An Amazon Prime Air cargo jet ripped right past the landing zone at the Miami International Airport on Sunday afternoon, struggling to stop itself in time before overrunning the runway and crashing into a cleaning crew and a nearby SUV.

It was a tragic incident, killing five innocent people.

The Boeing 767-300 also barreled right through a chain-link fence that was protecting a highly unusual lot of vehicles: photographs of the scene show the dented nose of the airliner just a few dozen feet away from a kennel of parked Tesla Cybercabs.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has banked the future success of his EV maker on the gold-colored self-driving vehicles, which are too small to fit more than two passengers and lack both steering wheels or pedals. Their sudden appearance in a story about a deadly airliner disaster had the billionaire taken aback. However, instead of offering his condolences after the tragedy, Musk simply tweeted the word “Weird” in response.

The peculiar cameo also led to plenty of questions over Tesla’s plans to roll out the cars outside of Austin. Just last week, the Cybercabs were deployed for the first time in the Texas city, but the company has yet to announce any imminent launches in Miami.

Regulators from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration watched closely following last week’s deployment, which comes just shy of two years after Tesla first showed off its Cybercab. As Bloomberg notes, the light on details event was “uncharacteristically low-key,” offering no livestream or media coverage.

The “Cybercab event was largely a bust,” tweeted Future Fund Advisors co-founder Gary Black. “The launch offered little detail and key questions remained unanswered.”

Indeed, regulatory approval is hazy for vehicles without any traditional driver controls, a topic that’s especially pertinent to Tesla. Musk has bet the company’s entire future on the success of its Cybercabs and its humanoid robot, dubbed Optimus.

With neither showing any signs of a significant public rollout any time soon, Wall Street is bound to keep asking some tough questions.

More on the Cybercab: Tesla Loses Trademark to “Cybercab” Due to Its Own Staggering Incompetence

The post Amazon Cargo Jet Crashes Just Feet From Parking Lot Full of Tesla Cybercabs, Killing Five appeared first on Futurism.

Automakers are having an increasingly difficult time convincing their customers that more in-car screens — and the often dodgy software that accompanies them — are a compelling reason to pay a major premium.

Virtually every major car company is now installing increasingly enormous screens into the dashboards of its cars, frequently stretching far beyond the driver’s seat and into the passenger area as well.

But what’s becoming more and more clear is that practically nobody actually wants any of those purported luxuries in their ride. As a new survey by consumer research firm JD Power goes to show, owners of 2026 model-year vehicles are being actively put off by the enormous displays.

Out of the 68,000 owners JD Power surveyed, over a third of them said that they never even tried to use passenger screens, while only six percent said they use them every time they get in the car. Worse yet, in its own investigation, JD Power found that the larger screens were more prone to infotainment system problems as well.

The survey made clear that the most popular consumer-facing car technologies, out of the 40 examined, were the ones that were the most easily ignored, such as smart ignition or smart HVAC. The lowest on the entire list, tellingly, were passenger console touchscreens — which have previously been linked to severe driving safety issues that were absent for traditional knobs and buttons.

“The technology customers value most is often the technology they barely notice because it simply works,” said JD Power director of customer success Doron Hikry in an accompanying press release. “Smart ignition and smart climate control make everyday driving easier without demanding the driver’s attention, while more automation and additional screens don’t necessarily translate into a better experience.”

Beyond wasted space for giant screens, owners also weren’t impressed with Level 2 Plus driver assistance systems, which allow them to drive without having to keep their hands on the wheel on certain roads, such as Tesla’s infamous Full Self-Driving feature. In its survey, JD Power found that owners preferred Level 2 systems in terms of both design and quality of experience.

“The results indicate that owners may currently be more comfortable with systems that clearly assist the driver rather than those that introduce a greater degree of automation,” Hikry added.

It’s an already familiar trend, with consumers growing frustrated with every feature getting buried in convoluted touchscreen interfaces. Some automakers have caught on to the widespread frustration, opting to fall back on easier-to-use and less distracting tactile controls for car interiors.

More on car interiors: Volkswagen Bringing Back Buttons, Knob After Touchscreen Complaints

The post It Turns Out That Drivers Absolutely Detest Those Giant Touchscreens They Put in Cars Now appeared first on Futurism.

As work conditions go, the transition from licensed taxi cabs to the rideshare model represented a significant step backwards for drivers in the US. Stable wage jobs became “side gigs,” while human managers were replaced by labyrinthine algorithms. And forget fleet maintenance — under the new model, disenfranchised drivers were now responsible for their own vehicle’s upkeep, and all the financial burdens that come with it.

Yet with robotaxis from brands like Waymo and Tesla spreading through US cities like wildfire, even the Uber-fied gig economy is starting to become untenable for workers. Rising in its place is the “robotaxi handling” industry, bring with it contract jobs that are somehow even more grueling than the rideshare gigs they’re replacing.

