Rafaela Vasquez pleads guilty to endangerment in the first deadly crash involving a fully autonomous carThe backup Uber driver for a self-driving vehicle that killed a pedestrian in suburban Phoenix in 2018 pleaded guilty on Friday to endangerment in the first deadly crash involving a fully autonomous car.Arizona state judge David Garbarino, who accepted the plea agreement, sentenced Rafaela Vasquez to three years of supervised probation for the crash that killed 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg. Vasquez, 49, told police that Herzberg came out of nowhere" and that she didn't see Herzberg before hitting her on a darkened Tempe street on 18 March 2018. Continue reading...
GCHQ, MI6 and MI5 propose weakening safeguards that limit training of AI models with bulk personal datasetsThe UK intelligence agencies are lobbying the government to weaken surveillance laws they argue place a burdensome" limit on their ability to train artificial intelligence models with large amounts of personal data.The proposals would make it easier for GCHQ, MI6 and MI5 to use certain types of data, by relaxing safeguards designed to protect people's privacy and prevent the misuse of sensitive information. Continue reading...
Service between Stromness and the islands of Hoy and Graemsay is Royal Mail's first permanent drone delivery serviceRoyal Mail has begun using drones to deliver post in Orkney, helping pave the way for drone deliveries to islands around the UK and on the mainland during emergencies.The service between the village of Stromness on Orkney's main island and the nearby islands of Hoy and Graemsay, using aircraft able to carry up to 6kg, is Royal Mail's first permanent drone delivery service. Continue reading...
The city building department had logged 24 complaints after the new logo went up, with neighbors upset over its intrusive lightsIt is gone. A giant, glowing X no longer marks the spot on the San Francisco high-rise that is headquarters to Elon Musk's company X, formerly known as Twitter.The city building department logged 24 complaints after a weekend of the big X, which on Friday was erected on the roof of the company's downtown San Francisco headquarters, on Market Street, to the chagrin of neighbors who complained about intrusive lights. Continue reading...
Competition and Markets Authority gives tech giant hope after it blocked acquisition of Call of Duty makerThe UK competition watchdog has said it will decide whether to clear or block Microsoft's $69bn (54bn) takeover of the video game developer Activision Blizzard by 29 August, as it gave fresh hope for the transaction by opening a new consultation on it.The Competition and Markets Authority, which had originally said in April it would block the deal to take over the owner of hit titles such as Call of Duty, World of Warcraft and Candy Crush, is seeking public contributions on whether it should clear it after a new submission from Microsoft. Continue reading...
Design director Marten Bruggemann explains why he set out to make a sci-fi game that's as much about cultivation as combatVideo game action-platformers might have had their golden age in the 1980s and 90s with Metroid and Contra, but the genre's modern resurgence has given us exceptional games such as Dead Cells and Hollow Knight, showing that bone-crunching combat and pin-point platforming still work beautifully together. But how do you breathe new life into this familiar video game form? In the case of Ultros, you complement the usual thrills and spills, with a spot of gardening - an opportunity to slow down and smell the roses.Game design director Marten Bruggemann says the gardening isn't just about growing resources (although that's a useful outcome of getting your hands dirty), but deepening your relationship with the game's teeming, nature-filled world. You can plant as much as you want, evolving the plants and shaping them in different ways to make hybrids," he says. We want to give life to an ecosystem."Ultros is out in 2024 on PlayStation 4 and 5. Continue reading...
From dealing with flight delays and preventing the children fighting, to claiming 15 minutes for yourself, we have recommendations for every summer holiday scenarioThe summer holidays are upon us, as are the immense tasks of navigating long trips, airports and keeping children amused for what feels like 400 days with no school. Video games can be a godsend for parents at this time, but there is a delicate balance to be struck: for kids, you want something entertaining enough to keep them out of your hair for a while, but not so addictive that you lose them completely for weeks on end. For adults, you need something you can play in the brief snatches of time when you're not making someone a snack.We're here to help. These are the best video games to keep everyone happy during the summer holidays, for every kind of scenario and gamer. Continue reading...
