Humm, I am starting to think that this should be in Product/Book reviews. I haven't read it yet, but may have to.

Anyway, eventually AI will get that far, but for now, I don't think so. As far as a program that knows when to destroy itself, they are already in existance in military use. On certain military vehicles (planes, tanks, etc) there is a program that does nothing but monitor the vehicle. If the vehicle is somehow "destroyed" this program destoys all confidential information before the computers can be "captured". I don't know how in depth the system goes (if it just wipes the disks, or physically destroys them), but I know it exists. Actually, I am not positive that it has even been put in production yet, but it was being written by a company in Michigan that I talked to about working with. I assume there has to be a lot of error checking though, because a false positive (like a flat tire) could result in the death of everyone in the vehicle...