A startling interview with an anonymous Waymo contractor by Bay Area Current details precisely how degrading these jobs can be. The worker, identified only as a “Robotaxi Handler,” outlines a poorly organized jobsite where incognito enforcers routinely snitch on undertrained contractors on behalf of management. Oh, and there’s poop to clean — lots of poop.

Starting off, the handler clarifies that although their work is for Waymo vehicles, they actually report to a third-party company called Transdev US, which handles the messy logistics behind the autonomous cabs. (Neither company commented on Bay Area Current‘s interview.)

Per the worker, Transdev’s hiring process amounts to a kind of Soylent Green approach to human resources, in which dozens of contractors are rounded up sight unseen, onboarded en masse, and then culled from the herd when they inevitably fall behind.

“There’s no interview process,” the worker explained. “They weed people out over time based on whether or not you can keep up with that process and adapt really quickly.”

After that rapid-fire orientation, workers can be assigned to various Waymo facilities all over their home city, with job duties rotating on a daily basis.

“Who gets placed in those specific jobs gets decided by managers the day of,” the robotaxi handler told Bay Area Current. “So your job changes every day depending on how much experience you have, how long you’ve been there, and how friendly you are with the managers.”

Sometimes those roles involve troubleshooting — updating software, cleaning sensors, and uploading Waymo data to company servers. It also includes unsticking Waymos when they clog up traffic, which is becoming a frequent occurrence in San Francisco. That can put workers in a precarious situation in which they have to choose whether to follow company orders not to interfere with a piece of tech still in its infancy.

“The policy for Transdev and Waymo is actually to let [the car] sit there and figure it out, because if we disengage it whenever there’s an issue, then the cars don’t have a chance to figure out the issue itself,” the worker explained. “But when it gets really bad, then we have to — what are you going to do? There’s 50 cars all stuck and people off the street yelling at us and threatening us.”

Other times, handlers can be assigned to cleaning tasks. This becomes especially unpleasant near the end of the week, when weekend revelers leave all kinds of nasty surprises for handlers to mop up.

“Typically that’s when there’s the most throw-up, the most disgusting things in the back,” the handler told Bay Area Current. “Even poop, there’s a lot of cleaning up poop. Way more than you think.”

“One time there were two pig heads in the backseat of the car and the cleaner had to clean it up,” the worker continued. “I assume they just went to the market to make a stew or something, but they forgot their pig heads. They were just rolling around in the back of the car.”

This worker’s arduous experience wrangling Waymos in San Francisco may just a taste of things to come as robotaxis hit the streets across the US.

More on Waymo: It Turns Out That When Waymos Are Stumped, They Get Intervention From Workers in the Philippines

The post The People Maintaining Waymo’s Self-Driving Cars Are Being Treated Horribly, Insider Claims appeared first on Futurism.

Uber drivers and their passengers across Nigeria and Uganda were shocked on Wednesday when the platform abruptly ceased operations in the middle of the day — and, in some cases, even mid-trip.

According to reporting by the Register, the “Uber rapture,” as it’s come to be known, came with little warning — an email notice sent on the very same day.

“We are writing to share some difficult news,” Uber’s email to Nigerian users went, per a screenshot obtained by the outlet TechCabal. “After a thorough review of our business, we have made the tough decision to wind down our operations in Nigeria, effective 2 September, 2026.”

Of course, the deluge of corporate communiques delivered via email in this day and age means an important memo like this could be easily ignored, if not relegated to the spam folder automatically.

Case in point, the same-day memo did little to prepare drivers or riders for the deactivation, prompting waves of outrage on social media when the Uber app was shut off, seemingly out of nowhere.

“The Uber rapture is wild! Drivers and riders were mid-trip when it happened,” wrote Nigerian journalist Anita Eboigbe in a post on social media. “Insane!”

Another commentator wrote that a “friend of mine said they were on a ride when they got the message. She told the driver and he said ‘it’s a lie!’ The drivers who depend on it for livelihood had absolutely no idea.”

“The app shut down mid-trip,” another account located in Nigeria explained in a comment on X-formerly-Twitter. “They never gave a heads-up or hinted at them leaving the landscape. I had done a delivery that same morning and about an hour later, we all got emails saying they were leaving immediately.”

It’s a dramatic step for Uber, which had been operating in Nigeria since 2014, and Uganda’s capital city of Kampala since 2016.

“This decision is limited strictly to these two markets and does not impact our operations across the rest of the continent,” the rideshare company said in a statement to the Register. “Uber remains deeply committed to sub-Saharan Africa, where we continue to see robust growth and long-term opportunity.”

More on transit: Uber Drivers Say Waymo Robotaxis Are Driving Down Their Pay

The post Uber Abruptly Ends Operations in Africa, Abandoning Drivers and Riders Mid-Trip appeared first on Futurism.

