AI Employees Petition US to do More Regulation; Waymo & Others-More Scrutiny Due to Emergency Response Failures; DoorDash Launches Drone Unit; Musk Rolls out X Money

Over a thousand employees of AI firms like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta have petitioned the US government, asking for help to ‘deliberately pace’ the development of the transformative tech. Engadget.com reports that the petition states “We request that the US government support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development.” Although it isn’t signed by the CEOs of any of the companies, a couple have put out statements in support. Will this present government go for more regulation, considering their reducing of regulations almost everywhere. It seems doubtful. 

Even as we see stories that claim robotaxis are safer than human driven vehicles, issues keep cropping up that would not happen with a live driver. According to techcrunch.com, lawmakers are looking at possible new federal requirements governing how the autonomous vehicles interact with emergency responders. The things tend to just stop, and block lanes, and that has hindered ambulance and fire crews on the way to save lives. Rep. Kevin Mullin, a California Democrat has a proposed bill that would direct federal regulators to establish minimum national safety standards for autonomous vehicle operators. The proposed legislation, expected to be introduced in Congress this week, follows a number of incidents in which autonomous vehicles have blocked ambulances and fire trucks, driven into active crime scenes, and failed to recognize safety signals such as traffic cones and flares. Being in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Waymo and Zoosk regularly field sizable fleets of autonomous vehicles on the streets, I have seen a number of stories on the news…including ones where multiple robot-vehicles have just stopped and jammed up things for a lengthy period. The new bill will propose that AV companies  must provide clear emergency protocols for first responders, among other things. the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has also called for ‘solutions’ from AV makers…but let a deadline slide. 

DoorDash Airlines is ready to take off. Ok, maybe not airlines, but they have been cleared under Part 135 of air carrier certification by the FAA. Now, mashable.com says DoorDash is preparing to launch their in-house drone program…which is named DoorDash Air. Still sounds like an airline. DoorDash put out a statement saying: “We want drone delivery to work for any merchant, anywhere. We’re building the full stack to make that possible from the ground infrastructure to the drone itself, and the handoff systems that make it work together seamlessly. Advances in hardware, compute, and AI are creating extraordinary new capabilities for local commerce, and becoming a certified air carrier accelerates everything we’re building.”

In a move anticipated by him at least for years, Elon Musk has launched X Money. Now, arstechnica.com notes that if you are a US Premium  or Premium + member, You transfer funds and set things up so that your paychecks automatically deposit to X, where you expect to receive cashback rewards and a high annual yield of 6 percent on your funds—a rate that’s genuinely competitive with some banks. The drawbacks…oh yeah…you can only send peer to peer payments to other X Money users 18 and older. Also, if you add the X Card to the Apple Pay or Google Wallets, you can’t use it to make purchases everywhere. X doesn’t not have money transmitter licenses in New York or Massachusetts. Even if you are a huge Elon fan, you may want to hold off on this half-baked X Money.

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