More A.I. Slop-iness

Cybercab driving itself out of the GigaTexas factory pic.twitter.com/EwAMVVDjYy

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 28, 2026

Tesla’s own AI trainers don’t trust ‘Full Self-Driving’ or its safety stats, Reuters finds

A major Reuters investigation published today reveals that Tesla’s widely touted “Full Self-Driving” safety statistics are built on deeply flawed methodology — and that the company’s own data labelers, the workers who train the AI system, don’t trust the technology to drive them.

The report, based on interviews with nine former Tesla data labelers, a former self-driving engineer, and 11 traffic-safety researchers, paints a damning picture of the gap between Tesla’s safety marketing and the reality of its autonomous driving program.

Tesla’s safety stats inflated by a factor of 3

We’ve been calling out Tesla’s misleading FSD safety claims for a while now, and the Reuters investigation confirms the core problem with hard data.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk and other executives have repeatedly claimed that “Full Self-Driving” is up to 10 times safer than human drivers. Tesla CFO Vaibhav Taneja first made this claim last July, and Tesla Board Chair Robyn Denholm repeated it at a November shareholder meeting. Musk himself displayed a chart at that meeting claiming “85% less crashes.”

Reuters found that a central comparison error inflated Tesla’s claimed safety level by a factor of three. Tesla counted crashes where airbags deployed in its own vehicles, then compared that number to federal data that includes all crashes requiring a tow truck — a far less severe threshold. Tow-truck crashes often don’t involve airbag deployments at all.

The critical point: the federal data Tesla used already included airbag-deployment crashes as a separate category. Tesla could have made a valid apples-to-apples comparison but chose not to.

When University of Michigan researcher Marco Benedetti performed the correct comparison — airbag crashes for Teslas versus airbag crashes for all vehicles — the result dropped from “10 times safer” to roughly three times farther between crashes. And even that figure is unreliable because of additional methodological problems, including the massive age gap between Tesla’s fleet (4.1 years average) and the overall U.S. fleet (12.8 years).

As Carnegie Mellon professor Phil Koopman put it: “It’s like saying: ‘My jet airplane is faster than your World War II bomber.’ Yeah, so, what’s your point?”

Ten of the 11 traffic-safety researchers who reviewed Tesla’s methodology for Reuters said the statistics amounted to misleading marketing rather than a serious safety investigation.

‘Don’t trust Elon on this’

Beyond the statistics, the Reuters report reveals what Tesla employees actually think about the technology they help build.

Seven of the nine former data labelers told Reuters they wouldn’t trust FSD to drive them. One said he wouldn’t ride in a Tesla robotaxi “if you fucking paid me.” A veteran self-driving engineer who reviewed Tesla crash data for years called the company’s safety claims “bullshit” and said: “Definitely, don’t trust Elon on this.”

The data labelers, based primarily in a Utah office, review video footage from the eight exterior cameras on Tesla vehicles using FSD. They described regularly seeing FSD fail at basic tasks: pulling over for emergency vehicles, giving motorcyclists enough space, braking on freeway off-ramps, and avoiding construction zones. In one incident, a Tesla drove into a construction zone and nearly struck workers.

A specialized team in Palo Alto, known internally as the “trauma team,” focused specifically on near-misses with pedestrians. Former employees described seeing clips of FSD-piloted Teslas nearly hitting children and failing to recognize pedestrians in crosswalks.

The report also details FSD regularly exceeding speed limits by 20 to 30 mph after Tesla introduced a “Mad Max” mode for more aggressive driving, with one labeler reporting an FSD vehicle traveling 60 mph in a 25-mph zone.

The robotaxi mapping that undermines Musk’s key claim

One of the most significant findings in the Reuters investigation is how Tesla extensively mapped its robotaxi operating zones before public launches — directly contradicting Musk’s central claim that Tesla’s approach doesn’t require the “laborious local mapping” used by rivals like Waymo.

For weeks before the October 2024 Cybercab unveiling at the Warner Bros. studio lot, staff tested prototypes every night from 6 p.m. until dawn, collecting video of the exact routes the cars would follow. Data labelers spent hundreds of hours annotating curbs and road markings to prevent embarrassing incidents.