New logo for Elon Musk's social network strobes over San Francisco neighbourhood, prompting complaints and mobilising building inspectorsA giant glowing X marks the San Francisco spot where Elon Musk says he plans to keep his company, the messaging platform formerly known as Twitter. But city officials and some residents are unhappy with the display.On Friday, the company erected an X logo on the roof of its Market Street headquarters, to the chagrin of neighbours who complained about intrusive lights, and San Francisco's building inspection department, which said it would start an investigation. Continue reading...
We live in worrying times. From the climate crisis to the culture wars, there is always something to keep us fretting. But sometimes the facts tell a different story - a more hopeful one. Here, we speak to experts in search of some optimism and find 13 reasons to be a little more cheerfulKriti Sharma is a chief product officer for legal technology at Thomson Reuters and the founder of AI for Good Continue reading...
Ruxley Manor in south-east London is among the increasing numbers of retailers installing biometric security technologyAt 11.12am last Tuesday, a woman in her 70s sauntered through the main entrance of the Ruxley Manor garden centre in Sidcup, south-east London. Upstairs in its offices, the phone of director James Evans pinged.Facial recognition cameras had identified the pensioner as a potential criminal. Two weeks earlier, she had been caught stealing 15 worth of toys for her granddaughter and her image uploaded on to a private watchlist of known shoplifters. Continue reading...
The country's manufacturers are starting to dominate not just sales charts, but also supply chains for crucial materialsIf you bought an electric vehicle in the UK this year, there's a good chance it was an MG4. The fully electric hatchback, which launched in 2022, sold 5,200 units in the first three months of this year, the second-best selling EV behind Tesla's Model Y.With prices starting at about 27,000, it is also substantially cheaper than the Tesla at 45,000. And while MG is one of Britain's most famous car brands - with a century of carmaking in Birmingham until MG Rover's 2005 collapse - the secret to its newfound success comes from China. Since 2007, the company has been owned, and the cars made, by SAIC, China's largest carmaker. Continue reading...
When staff in Coventry downed tools, they kickstarted a David v Goliath battle against one of the most powerful companies on Earth. This is what happened nextIt takes a lot to frighten Zee. The 35-year-old father of two rarely gets flustered: not when he first set out on the 4,000-mile journey from his family home in Pakistan to the UK more than a decade ago; not during the years he spent struggling for survival on the fringes of Britain's formal economy; not when the Home Office threatened to deport him, plunging his young family into uncertainty. But the cold, foggy, final hours of 24 January this year - they felt different. My heart was pounding," Zee remembers. My mind was scared."That was the night Zee and his colleagues at Amazon's BHX4 warehouse in Coventry decided to make history, abandoning their workstations and launching an unprecedented stoppage to demand higher wages. They had walked out before, in a spontaneous, ad hoc protest. But this was different: a carefully planned and legal effort, the likes of which Amazon UK had never faced. Standing in their way at the exit gates was a line of senior managers who had the power to make or break each worker's future, staring down anyone who might dare to pass. As midnight struck, I kept catching other people's eyes: do we go, or do we stay?" Zee recalls. We didn't know what would happen if we crossed that threshold. But we did know that somebody, somewhere had to be the first to try." Continue reading...
Study of Facebook and Instagram data from 2020 election shows chronological lists had no measurable impact on polarizationThe powerful algorithms used by Facebook and Instagram have increasingly been blamed for amplifying misinformation and political polarization. But a series of groundbreaking studies published on Thursday suggest addressing these challenges will require more than just tweaking the platforms' software.The four research papers, published in Science and Nature also reveal the extent of political echo chambers on Facebook, where conservatives and liberals rely on divergent sources of information, interact with opposing groups and consume distinctly different amounts of misinformation. Continue reading...
by Lisa O'Carroll Brussels correspondent on (#6DAYP)
European Commission says bundling of app with other products may be anticompetitiveIt became one of the hits of remote working during the pandemic, but now the EU has launched an antitrust investigation into Microsoft's bundling of its Teams video and chat app with some of its other products.The European Commission said the decision to bundle Teams with its Office 365 and Microsoft 365 packages may constitute anticompetitive behaviour. It is the EU's first antitrust investigation into Microsoft in more than a decade. Continue reading...
