Musk Issues Rare Apology; Twitch-Deepfake Porn =Instant Ban; Google I/O Dates; Gates & Bezos Backed Brain Implant Startup; GM Ultra Cruise to Debut on Cadillac 

If you haven’t been following it, Elon Musk actually apologized after mocking a disabled Twitter employee online. AP reports that Haraldur Thorleifsson had signed in to his computer to work last Sunday, and was locked out. He tried for 9 days to find out if he was fired…and finally Tweeted Musk. Musk responded by asking about his work…like did he actually do any, and questioned his disability. Thorleifsson has muscular dystrophy and is in a wheel chair. Twitter had bought his company for a substantial amount a few years ago, and Musk even said the reason the ex-employee Tweeted him was ‘to get a big payout.’ In fact, Thorleifsson’s contract calls for $100 million if he is terminated! Now, after some attorneys no doubt warned Musk to apologize publicly, perhaps the payout will not be quite as big in the inevitable lawsuit…but the mocking of a disabled person publicly isn’t going to be cheap. 

Twitch has posted ‘Addressing Explicit Deepfake Content’, in an effort to clean up the platform. According to theverge.com, it states that synthetic non-consensual exploitive images will not be tolerated. The post goes on to say that even a brief unintentional glimpse at those sorts of images “will be removed and will result in an enforcement,” the company writes. And if you intentionally promote, create, or share deepfake porn, that’s grounds for an instaban: doing that “can result in an indefinite suspension on the first offense.” Twitch is a bit late to the party on this, but it will be a welcome move. It comes after a streamer left a browser window open on his stream January 30th that showed the faces of other popular Twitch streamers’ faces “grafted onto the bodies of naked women.” Although the streamer, Brandon Ewing, posted a tearful apology, the outrage was finally enough to move Twitch to go to instabans.

We now have a date for Google I/O 2023…it will be Wednesday, May 10th. Google skipped 2020, and in 2021 had a small presentation in front of employees. Last year, the company put o the usual concert-venue sized production. This year’s will be before a ‘limited live audience,’ and it will take place at Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, Ca. Registration is open, and it is again free. Google says they will make the agenda and program available closer to the date of the show. 

A startup backed by Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos called Synchron is working on a brain interface that doesn’t require surgery and the type of physical connection that our brains don’t tend to like. CNBC says that unlike Nuralink, the Synchron Switch is implanted through blood vessels and enables people with no or very limited mobility to operate technology such as cursors and smart home devices using their mind. The device has a stent type sensor that translates brain signals, and transmits that to an amplifier type device implanted in the chest that then connects to the outside world. So far, it’s been used on 3 patients in the US and Australia. 

General Motors has had Super Cruise, their Level 2 driving assist system since 2021. The General is taking it up a notch with Ultra Cruise. (What will happen when companies want to go beyond ultra…just asking?) At any rate, the upgraded system will first go into the pricy Cadillac Celestiq. Super Cruise works on about 400,000 miles of US and Canadian highways. The Ultra Cruise system will use LiDAR, radar, GPS, and cameras and will be able to drive hands free on some 3.4 million miles of roadways… “nearly every paved road, city street, suburban street, subdivision, and rural road in addition to the highways that today on the super cruise operates on.” It is notable that Ultra Cruise is still Level 2…not a Level 3 system. So far, only Mercedes has gotten a Level 3 system approved. If you want to be first on your block to have one, order a Cadillac Celestiq…and have a cool $300,000 on hand!

I’m Clark Reid, and you’re ‘Technified’ for now.