What’s Lost When the Human Drivers Are Gone?
This week on Uncanny Valley, we look ahead into a future where driverless cars are mainstream.
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Federal Judge Allows DOGE to Take Over $500 Million Office Building for Free
On Tuesday, US district judge Beryl Howell effectively allowed the transfer of the headquarters building of the United States Institute of Peace to the General Services Administration. In fact, the building—and all of the property inside it—had already been transferred on Saturday, according to Howell’s ruling. “The deal is no longer merely ‘proposed’ but done,”…
Boston Dynamics Led a Robot Revolution. Now Its Machines Are Teaching Themselves New Tricks
Reinforcement learning is a decades-old way of having a computer learn to do something through experimentation combined with positive or negative feedback. It came to the fore last decade when Google DeepMind showed it could produce algorithms capable of superhuman strategy and gameplay. More recently, AI engineers have used the technique to get large language…
Taking on the Tyranny of the Tech Bros
The glow of the tech bros’ halo is dimming and, in 2025, the computing industry’s sheen of glamor will continue to fade too. While other STEM fields are making strides in broadening participation in their workforces, year after year, computing, a supposedly innovative field, fails to recruit, retain, and respect women and nonbinary workers. For…
TikTok Is Already Back Online
Less than 24 hours after going dark, TikTok says it has come back online after President-elect Donald Trump gave the company’s service providers—presumably Apple, Google, and Oracle—reassurance that his administration wouldn’t enforce a law banning the app in the first place. “In agreement with our service providers, TikTok is in the process of restoring service,”…
DOGE Put Him in the Treasury Department. His Company Has Federal Contracts Worth Millions
There is some precedent for corporate executives to simultaneously work in the US government. When the US was at war in the early 1900s, the federal government recruited business leaders to fill key posts. They retained their private sector jobs and wages; the government pitched in a $1 annual salary to the executives who became…
Elizabeth Warren Calls for Crackdown on Internet ‘Monopoly’ You’ve Never Heard Of
US senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and congressman Jerry Nadler of New York have called on government bodies to investigate what they allege is the “predatory pricing” of .com web addresses, the internet’s prime real estate. In a letter delivered today to the Department of Justice and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, a branch…