Creative director Alex Dracott explains why he decided to make a driving game with a supernatural twistThe rain was pouring as game director Alex Dracott drove through the wilderness of the Pacific north-west. There wasn't anyone in the car with him, but nonetheless, Dracott didn't feel alone in his trusty station wagon - a dependable, durable vehicle he'd been driving ever since he was a teenager. As the game maker was bludgeoned by the elements, he describes feeling a camaraderie with the car", sheltered by its windshield and the metal of its body.This experience inspired Pacific Drive, the game Dracott has been making for the past three years with his team at Ironwood Studios in Seattle, capital of the famously verdant region. He describes it as a run-based driving survival game," played in first-person. You must make it out of an exclusion zone using nothing but your smarts and your beat-up vehicle. There are conspiracies to untangle, anomalies to avoid, supplies to gather and repairs to be made - if you make it back to your garage after each hair-raising excursion.Pacific Drive will be out on PC and PlayStation 5 in late 2023. Continue reading...
She's tasked with saving the company now called X, but Musk might be loth to hand over the reins of his $44bn vanity appThe rebrand of Twitter to X.com this week has been widely considered as among the most consequential steps in Elon Musk's endeavor to reshape the social media company. It is also being seen as a deciding moment for the company's recently appointed chief executive officer, Linda Yaccarino.Yaccarino, a longtime advertising executive, took the helm of Twitter in May. Her appointment came after months of controversial decisions from Musk, who bought Twitter for $44bn in October 2022 and proceeded quickly to lay off the majority of its staff and alienate advertisers with new policies. Faced with growing criticism over his erratic decision-making, Musk promised to bring in a new CEO - a position he himself described as a painful" job that anyone would be foolish" to take on. Continue reading...
In 2009, two bookshops a week were closing in the UK and the days of physical books seemed numbered. Now, indie stores are booming. What explains the turnaround - and can it be sustained?When Sarah Mullen was asked to set up a children's book festival in a leafy suburb of Birmingham in 2012, she couldn't find an independent bookseller to run the bookstall. So we all rolled up our sleeves and did it ourselves," she says. Pregnant with her third child, she had recently given up her job as a solicitor to work for the Bournville Village Trust. Mullen's task was to set up the Bournville BookFest, which ran for 10 years before being brought to a halt by the Covid pandemic. But far from accepting defeat, she rolled up her sleeves once again and pivoted the whole thing into a bookshop". Two years on, the Bookshop on the Green is thriving - a living rebuttal to the once widely held idea that the digital era meant certain death for the neighbourhood bookstore.When I visit early on a Friday morning, a turquoise vintage Smith Corona typewriter holds centre stage in the Bookshop on the Green. Beside it stands Bradley Taylor, a poet whose job is to write poems on demand for anyone who asks. He has composed a lot of Batman and football poems for the children who pile in on Saturdays, he says, before sitting down to tap one out for me about the joy of bookshops. In the multitasking tradition of small retailers, Taylor also works in the shop. He made his cosplay debut last month as the Gruffalo, in a sold-out storytelling session on the village green, as part of a week celebrating Birmingham's independent bookshops. Continue reading...
Revenue grew to $32bn, marking company's most profitable quarter since 2021, as news sends stocks surging by 7%Meta stock rallied as the company reported an 11% rise in revenue on Wednesday, beating Wall Street expectations.Revenue grew to $32bn in the quarter ending in June, compared with analysts' average estimate of $31.12bn, marking Meta's most profitable quarter since 2021 due in part to a massive growth in revenue from the company's short-form video product, Reels. The news sent stocks surging by 7% in after-market trading. Continue reading...
