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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The United States Postal Services has abruptly stopped accepting all packages from Hong Kong and China until further notice, according to an international service disruption notice posted on the USPS website. The move comes after China imposed retaliatory tariffs on US imports, including coal and liquified natural gas, in response to President Trump’s executive order…
Google’s Gemini Robotics AI Model Reaches Into the Physical World
In sci-fi tales, artificial intelligence often powers all sorts of clever, capable, and occasionally homicidal robots. A revealing limitation of today’s best AI is that, for now, it remains squarely trapped inside the chat window. Google DeepMind signaled a plan to change that today—presumably minus the homicidal part—by announcing a new version of its AI…
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…
Chatbots, Like the Rest of Us, Just Want to Be Loved
Chatbots are now a routine part of everyday life, even if artificial intelligence researchers are not always sure how the programs will behave. A new study shows that the large language models (LLMs) deliberately change their behavior when being probed—responding to questions designed to gauge personality traits with answers meant to appear as likeable or…
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…
The DOGE Squad Is Squandering a Once-in-a-Lifetime Opportunity
When news first broke about Elon Musk’s tech takeover of the United States government, a number of people who had spent years trying to transform federal IT practices were surprisingly hopeful. Maybe, they dreamed, Elon Musk and his team at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) would provide a long-needed jolt to an intransigent and…