A Tesla running one of its self-driving modes was rear-ended after stopping in the middle of a Arizona highway, Electrek reports, with the driver found dead at the scene. Grimly, it’s not the first accident of its kind.

The crash occurred on October 31, 2025. According to local reports at the time, the 2020 Tesla Model 3 was struck by an F-350 pickup around 3 AM on the eastbound Loop 202 in Mesa, Arizona. None of the contemporaneous reports made note of whether the Tesla had one of its driver-assist systems engaged.

Electrek, however, managed to match the collision to a redacted crash report that Tesla provided in its filings to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. These were shared under a Standing General Order that requires automakers to report crashes involving a driver-assist system that’s considered to have an SAE Level 2 of automation or higher, meaning that it can partially drive itself under the right conditions and with constant supervision.

The report states that an automated driving system — either Autopilot or Full Self-Driving — was “verified engaged” during the accident. The vehicle’s “pre-crash movement” is listed as “stopped – 0 mph,” indicating it stopped in the middle of the road. None of these details were shared publicly at the time of the accident.

Electrek says that this is the second time that a Tesla Model 3 with a driver-assist system engaged apparently stopped in a highway before a crash that killed its driver; it also happened in Florida, just weeks before the second one.

What happened is unclear. Tesla’s self-driving software has a well-known “phantom braking” problem that causes the cars to brake unexpectedly, but this is typically to slow the vehicle down, not stop it completely. Going from highway speeds to a grinding halt would be an extraordinary, if not unprecedented, example. It’s also possible that the driver fell asleep behind the wheel or experienced some kind of medical episode that rendered them unable to respond.

The upshot is that we’re more or less being kept in the dark. These details, and whether the car was running the now-obsolete Autopilot or its more advanced successor FSD is impossible to know, because Tesla censored that section of the crash report. It has long redacted crucial information in these reports reports under the guise of protecting “confidential business information,” a practice that is legal but rarely used to the extent that Tesla does. It has gotten in trouble with regulators for how it reports crashes, though. Last year, the NHTSA launched an investigation into Tesla for repeatedly failing to report crashes in time.

More on Tesla: Teslas Are Still Driving Into Oncoming Freight Trains

The post Tesla Driver Killed After Self-Driving Mode Stops in the Middle of a Highway appeared first on Futurism.

In November of last year, scientists warned of a “severe” solar storm, the strongest in over two decades, colliding with the Earth.

Solar storms are the result of a surge in solar activity, with the Sun unleashing a barrage of charged particles that can trigger spectacular auroras — and wreak havoc with communications satellites and radio signals — when they reach the Earth’s magnetosphere.

Beyond being ferocious enough to delay the launch of a Mars-bound NASA spacecraft, the storm wreaked absolute havoc with GPS systems back on the ground for hours at a time. As detailed in a new paper published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, a team of scientists found that global navigation satellite systems experienced “significant positioning errors” of over 33 feet during the superstorm, “large enough to disrupt precision agriculture and autonomous transportation industries” across the continental United States.

That’s enough risk to warrant a careful study on these types of events can impact human activity on Earth.

“The results underscore the importance of accurate understanding of various space weather phenomena to enhance our predictive capabilities through coordinated observations and physics‐based modeling and ultimately reducing disruptions to RF applications during space weather events,” the paper reads.

The researchers analyzed observations from several scientific instruments spread out across the US to watch the chaos unfold last November. The Aurora Oval, a ring-shaped area of pronounced activity around the Earth’s geomagnetic north pole where auroras conventionally occur, was pushed south toward the equator. This triggered a “horizontally extended band of intense density gradients” in the upper atmosphere, causing fluctuations in how long signals take to travel through it.

The result: “significant positioning errors at mid-latitudes,” the researchers noted.

The researchers also found that as the auroras became brighter, the observed irregularities became more intense, deteriorating GPS accuracy accordingly.

Fortunately, while farming equipment like GPS-equipped tractors would’ve likely been affected, the November storm occurred long after the farming season concluded.

However, that wasn’t the case for the May 2024 superstorm, which scientists estimate cost farmers half a billion dollars in damages.

“Had the November superstorm occurred during the farming season in the American sector, it could have caused significant economic losses for the American farming industry, in addition to affecting the autonomous transportation industry,” the paper reads.

More on the solar storm: Scientists Say the Largest Solar Storm in Two Decades Is About to Blast Earth

The post Researchers Alarmed as GPS Readings Suddenly Veer Off by 33 Feet, Enough to Crash Self-Driving Cars appeared first on Futurism.

The South African airline Airlink is defending its dramatic flyover of two full sized passenger jets that passed just yards above a packed stadium in Cape Town.

Footage of the ambitious stunt consumed social media, with multiple angles showing how closely the aircraft — two Embraer SA passenger jets — passed within the rooftop of the 55,000 capacity venue. It was a tight enough call that many saw it as a near-crash rather than a piece of precision maneuvering. 