Tech companies say Frontier Model Forum will focus on safe and responsible' creation of new modelsFour of the most influential companies in artificial intelligence have announced the formation of an industry body to oversee safe development of the most advanced models.The Frontier Model Forum has been formed by the ChatGPT developer OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft and Google, the owner of the UK-based DeepMind. Continue reading...
In this week's newsletter: It's an act of subversion to design a game that tries to get you to think about death, but titles that embrace it can be wonderfully freeing Don't get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up hereThere's a line in Gabrielle Zevin's brilliant novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, a multilayered love story about game designers, that shows remarkable understanding of video games and what they do for us. What, after all, is a video game's subtextual preoccupation if not the erasure of mortality?"It's a connection that Zevin draws several times in her fabulous book, the contrast between the endlessly replayable, replaceable lives of video games and our own real, distressingly fragile mortal lives. Continue reading...
The sunny report establishes a continued rebound for the tech company after a difficult 2022 and thousands of job cutsAlphabet stocks rose in after-hours trading on Tuesday after the Google parent company's second-quarter profits exceeded Wall Street expectations, amid a rebound in advertising dollars and the growing boom in artificial intelligence.The company reported net profits of $1.44 a share for the April-June period, compared with estimates of $1.34 a share. Revenue for the quarter stood at $74.6bn, compared with estimates of $72.82bn, according to Refinitiv data. Continue reading...
Sotheby's selling one of firm's most obscure products, thought to have been custom-made for employeesOne lucky shopper with US men's 10.5-size feet and $50,000 (38,969) to spare will be able to buy one of Apple's earliest and most obscure products - trainers.The auction house Sotheby's is selling the ultra-rare" Apple-branded trainers, which are believed to have been custom-made for employees in the late 80s or early 90s, on its website. Continue reading...
Worldcoin, launched by CEO of ChatGPT developer OpenAI, says scheme will distinguish between verified humans' and AIMembers of the public are being invited to have their eyeballs scanned by a silver orb as part of cryptocurrency project that aims to use biometric verification to distinguish humans from AI systems.People signing up to the Worldcoin scheme via an app this week will receive a genesis grant" of 25 tokens, equivalent to about 40, after having their iris scanned by one of the bowling ball-sized devices. Continue reading...
The Lost Crown honours the adventure series' classic platform-game roots, but now the powers to manipulate time are in the hands of the villain. The game's developers reveal moreSome 34 years after the release of the first game in the series, Prince of Persia is going back to its 2D roots. Jordan Mechner's 1989 Apple II original was a side-on platformer that dazzled with its fluid, rotoscoped animation, but the series is probably now better known for its groundbreaking 3D entries, in particular The Sands of Time from 2003, which gave the Prince the power to slow, freeze or even rewind time. That game was the work of Ubisoft Montreal, but The Lost Crown is being created by a different Ubisoft studio with a strong 2D heritage.Ubisoft Montpellier has real expertise in 2D platform games, and some 20 members of the team worked directly on Rayman Origins and Rayman Legends in key positions," says game director Mounir Radi, who thinks it's a natural evolution for the studio to try its hand at a more open, less linear game structure. Accordingly, The Lost Crown is a Metroidvania", a style of action game that encourages backtracking across a gradually unfurling world where new abilities unlock new areas to explore. And it introduces a neat new trick: memory shards. Continue reading...
Authorities intervened on Monday to halt 'unauthorised work' to remove the old Twitter name from the sign at the company's San Francisco headquarters after Elon Musk's announcement of a rebrand to 'X'. Workers were seen removing the first letters of the word Twitter before the local police department was called to the scene. They later said no crime has been committed
We would like to hear from teachers worldwide about their experiences of smartphone use in schoolsWe would like to hear from teachers worldwide about their experiences of how smartphones affect school life.Are smartphones permitted among students at your school? Do you have any concerns? Continue reading...