The same thing happened before the Austin robotaxi launch in June 2025. Tesla extensively filmed features in the limited robotaxi zone to map stop lights, road signs, and other features. The Utah data-labeling staff doubled to about 300 workers in the six months before launch, working primarily on making the Austin test go smoothly.

We’ve previously reported on how Tesla’s robotaxi expansion looked more like a stock pump than a genuine scaling effort, and more recently that the fleet is actually shrinking rather than growing. The Reuters report now explains why scaling is so difficult: the labor-intensive safeguards Tesla deploys for each launch zone are extremely difficult to replicate broadly.

Nearly a year after the Austin launch, Tesla still operates only about 20 unsupervised robotaxis there, traversing a limited and carefully mapped zone. Some still have human safety monitors in the front seat.

As one former employee told Reuters about the Austin zone: “You can’t get creative outside of that.”

A growing pile of investigations and lawsuits

The Reuters report arrives at a time when Tesla faces mounting regulatory scrutiny over FSD. NHTSA currently has four active investigations into FSD and Autopilot, including a probe into dozens of cases where FSD ran red lights or turned into oncoming traffic, and an investigation into whether Tesla’s 2023 Autopilot recall was sufficient.

Tesla was also hit with a $243 million verdict after an Autopilot crash in Florida killed a 22-year-old woman, and the company has struggled to turn over FSD traffic violation data to NHTSA investigators.

Musk told shareholders in November that Tesla would soon let drivers text while using FSD. Six months later, the company hasn’t done so, and its own FSD website continues to warn: “Currently enabled features require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous.”

Electrek’s Take

None of this is surprising to anyone who has been paying close attention. We’ve been documenting FSD’s pattern of repeated safety claims that don’t hold up, version after version, year after year. What the Reuters investigation adds is the internal perspective — and it’s devastating.

The fact that Tesla’s own data labelers, the people who see FSD’s performance every single day, overwhelmingly don’t trust the system to drive them should tell you everything you need to know about the gap between Musk’s promises and reality.

The statistical methodology issue is particularly damning because it’s not a subtle error. Tesla had access to the correct comparison data and chose to use a metric that inflated its safety claims by 3x. That’s not a choice you make by accident. And when 10 out of 11 independent traffic-safety researchers call your safety report “misleading marketing,” you have a credibility problem that no software update can fix.

Technocracy

The plutocrats are coming out of hiding now.

GIGO

Disclaimer: Everything I'm saying here is from my own limited knowledge and experience of what it takes to "program" a computer.

AI has already shown a nasty tendency to hallucinate. Its programming is such that it gets sent out to capture as much data as possible. Generally, that data has been processed down to actual information, and sometimes, it's been contaminated by "raw data" that's just out there floating around.

And as each AI thingie keeps eating everything put out by all the other AI thingies, there's a fair likelihood that we're going to get a kind of closed-loop information track that eventually leads to what we used to call Machine Psychosis.

ie:

10 print: Help, I'm stuck in a loop!

20 go to: 10

One of the problems right now is that everybody and his fuckin' uncle has been putting up an AI thingie, and they're all pretty much feeding on each other. So if some random yahoo throws some totally bogus info into cyberspace, it's going to get swept up and included in practically everybody's output.

So the big problem, as I see it, is that most AI engines haven't been taught any great skills of discernment - kinda like most Americans haven't. Not yet anyway.

Just A Thought

If AI is such an extraordinarily useful tool in decision-making, we should put it in charge of the big corporations and shit-can all those mega-billionaire parasites who think they actually earn their gazillion-dollar salaries and bonuses and perks.

I dunno - worth considering.

Not To Get All Techie And Shit

...but the use of chat apps and the infuriating nonchalance of these idiot motherfuckers in the Trump administration - it's got me boilin'. Again. Still.

Because now we have to pay attention to even more stoopid shit than anybody should ever have to.

Tech Update

Turns out that Open A.I. hallucinates, and the more recent iterations hallucinate more frequently than the older versions.