In response to the backlash, Airlink, which is backed by Qatar Airways, is reassuring that the flyover was super carefully planned and as safe as it could be.

“Airlink notes the concerns,” its statement began, in near perfect parody of corporate non-apologies.

“The two aircraft were flown by highly-experienced crew, with each comprised of three senior captains operating in the roles of commander, co-pilot and safety/technical officer,” it added, per multiple reports.

It insisted that the stunt “demanded careful planning and rehearsal” because of the low altitude and speed, stressing that it was approved by the South African Civil Aviation Authority and the Air Traffic Navigation Services. 

look how low this flyover looked. two airlink passenger jets just flew over dhl stadium in cape town ahead of the springboks vs. all blacks match. pic.twitter.com/5r5nB1j9ti

— Michael Rusch (@weeddude) August 29, 2026

Be that as it may, aviation experts were aghast at what they saw. The flight tracking platform Flightradar24 calculated that one of the planes flew within less than 50 feet of the stadium’s rooftop, where a rugby match between South Africa and New Zealand was being hosted. One of the planes also appeared to be flying much lower than the other, which could cut against the airline’s claims of how tightly controlled the stunt was.

“Hundreds of professional aviators around the world have looked at those images and expressed concern,” wrote Scott Bateman, a professional aviator and author, on X. He added that while the stunt may have been carefully planned, a “mature safety culture” should still be capable of admitting that “perhaps the margins were tighter than they needed to be.”

Keith Tonkin, an Australian aviation consultant, said that the Embraer SA passenger jets weren’t designed to fly that low.

“The bigger picture is that a benchmark has been established and others may expect to do something similar, and that’s not going to end well,” Tonkin told  The Associated Press. Unexpected turbulence or a bird strike, he warned, could’ve been disastrous.

More on aviation: Paramedics Now Rolling Up to Medical Emergencies in Flying Hovercraft

The post Airline Defends Decision to Fly Two Full Sized Passenger Jets So Close to a Packed Stadium That They Nearly Grazed the Roof appeared first on Futurism.

Uber and Lyft drivers in Atlanta are fed up with Waymo robotaxis.

The Atlanta Rideshare Drivers Union is claiming that drivers have reported lower pay, longer waits between rides, and fewer fares since Waymo began offering its service in the city last June, Axios reports. 

As such, the union is calling on city and state leaders to curb Waymo’s expansion — and to consider some measures to easen its disruptive effects on their livelihoods. 

Liza Ramsey of the ARDU proposed a particularly bold measure to Atlanta City Council members on Wednesday. Rideshare drivers, Ramsey claimed, wanted to create a robotaxi impact fee of between $0.50 to $1.00 that would be added to each ride.

The money from this would go into a “driver transition fund” to help drivers find a new calling with job training and other assistive programs.

“If corporations profit from replacing human workers with automation, they should contribute to helping those workers transition to the next opportunity,” Ramsey said, per Axios.

The union also wants to ban robotaxis from picking up people from the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. Airports, historically, have always been a reliable place to pick up passengers.

Ramsey said that the union hasn’t collected any hard data proving the decline in income, but cited widespread complaints from drivers who share screenshots of their earnings in a group chat.

Since launching in June 2025, Waymo’s Atlanta service has logged more than 5.4 million miles of fully autonomous rides. (It hasn’t always been smooth sailing, with residents complaining about the vehicles’ strange habit of congregating in suburban neighborhoods and repeatedly plunging into flooded stretches of road.) It also hasn’t had an antagonistic relationship with Uber: to help it get a foothold in the area, Waymo partnered with the rideshare app, allowing passengers to hail a robotaxi directly through its app as they would a human driver.

It’s not the only city where Uber and Lyft drivers are disgruntled about automation. In January, rideshare drivers protested against Waymo vehicles in San Francisco, demanding tighter regulation of the industry. Similar protests have taken place in New York City, Los Angeles, and Seattle.

ARDU is also not the only union going on the offensive against autonomous vehicles. Earlier this month, the California branch of the Teamsters union sued state lawmakers for pushing out new regulations friendly to the autonomous vehicle industry, which they allege didn’t consider the devastating impact of self-driving trucks on their jobs.

More on self-driving vehicles: Former Lyft Drivers Now Doing Menial Tasks for Their Waymo Overlords

The post Uber Drivers Say Waymo Robotaxis Are Driving Down Their Pay appeared first on Futurism.

Your fear of flying is only going to get worse once you hear what these white hat hackers figured out to do with a popular airliner.

As Wired reports, a team of security researchers from the University of California, San Diego and Oberlin College created a device the size of a coin that can take over the autopilot system of a Boeing 737 and change its flight plan, not to mention tampering with key values in its takeoff and fuel calculations. 

