-of-a-kind. Travel where everything but the clothes on your back and your laptop is already pre-positioned at the other end is a treasure.
is there any aspect of human existence as complicated as romance
Yes. Parenting and politics. Given a good enough model of humanity, you could probably prove that romance comes in precisely third after those two. Unlike romance, it's not even all that sensible to consider those two with non-sentient NPCs, a sign of their inherent complexity. Otherwise, good argument.
I'm coming in late, but I will say that you should probably examine the game-design literature. They are (for good commercial and aesthetic reasons) pretty much in line with your theory of fun, and in some ways advanced of it.
The problem, as I see it, is that you can't take bits out of a running piece of software and replace them with other bits, and have them still work, unless said piece of software is trivial.
The capacity to do in-place updates of running software components dates back to at least the first LISP systems. Call it 1955? Modern day telephone switches and network routers are all built with the capability of doing hot upgrades, or they wouldn't be able to reach the the level of uptime required (if you require 99.9999% uptime, going down for 30 seconds for an upgrade ruins your numbers for ten years). Additionally, those systems require that every component be independently crashable and restartable, for reliability purposes.
The best solution I've seen to the "nuke in New York" situation is that the torturers should be tried, convicted, and pardoned. The pardon is there specifically for situations where rule-based law violates perceptions of justice, but acknowledges that rule-based law and ethics should be followed first. The codification of the rule of pardon seems to conflict with the ideas of "never compromise your ethics, not even in the face of armageddon" that you are apparently advancing. Thoughts?
Because I would give odds around as extreme as the odds I would give of anything, that if you tell me "the AI you built is trying to deceive yourself", it indicates that some kind of really epic error has occurred. Controlled shutdown, immediately.
Um, no. Controlled shutdown means you are relying on software, which should be presumed corrupted, unless you are very sure about your correctness proofs. What you want there is uncontrolled shutdown, whether by pulling the plug, taking an axe to the CPU, shutting down the local power-grid, or nuking the city, as necessary. Otherwise, Hard Rapture.
Deep geothermal energy production via microwave drilling to 20km. If we can geothermal wells to those depths, we can pump down water and get back superheated steam. This can then be turned to electricity using a standard power plant turbine. In particular, it can be turned to electricity using existing turbines at coal- and oil- fired power plants, allowing those plants to continue to run but "defueled". Abundant power, no CO2 or other emissions, no additional land usage, no intermittency, no additional grid connections required, no additional earthquake risks (it's drilling, but not fracking), no geographic restrictions (if you drill anywhere it's hot enough) which also means reduced geopolitical conflict. If you feel like it, you can use some of the waste water for wicked-awesome artificial hot springs like they do in Iceland. The trick is that drilling to that depth is difficult with standard drills, so the idea is to use high-powered microwaves to essentially vaporize the hole down to the necessary depth. The microwave generators necessary were designed for fusion research. They stay on the surface, while the microwaves are shot down a wave guide (a conductive pipe, essentially). Quaise Energy is hoping to have a test well this year, and to be defueling existing power plants by 2018. If there's a downside to any of this, I haven't heard of it.