Austin is known for live music, Texas’ premier public university and being home to tech companies. It is also becoming a laboratory for autonomous vehicles. Driverless Waymo taxis, owned by Google’s parent company, regularly drop off diners at Austin’s famous barbecue joints. Box-shaped, four-wheeled robots operated by Avride, a start-up working with Uber Eats, deliver…
Years ago, when I started writing about Silicon Valley’s efforts to replace workers with artificial intelligence, most tech executives at least had the decency to lie about it. “We’re not automating workers, we’re augmenting them,” the executives would tell me. “Our A.I. tools won’t destroy jobs. They’ll be helpful assistants that will free workers from…
John L. Young, who used his experience as a computer-savvy architect to help build Cryptome, a vast library of sensitive documents that both preceded WikiLeaks and in some ways outdid it in its no-holds-barred approach to exposing government secrets, died on March 28 at a rehabilitation facility in Manhattan. He was 89. His death, which…
For more than 60 years, my family owned a small paint factory in Long Island City, Queens, in the shadow of the neon Pepsi-Cola sign just across the East River from Manhattan. That factory and the Pepsi-Cola bottling plant are long gone — two of the hundreds of industrial facilities that once existed throughout the…
Newark Liberty International Airport has faced many disruptions in recent weeks. Technology outages, air traffic controller shortages and runway construction at the busy hub have led to scores of canceled and delayed flights. The Federal Aviation Administration says it’s trying to improve the situation, including with software and hardware upgrades. On Wednesday, it met with…
Nine years ago, one of the world’s leading artificial intelligence scientists singled out an endangered occupational species. “People should stop training radiologists now,” Geoffrey Hinton said, adding that it was “just completely obvious” that within five years A.I. would outperform humans in that field. Today, radiologists — the physician specialists in medical imaging who look…
In February, Ella Stapleton, then a senior at Northeastern University, was reviewing lecture notes from her organizational behavior class when she noticed something odd. Was that a query to ChatGPT from her professor? Halfway through the document, which her business professor had made for a lesson on models of leadership, was an instruction to ChatGPT…
OpenAI is in talks to acquire Windsurf, an A.I.-powered computer programming tool, for around $3 billion, according to two people familiar with the discussions. The acquisition could gain OpenAI thousands of new customers in the tech industry, which is rapidly embracing tools, like Windsurf, that can instantly generate computer code. The potential deal, which would…
Automakers are worried that President Trump’s tariffs on imported cars and auto parts will soon increase their costs and start eating into profits. But at least one business in the auto industry thinks the tariffs could give it a lift. That company is Carvana, an online retailer of used cars that has gained fame for…
The Federal Railroad Administration, the nation’s railroad agency, has brought in the Boring Company, the tunneling firm founded by Elon Musk, to help with a multibillion-dollar Amtrak project, according to three people familiar with the discussions. Federal Railroad Administration officials have talked with employees at the Boring Company about assessing the costs and progress of…