According to its creators, the device could also change the data on a pilot’s screen so they don’t notice anything’s amiss — or even trick a pilot into making a disastrous decision.

“If you could get 60 seconds with an airplane, what could you do?” Stefan Savage, a UCSL professor who led the project, asked Wired. “Well, it turns out there’s a port that’s externally accessible. You can get to it with no special tools in about 15 seconds. And you can shove in a piece of electronics a little bigger than a quarter that lets you basically tell the autopilot what to do and lie to the pilot about changes to the flight plan.”

The attack relies on plugging the device, which costs less than $100, into a port hidden by a hatch on the exterior of the plane, which the researchers say is easily within reach of maintenance workers and airline staff. Once the device is plugged in, it could connect to the plane’s in-flight Wi-Fi system and allow a hacker to remotely control the aircraft’s systems from terra firma.

As Savage explained to Wired, his team found this vulnerability after spending years cobbling together 737 computer parts to effectively recreate the plane’s nervous system. Inspired by credit card skimming devices that plug into ATMs to steal your information, they realized that an entire aircraft could be broken into by physically plugging a device into its internal “bus” — the system that connects different components of its computer. 

And after digging through Boeing wiring diagrams, they found their way in: a port carrying data between the plane’s Flight Manage Computer and the pilot’s display unit, accessible from an unlocked hatch on the plane’s exterior. 

It was like finding “the goddamn exhaust port on the Death Star,” Savage told Wired.

The havoc a hacker wreaks using their attack could be catastrophic. They could feed the pilot the wrong information about the air temperature outside or about the weight of its cargo and passengers and cause them to miss the speed they need for takeoff before running out of runway, Wired noted. Or they could suddenly change its navigation and crash it into a mountain.

The attacks could also be far more sneaky.

“It could be something as subtle as, you’re in the Pacific, you see blue everywhere, and this diverts you 3 degrees off course, and now you’re in the middle of nowhere,” Aaron Schulman, another UCSD professor working on the project, told the magazine.

Savage and Schulman shared their findings with Boeing six years ago and have worked closely with the company to explore the vulnerability.

But the researchers say that Boeing hasn’t told them about any fix to the vulnerabilities they found. In fact, they say it’s likely that it any fix may not have been implemented yet, since commercial airplanes are rarely redesigned.

You shouldn’t panic though, they insist.

“All of the authors of this paper routinely travel on Boeing 737 aircraft and expect to continue doing so,” they wrote in their paper.

Beau Woods, a former adviser to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the Boeing’s Industry Cyber Technical Council, was alarmed by the findings.

“It is entirely possible to have someone who is on staff go up to an airplane when it’s on the ground, going through maintenance, and put this type of thing in there,” Woods told Wired.

“This is something the aviation industry will want to plan to defend against,” Savage agreed. “I would not sleep on this one.”

More on aviation: Why Aren’t Any AI Companies Watching Their Frontier Models to Make Sure They Don’t Go on Hacking Sprees?

The post Hackers Created a Device That Can Take Over a Boeing 737 Jet’s Autopilot Without Anyone Noticing appeared first on Futurism.

At this point, it’s a pretty well known fact that electric vehicles — and, at least in the popular imagination, Teslas especially — have a nagging habit of erupting into flames.

One Tesla owner in Maine evidently has that concern hovering in the back of their mind every time they leave the driveway.

While driving around the town of Tremont in a sleek red Model S, an unnamed driver hit an object on the road which punctured the vehicle’s lithium-ion battery, local station WABI5 reported. As most EV drivers are hopefully aware, any kind of damage to a car’s battery can easily spark a fire fueled by thermal runaway, resulting in a uniquely dangerous inferno that can be difficult to put out.

Luckily, this driver kept their head, driving straight to the Tremont fire station where the high-voltage battery immediately burst into flames, Bangor Daily News reported.

With help from the nearby Southwest Harbor Fire Department, the crew of the Tremont Volunteer Fire Department sprang into action, shutting down the road and dousing the Tesla using an arsenal of firehoses.

Based on photos of the incident, it seems the Tesla was totaled, but the driver is said to be doing alright.

The Tremont fire comes just days after an exploding Tesla in Seattle sent two firefighters to the hospital. That particular EV was parked inside an attached garage at the time, resulting in a two-alarm housefire that displaced an unfortunate family.

All told, if you drive an EV, it’s probably smart to have the address of the nearest fire department drilled into your head — especially if it’s a Tesla.

More on Tesla: It’s Looking Like the Cybertruck Is the Biggest Flop in Automotive History

The post Driver Pulls Up Directly to Firehouse When His Tesla Inexplicably Bursts Into Flames appeared first on Futurism.

How do you fix a shortage in air traffic controllers and restore trust in the safety of the country’s aviation industry? By hiring video game addicts, of course.