Bot traffic on the intertoobz is now greater than human-generated content and interaction.

Daddy State Awareness Guide 

4. They change the meaning of words to suit their needs.

a) if it's false but it works in my favor, then it's true

b) if it's true but it works against me, then it's false

Privacy? What Privacy?

Whoever told you there was something called privacy - since the 1840s anyway - lied to you.

1870s – 1940s: Telephone

This timeline is provided to help show how the dominant form of communication changes as rapidly as innovators develop new technologies.

A brief historical overview: The printing press was the big innovation in communications until the telegraph was developed. Printing remained the key format for mass messages for years afterward, but the telegraph allowed instant communication over vast distances for the first time in human history. Telegraph usage faded as radio became easy to use and popularized; as radio was being developed, the telephone quickly became the fastest way to communicate person-to-person; after television was perfected and content for it was well developed, it became the dominant form of mass-communication technology; the internet came next, and newspapers, radio, telephones, and television are being rolled into this far-reaching information medium.

As with many innovations, the idea for the telephone came along far sooner than it was brought to reality. While Italian innovator Antonio Meucci is credited with inventing the first basic phone in 1849, and Frenchman Charles Bourseul devised a phone in 1854, Alexander Graham Bell won the first U.S. patent for the device in 1876. Bell began his research in 1874 and had financial backers who gave him the best business plan for bringing it to market.

In 1877-78, the first telephone line was constructed, the first switchboard was created and the first telephone exchange was in operation. Three years later, almost 49,000 telephones were in use. In 1880, Bell (in the photo below) merged this company with others to form the American Bell Telephone Company and in 1885 American Telegraph and Telephone Company (AT&T) was formed; it dominated telephone communications for the next century. At one point in time, Bell System employees purposely denigrated the U.S. telephone system to drive down stock prices of all phone companies and thus make it easier for Bell to acquire smaller competitors.

Alexander Graham Bell Using a TelephoneBy 1900 there were nearly 600,000 phones in Bell’s telephone system; that number shot up to 2.2 million phones by 1905, and 5.8 million by 1910. In 1915 the transcontinental telephone line began operating. By 1907, AT&T had a near monopoly on phone and telegraph service, thanks to its purchase of Western Union. Its president, Theodore Vail, urged at the time that a monopoly could most efficiently operate the nation’s far-flung communications network. At the urging of the public and AT&T competitors, the government began to investigate the company for anti-trust violations, thus forcing the 1913 Kingsbury Commitment, an agreement between AT&T vice president Nathan Kingsbury and the office of the U.S. Attorney General. Under this commitment, AT&T agreed to divest itself of Western Union and provide long-distance services to independent phone exchanges.

During World War I, the government nationalized telephone and telegraph lines in the United States from June 1918 to July 1919, when, after a joint resolution of Congress, President Wilson issued an order putting them under the direction of the U.S. Post Office. A year later, the systems were returned to private ownership, AT&T resumed its monopolistic hold, and by 1934 the government again acted, this time agreeing to allow it to operate as a “regulated monopoly” under the jurisdiction of the FCC.

Public utility commissions in state and local jurisdictions were appointed regulators of AT&T and the nation’s independent phone companies, while the FCC regulated long-distance services conducted across state lines. They set the rates the phone companies could charge and determined what services and equipment each could offer. This stayed in effect until AT&T’s forced divestiture in 1984, the conclusion of a U.S. Department of Justice anti-trust suit that had been filed in 1974. The all-powerful company had become popularly known and disparaged as “Ma Bell.” AT&T’s local operations were divided into seven independent Regional Bell Operating Companies, known as the “Baby Bells.” AT&T became a long-distance-services company.

By 1948, the 30 millionth phone was connected in the United States; by the 1960s, there were more than 80 million phone hookups in the U.S. and 160 million in the world; by 1980, there were more than 175 million telephone subscriber lines in the U.S. In 1993, the first digital cellular network went online in Orlando, Florida; by 1995 there were 25 million cellular phone subscribers, and that number exploded at the turn of the century, with digital cellular phone service expected to replace land-line phones for most U.S. customers by as early as 2010.

