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.
A local health department in Memphis has granted Elon Musk’s xAI data center an air permit to continue operating the gas turbines that power the company’s Grok chatbot. The permit comes amid widespread community opposition and a looming lawsuit alleging the company violated the Clean Air Act. The Shelby County Health Department released an air…
Another week, another Chinese electric car poised to deliver an extinction event to Western automakers. This time it’s Xiaomi, a Beijing-based tech firm best known for smartphones and the company behind the Porsche Taycan-baiting SU7, which in late-2024 was so popular that Xiaomi increased its sales forecast three times in a matter of months. Now…
Meanwhile, the Trump family’s crypto empire continues to expand. In late March, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., the president’s sons, announced a new bitcoin mining venture. Shortly before that, the parent company of Truth Social, Trump’s social media platform, entered an agreement to launch a series of crypto-exchange-traded funds. President Trump himself has previously…
Four OpenAI researchers are leaving the company to go to Meta, two sources confirm to WIRED. Shengjia Zhao, Shuchao Bi, Jiahui Yu, and Hongyu Ren have joined Meta’s superintelligence team. Their OpenAI Slack profiles have been deactivated. The Information first reported on the departures. It’s the latest in a series of aggressive moves by Mark…
In her new book, Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream, journalist and WIRED alum Megan Greenwell chronicles the devastating impacts of one of the most powerful yet poorly understood forces in modern American capitalism. Flush with cash, largely unregulated, and relentlessly focused on profit, private equity firms have quietly reshaped…
So the race is on to engineer an efficient surrounding for fusion. One of Fuse’s ideas is to get a bunch of big capacitors to discharge at once, thus kick-starting a reaction. That’s why, at our show, there were all those big caps behind the audience. (You also see constructions of big caps at other…