On Sunday, transportation secretary Sean Duffy announced that the department had hired thousands of new air traffic controllers thanks to his campaign to “recruit video gamers as air traffic controllers.”

“We’re building the strongest, sharpest workforce in aviation history,” he declared.

This genius strategy is, in Duffy’s opinion, a “GAME CHANGER.” He claimed that the department has now met 94 percent of its hiring goals after bringing in more than 2,000 new employees — the “best and brightest,” he says — which was the “most in a single year.”

And there’s 2,000 more candidates behind them, Duffy added, “reaching the Academy quicker than any class before them, thanks to the most streamlined hiring process.”

When Duffy announced the plan in April he reasoned that some air traffic controllers said gaming helped them “think quickly, stay focused, and manage complexity.”

There’s nothing inherently wrong with hiring gamers, but it’s a somewhat glib message to be sending after a shortage in air traffic controllers has caused a crisis of faith in the aviation industry. President Trump helped kick that off by gutting the industry’s regulators and firing hundreds of employees from the Federal Aviation Administration in an anti-woke, anti-DEI purge. To make up for the chronic understaffing, controllers have been forced to work grueling overtime shifts, and last October worked for over a month without pay amid a government shutdown. The FAA has also had to delay and cancel flights because it didn’t have enough controllers available.

The new recruits will help, but it’s too early to declare victory. It takes years to train new controllers, with the vast majority dropping out before they finish, according to the Government Accountability Office.

It’s well worth asking if Duffy’s “streamlined hiring process” is rigorous enough, too. By the FAA’s own historic estimate, less than 10 percent of applicants are accepted into its training program. Meanwhile, in keeping with a Trump administration motif, Duffy has been obsessed with integrating AI, including adding the tech into the air traffic management system.

More on transportation: Flock’s Secret Surveillance Plan Will Make You Gasp

The post Transportation Secretary Announces That the Air Traffic Controller Crisis Is History Now That He’s Hired Thousands of Epic Gamers appeared first on Futurism.

Flock had a devious plan to expand its surveillance network past its army of AI-powered license plate scanners.

As 404 Media reports, the controversial company drew up plans to use the dashcams installed in Uber and Lyft drivers’ cars to scan the license plates of every vehicle that drove past them — in effect turning hundreds of thousands of rideshare and delivery drivers into a network of what the reporting describes as “roaming surveillance vehicles.”

These plans were first revealed last August as part of an intended partnership between Flock and the AI-powered dashcam company Nexar. Now, a presentation document obtained by 404 Media shows that Flock was actively pitching this partnership to potential customers at the time. The presentation, which was intended to be shown to the Georgia Office of the Attorney General, was obtained by a Georgia resident through a public records request.

Flock told 404 that the partnership never went through, but the presentation still shows the company’s plans to turn rideshare and delivery drivers into mobile surveillance apparatuses — and the sheer scale is astonishing. 

“Hundreds of Commercial Business and HOA [home owners associations] in GA [Georgia] are part of the network,” the Flock presentation stated. “Plus Nexar partnership which includes 350k Uber/Lyft and other delivery service devices.”

Expanding to rideshare drivers would’ve added a new dimension to Flock’s already far-reaching surveillance network. Most of its cameras are mounted on stationary poles that survey a fixed area. In addition to providing more coverage, using cars could help Flock keep a lower profile; one of the main problems Flock is facing amid overwhelming public backlash is that protestors are vandalizing or blocking its surveillance pylons.

Another murky area of Flock’s plans was that it’s unclear if the Uber and Lyft drivers would’ve been aware they were participating in surveillance efforts, 404 noted.

Flock didn’t discount the possibility of these plans being realized through another partnership in the future. If they do, it’ll only fuel the massive privacy and safety concerns already posed by its cameras. The footage it collects into a centralized network can be accessed by cops across the country, often with little accountability. At least 50 police officers have been accused of using the cameras to stalk women, according to a recent Washington Post tally.  

Several people have also been swarmed by cops after Flock wrongly identified them as suspects.

The dashcam partnership wasn’t the only plan that Flock had to deepen its surveillance. Last month, it officially cancelled a “human distress detection” pilot program, a network of always-on acoustic sensors that monitored public places for sounds of “screaming.”

More on surveillance: Public Offers Implausible Number of Alibis for Man Accused of Destroying Flock Cameras

The post Flock’s Secret Surveillance Plan Will Make You Gasp appeared first on Futurism.

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Police say the remains found in a suitcase near Goulburn are not human.

Supt Linda Bradbury with NSW police said:

Some good news here that we don’t have a suspicious death of a human on our hands. … We are still undertaking more forensic work to identify what they are. But we can identify that they’re not human.

But we’ve confirmed by other means that they are not.