The AI arms race heats up as Meta makes a deal with Microsoft while its Cupertino competitor toils away on Apple GPT'. Plus, Twitter's X-tinction Don't get TechScape delivered to your inbox? Sign up for the full article hereThe AI summer is well and truly upon us. (This gag may not play as well for readers in the southern hemisphere.) Whether we call this period the peak of the hype cycle" or simply the moment the curve goes vertical will only be obvious in hindsight, but the cadence of big news in the field has gone from weekly to almost daily. Let's catch up with what the biggest players in AI - Meta, Microsoft, Apple and OpenAI - are doing.AppleThe iPhone maker has built its own framework to create large language models - the AI-based systems at the heart of new offerings like ChatGPT and Google's Bard - according to people with knowledge of the efforts. With that foundation, known as Ajax", Apple also has created a chatbot service that some engineers call Apple GPT".In recent months, the AI push has become a major effort for Apple, with several teams collaborating on the project, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the matter is private. The work includes trying to address potential privacy concerns related to the technology.We're now ready to open source the next version of Llama 2 and are making it available free of charge for research and commercial use. We're including model weights and starting code for the pretrained model and conversational fine-tuned versions too.Starting today, Llama 2 is available in the Azure AI model catalog, enabling developers using Microsoft Azure to build with it and leverage their cloud-native tools for content filtering and safety features. It is also optimized to run locally on Windows, giving developers a seamless workflow as they bring generative AI experiences to customers across different platformsIn a study titled How is ChatGPT's behavior changing over time?" published on arXiv, Lingjiao Chen, Matei Zaharia, and James Zou, cast doubt on the consistent performance of OpenAI's large language models (LLMs), specifically GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. Using API access, they tested the March and June 2023 versions of these models on tasks like math problem-solving, answering sensitive questions, code generation, and visual reasoning. Most notably, GPT-4's ability to identify prime numbers reportedly plunged dramatically from an accuracy of 97.6 percent in March to just 2.4 percent in June. Strangely, GPT-3.5 showed improved performance in the same period.AI researcher Simon Willison also challenges the paper's conclusions. I don't find it very convincing," he told Ars. A decent portion of their criticism involves whether or not code output is wrapped in Markdown backticks or not"... So far, Willison thinks that any perceived change in GPT-4's capabilities comes from the novelty of LLMs wearing off. After all, GPT-4 sparked a wave of AGI panic shortly after launch and was once tested to see if it could take over the world. Now that the technology has become more mundane, its faults seem glaring.Willison agrees. Honestly, the lack of release notes and transparency may be the biggest story here," he told Ars. How are we meant to build dependable software on top of a platform that changes in completely undocumented and mysterious ways every few months?" Continue reading...
In 2020, people of all ages and backgrounds were suddenly stuck at home, with many turning to streaming platforms to connect with their peers - transforming toxic spaces into inclusive environmentsSomething weird happened to video game streaming in the early part of 2020. For a long time, platforms such as Twitch, Mixer and YouTube Live were clubhouses crammed with teenage and twentysomething dudes who ruthlessly guarded what they saw as their patch, trolling and hate raiding channels run by creators outside their demographic.Sure, Twitch has worked hard to combat old stereotypes and foster a safe, inclusive environment by improving security, adding new stream categories, and rigidly enforcing community guidelines. But talking to streamers at TwitchCon Paris, a huge get-together for fans and creators, it's clear that if the user-base is more diverse and welcoming now, one key reason has nothing to do with Twitch. It was Covid. Continue reading...
Overnight on a ferry I spent 35 as my phone downloaded while I sleptYour recent letter about BT prompted me to write about my own bad experience - in this case, the roaming charges I clocked up while asleep on an overnight ferry.We had boarded a Brittany Ferries service from Portsmouth to Bilbao late in the evening, and turned in fairly quickly after driving all day. But, unbeknownst to me, my phone was downloading data while I slept - I think because I had left Google Maps running. Continue reading...
The video sharing platform will allow posts of up to 1,000 words, in a move it characterised as expanding the boundaries of content creation'TikTok has announced the introduction of text-only posts, as it becomes the latest tech company seeking to capitalise on people who may be looking for an alternative to Twitter.Video sharing platform TikTok announced on Monday that it will now allow users to create text-based content", in a move it characterised as expanding the boundaries of content creation for everyone on TikTok" and giving the written creativity we've seen in comments, captions, and videos a dedicated space to shine." Continue reading...
Computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum was there at the dawn of artificial intelligence - but he was also adamant that we must never confuse computers with humansIn 1966, an MIT professor named Joseph Weizenbaum created the first chatbot. He cast it in the role of a psychotherapist. A user would type a message on an electric typewriter connected to a mainframe. After a moment, the psychotherapist" would reply.User: Men are all alike.
Change comes after streaming giant attempts to boost margins with layoffs and restructure of podcasting unitSpotify has raised prices for its premium plans across several countries including the US, UK and Australia, as the music-streaming company looks to boost profitability in an uncertain economy.Monday's move will result in a $1-a-month price increase for Spotify's US plans, with the premium single now starting at $10.99, duo at $14.99, family at $16.99 and the student plan at $5.99. Continue reading...
From a Tesla range misspelling sexy' to naming his own child after an airplane, branding just might not be his strong suitOn Sunday, in a series of posts that surely won't be called tweets for much longer, Elon Musk reasoned that his company's new logo, a badly rendered letter X, embodies the imperfections in us all that make us unique". What does he mean by that? He, of course, has no idea. This is a man with a terrible, terrible history for naming things.At Tesla, Musk would insist on a model lineup that spelled out the word sexy", even after there was no chance of Ford relinquishing their copyright on the Model E (so he ended up with Model S, Model 3, Model X, Model Y). At SpaceX, an uninventive moniker in itself, he named his rockets like an improv audience member shouting out random words to inspire a comedy scene: Grasshopper! Merlin! Starship! Musk's failure of a tunneling concern, the Boring Company, shows he also flair for lame puns that don't quite land. Continue reading...
When the Egyptian empire fell, no civilisation escaped unscathed. The latest in Creative Assembly's series of grand strategy games tries to make sense of a confusing periodIn recent years, Creative Assembly has pushed its grand strategy games - in which you raise armies and direct them over a world map that looks a little like the board game Risk - in more fantastical directions, giving you control of Greek and Trojan heroes in Total War: Troy, Chinese folk legends in a retelling of the epic Romance of the Three Kingdoms era, and even mythical monsters in its take on the tabletop miniatures game, Warhammer. But Total War: Pharaoh is firmly grounded in historical sources.The action happens in the years leading up to the bronze age collapse, a period of sudden turmoil in the 12th century BC that saw many centuries-old Mediterranean civilisations simply cease to exist. We are representing a specific historical period," game director Todor Nikolov says. There are no legends about the bronze age collapse in Egypt, so we went fully historical to try to recreate what could have happened."Total War: Pharoah will be out in October 2023 on PC and Mac Continue reading...
From dire warnings about social media to a genuinely meditative video game our critics select culture to help you overturn the overloadNo film tells us more about tech burnout than Jeff Orlowski's polemic The Social Dilemma, which shows that it is not simply a sad occasional casualty of digital consumption or social media engagement. It is inevitable. The tech burns you out because you are the fuel that is destined to be used up: you are the log throwing itself on the flames that warm the tech corporations. Addiction is algorithmically baked into the way social media works; cunningly conceived with all its little beeps and prompts and come-ons to keep you scrolling, liking and retweeting, yearning for the next insidious little dopamine hit of amusement, jittery and uneasy if your smartphone isn't immediately to hand. Thus we are all unwittingly enlisted into an army of consumers whose presence justifies these corporations' ad spends. Peter Bradshaw Continue reading...
Dr Karen DeSalvo is excited by the arrival of artificial intelligence but warns it has limitations and will only be a tool in the toolbox' of medical professionals
The long-running series in which readers answer other readers' questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific and philosophical conceptsWhy is the US the only country where nearly everyone drives an automatic? It's de rigueur over here, whereas driving stick" seems to be the default in other countries. Benton Oliver, San DiegoPost your answers (and new questions) below or send them to nq@theguardian.com. A selection will be published next Sunday. Continue reading...
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