Three New Apple Smart Home Products in Mid October; How Tech Leaders Will Allegedly Self-Police Under Trump’s Executive Order; DoorDash Launches AI Agent-Text it to Order Food; Nonprofit Files Complaint-EU Hiding Data Center Energy & Water Use

Apple is aiming to launch new smart home products on October 13th. One is the long-rumored smart home hub, and a couple others are new versions of the HomePod Mini and Apple TV. Macrumors.com reports that an updated full-sized HomePod won’t come until later. The devices to be released in a couple of weeks are expected to show off Siri AI…man, I hope it is at least marginally smarter than regular Siri! The smart home hub will have a 9-inch display, and reportedly it will swivel 360 degrees on a robot arm. I don’t expect my present HomePod gen 2 units to ever run the Siri AI…they only have an Apple Watch chip for brains, after all!

Donald Trump hosted a large group of tech leaders for a lunch yesterday, and afterwards touted a signed AI safety deal…which he called ‘morally binding.’ According to theverge.com, the tech execs agreed to self-regulate and to regulate each other. I’m sorry, and I have said this before, but this is truly like monkeys guarding the banana boat! At any rate, this moral agreement was autographed by Trump….and by the way it misspelled ‘United’ as ‘Unites.’ In addition to Trump…Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, Nvidia, and xAI put their John Hancocks on the deal. The agreement does enumerate 4 rules, but again…it’s self-policing. Good luck, planet earth.

A lot of AI agents so far don’t really do much for regular people in their everyday lives. I know people in the corporate world that use them for some tasks, and students have employed agents to help with resumes, exam prep, and more. What about the rest of us? Well techcrunch.com notes that now DoorDash has launched an agent that you can text to order food via Apple Messages. DoorDash says users can also ask for a specific dish and request a local recommendation. The agent will then search local spots and suggest a cart based on the prompt, and even text photos of the food it recommends. When ordering for a group, DoorDash says the agent can handle mixed dietary preferences and different quantities in one order. DoorDash has opened a waitlist for users to try the AI agent. It’s USA only for now. 

A lot of people in the US are in an uproar about all the data centers running and planned…and how the electricity use can jack up their bills and water use may run areas short of drinking water. Now, a Dutch nonprofit called Lighthouse Reports has lodged a complaint in the EU, saying that the European Commission is keeping the public from seeing how much power and water each data center in Europe is using. Thenextweb.com reports that Lighthouse has lodged the complaint under the Aarhus Convention, a binding treaty that grants people the right to access environmental information and to participate in environmental decision-making; the EU joined it in 2005. The convention Compliance Committee will decide by November if the complaint is admissible, and if so, it could find that the EU has violated the treaty.

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