The undersupply of housing combined with population growth is expected to partially offset the impact of higher interest rates and recent federal government policy changes on the housing market.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: 9News

© Photograph: 9News

© Photograph: 9News

Two firefighters were rushed to the hospital on Wednesday, after a Tesla parked in a family garage exploded.

According to local station KING5, the incident happened in the Seattle suburb of Auburn, after a massive fire spread from a family’s garage to the rest of their home.

The Tesla explosion set off what ultimately became a two-alarm fire, requiring emergency crews to battle back flames for hours. Thankfully, the two injured firefighters were discharged with non-life threatening injuries, and nobody else was hurt, though the single-family home was pretty much totaled.

The ultimate cause of the fire is still under investigation — whether the Tesla combusted on its own, setting off the blaze, or was the result of a fire which started elsewhere isn’t known.

Still, it’s fair to assume the explosion contributed to the severity of the fire, the latest example of an all-too-common situation plaguing Teslas and other electric vehicles.

Thanks to their massive lithium batteries, Teslas have an unfortunate habit of bursting into flames, often after being involved in collisions, but occasionally entirely on their own.

Regardless of what sparks the flames, battery fires are notoriously difficult to put out, requiring specialized hazmat units and thousands of gallons of water to end the battery’s combustion.

More on Tesla: Tesla Whistleblower Describes Wildly Dangerous Safety Lapses While Developing Full Self-Driving

The post Tesla Explosion Sends Injured Firefighters to the Hospital appeared first on Futurism.

Self-driving trucks could be hauling cargo across highways in the near future. But not without the Teamsters having a say in the matter first.

As Politico reports, the California branch of the nation’s largest union is suing state lawmakers, accusing them of rushing out new regulations that’re friendly to the autonomous vehicle industry without considering their impact on workers’ jobs.

The lawsuit, filed Wednesday, takes aim at several state agencies including the Department of Motor Vehicles, and governor Gavin Newsom’s administration. The union contends that the new regulations are an “existential threat” to hundreds of thousands of union jobs, and is demanding that the DMV should be blocked from enforcing the new rules.

“The DMV irresponsibly, carelessly, and unlawfully kept the public in the dark about the true economic and human costs of the amended Autonomous Vehicle regulations,” Julie Gutman Dickinson, an attorney representing the Teamsters, said in a statement, per Politico. 

“The only way to protect the public’s right to properly scrutinize regulations that will transform transportation in California is for the Court to order the DMV to immediately rescind the illegally enacted regulations,” Gutman added.

California regulators have played hardball with autonomous vehicle companies in the past, including Elon Musk’s Tesla. And previously, Politico noted, it was the only state that prohibited large self-driving vehicles.

That changed in April. Snuck into a sweeping bill that imposed tighter limits on how driverless cars should operate was a clause that allowed testing of autonomous semi-trucks and other heavy duty vehicles, so long as the pilot programs go through an approval process.

At the crux of the suit, the Teamsters say that the DMV didn’t conduct a mandatory economic study to gauge the effects of the new regulations. Instead, the lawmakers expediently used a process meant to fast-track minor updates that have minimal economic impact, they allege. 

The DMV, puzzlingly, calculated that no jobs would be eliminated by self-driving trucks. Fat chance, according to the Teamsters: by its own count, over 200,000 semi-truck drivers could be put out of work.

The Teamsters also raised the danger posed by allowing computer systems to control a vehicle weighing tens of thousands of pounds, compared to the smaller threat posed by a robotaxi. A Tesla Semi — a vehicle that’s envisioned as having autonomous driving capabilities — was involved in a grisly crash that killed two people, though it doesn’t appear that self-driving features were being tested at the time of the accident.

More on self-driving vehicles: Tesla Whistleblower Describes Wildly Dangerous Safety Lapses While Developing Full Self-Driving

The post Labor Union Sues Over Self-Driving Trucks appeared first on Futurism.

Europe is looking to clean its transport infrastructure and make it as sustainable as possible. Obviously, the future

For certain BMW owners, enormous car payments aren’t the only rude reminder that they don’t actually own their ride yet: now, irritating in-vehicle commercials will send them the same message.

Starting last week, the German automaker started blasting a promotion for the new Spider-Man movie into its customers’ cars without warning — because nothing says riding in luxury like a full-vehicle pop-up ad. BMW, showing that it was about as in-touch as its drivers are familiar with turn signals, teased the promotion as a “special surprise.” 

According to The Autopian‘s coverage and the heaps of complaints online, the ad appears on the center console screen when you start up the car. When the ad’s done playing — a cheap looking animation that doesn’t come close to warranting all this hubbub — it even has the gall to ask you to scan a QR code.

While it does give you the option to play or skip the “festive animation,” it’s still an annoying extra step drivers have to take before pulling up the map they need or the music they want to listen to. It’s also a breach of trust: drivers keep their cars connected so they receive critical software updates, not unexpectedly see ads when they’re trying to hit the road.

Few owners were pleased. Enthusiasts in the r/BMW subreddit had a veritable meltdown when someone posted footage of the ad playing on their infotainment system.

“BMW should stop with this sh*t,” one user fumed.

“F*ck everything about this,” another said.

According to a BMW press release, this latest ad campaign has been available in more than 70 markets since July 27 and is scheduled to keep playing through August 10.

If any automaker would have the temerity to pull a shameless stunt like this, it’d be BMW, which has a history of monetizing the digital and hardware features in its cars with video game-style microtransactions. It previously demanded customers pay a monthly subscription fee to unlock their heated seats that were already installed in their vehicles, and an additional fee for heated steering wheels. 

It also tried paywalling the widely popular Apple CarPlay and Android Auto smartphone integration features — something no other automaker charges for — but backed off after massive backlash.

It’s not the only carmaker that’s gotten into hot water for repurposing infotainment screens into ad real estate. Last year, Jeep drivers were livid after the company’s vehicles started showing giant pop-up ads that badgered them into buying an extended warranty.

More on advertising hell: The Economy Is So Off the Rails That They’re Trying to Figure Out How to Make Ads Specifically Targeted at AI Bots

The post BMW Suddenly Blasts Its Cars’ Internal Screens With Aggressive Advertisements appeared first on Futurism.

For years, Tesla has faced intense public and regulatory scrutiny over the safety of its self-driving software.

Now, a former Tesla manager is blowing the whistle on what he says is the the Elon Musk-led automaker’s dangerous approach to testing and deploying its autonomous vehicle technology.

In a federal lawsuit reported by The Independent, Javier Medrano accused Tesla of turning its autonomous test fleet in Houston into 24/7 “rolling hazards” by “aggressively” scaling up operations. 

The size of the fleet more than doubled to a size that Medrano claims was impossible to oversee on his own,. Despite consistently pleading higher-ups for more help, he alleges his warnings were ignored, and he was later fired.

“It almost feels like these big corporations can get away with anything, and people just kind of put their heads down and say, ‘Well, this is how it is,'” Medrano told The Independent. “And it breeds an environment where people don’t say, ‘This is not okay.'”

Medrano took over as the sole operational manager of Houston’s FSD test fleet eight months after joining the company in 2023. When he joined, the size of its fleet and human operators was just 15. But months later, Tesla increased it to 38 vehicle operators. These employees kept the cars running for 24 hours a day across three shifts, and Medrano, as remote fleet manager, oversaw them all.

This “dangerous 38:1 operator-to-manager ratio,” the suit argues, violated Tesla’s own “mandated 15:1 safety baseline.”

These operators, by the way, were part of Tesla’s controversial “Rodeo Team,” whose existence was first made public in reporting from Business Insider in 2024. The moniker is fitting: these drivers purposely got their autonomous cars into dangerous situations and only intervened at the last possible moment, providing Tesla valuable training data.

The lawsuit claims that in other cities with Rodeo Teams, Tesla had more than one safety lead. Having to oversee this sprawling fleet self-driving daredevils was wearing Medrano down to a nub. In one email to his boss, he confessed he was “trying not to lose my absolute mind, from not sleeping or eating correctly and doing everything I need to do to actually meet the expectations,” per the Independent. A month later, he begged for another safety lead and asked for a week off.

“This is officially my S.O.S signal,” he wrote.

Inevitably, all this foreshadowing came to a head. Just days after sending that message, one of the FSD vehicles was involved in a collision with another car. The test driver, following protocol, called Medrano after the accident, at the late hour of 2:05 AM. 

But Medrano was so exhausted that he answered the phone call while “physically asleep,” according to the complaint, causing him to give erroneous advice to the operator. Following his orders, she remained at the scene of the accident, where she was allegedly approached by an impaired stranger.

Medrano told HR the next day he had “no recollection” of the phone call, per The Independent. He then echoed his complaints of “severe understaffing” he’d made to his boss.

The response he apparently got was baffling and callous. An HR rep allegedly told Medrano to set his phone on “Do Not Disturb” mode if he didn’t want to be bothered during active testing shifts. And the Autopilot director said he should’ve “delegated” better.

But, he told The Indepedent, “I didn’t have anybody to delegate to.”

“I was really trying to let them know how serious this was,” Medrano added. “But there was no sense of urgency.” 

“It’s baffling to me how this went on so long,” he continued. “In other cities, they had multiple leads per shift. I was the only one who didn’t have that luxury… Our job is to make sure these cars are safe on the road.”

More on Tesla: Tesla’s Safety Camera Lets Woman Cruising at Highway Speed While Completely Passed Out

The post Tesla Whistleblower Describes Wildly Dangerous Safety Lapses While Developing Full Self-Driving appeared first on Futurism.

These organelles, protruding from the cell into the environment, could not be built by a Darwinian mechanism.

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