World Changes Due to the Telephone

First Prototype of a PhoneWithin 50 years of its invention, the telephone had become an indispensable tool in the United States. In the late 19th century, people raved about the telephone’s positive aspects and ranted about what they anticipated would be negatives. Their key points, recorded by Ithiel de Sola Pool in his 1983 book “Forecasting the Telephone,” mirror nearly precisely what was later predicted about the impact of the internet.

For example, people said the telephone would: help further democracy; be a tool for grassroots organizers; lead to additional advances in networked communications; allow social decentralization, resulting in a movement out of cities and more flexible work arrangements; change marketing and politics; alter the ways in which wars are fought; cause the postal service to lose business; open up new job opportunities; allow more public feedback; make the world smaller, increasing contact between peoples of all nations and thus fostering world peace; increase crime and aid criminals; be an aid for physicians, police, fire, and emergency workers; be a valuable tool for journalists; bring people closer together, decreasing loneliness and building new communities; inspire a decline in the art of writing; have an impact on language patterns and introduce new words; and someday lead to an advanced form of the transmission of intelligence.

Privacy was also a major concern. As is the case with the Internet, the telephone worked to improve privacy while simultaneously leaving people open to invasions of their privacy. In the beginning days of the telephone, people would often have to journey to the local general store or some other central point to be able to make and receive calls. Most homes weren’t wired together, and eavesdroppers could hear you conduct your personal business as you used a public phone. Switchboard operators who connected the calls would also regularly invade people’s privacy. The early house-to-house phone systems were often “party lines” on which a number of families would receive calls, and others were free to listen in and often chose to do so.

Today, while most homes are wired and people can travel freely, conducting their phone conversations wirelessly, wiretapping and other surveillance methods can be utilized to listen in on their private business. People’s privacy can also be interrupted by unwanted phone calls from telemarketers and others who wish to profit in some way – just as Internet e-mail accounts receive unwanted sales pitches, known as “spam.”

Yet, the invention of the telephone also worked to increase privacy in many ways. It permitted people to exchange information without having to put it in writing, and a call on the phone came to replace such intrusions on domestic seclusion as unexpected visits from relatives or neighbors and the pushy patter of door-to-door salesmen. The same could be said for the Internet – privacy has been enhanced in some ways because e-mail and instant messaging have reduced the frequency of the jangling interruptions previously dished out by our telephones.

Past Predictions About the Future of the Telephone

President Rutherford B. Hayes to Alexander Graham Bell in 1876 on viewing the telephone for the first time:

“That’s an amazing invention, but who would ever want to use one of them?”

Bell offered to sell his telephone patent to Western Union for $100,000 in 1876, when he was struggling with the business. An account that is believed by some to be apocryphal, but still recounted in many telephone histories states that the committee appointed to investigate the offer filed the following report:

“We do not see that this device will be ever capable of sending recognizable speech over a distance of several miles. Messer Hubbard and Bell want to install one of their ‘telephone devices’ in every city. The idea is idiotic on the face of it. Furthermore, why would any person want to use this ungainly and impractical device when he can send a messenger to the telegraph office and have a clear written message sent to any large city in the United States? … Mr. G.G. Hubbard’s fanciful predictions, while they sound rosy, are based on wild-eyed imagination and lack of understanding of the technical and economic facts of the situation, and a posture of ignoring the obvious limitations of his device, which is hardly more than a toy … This device is inherently of no use to us. We do not recommend its purchase.”

As reported in the book “Bell” by Robert V. Bruce, Kate Field, a British reporter who knew Bell, predicted in 1878 that eventually:

“While two persons, hundreds of miles apart, are talking together, they will actually see each other.”

Sir William Preece, chief engineer for the British Post Office, 1878, as reported in “The Telephone in a Changing World” by Marion May Dilts:

“There are conditions in America which necessitate the use of such instruments more than here. Here we have a superabundance of messengers, errand boys and things of that kind … The absence of servants has compelled America to adopt communications systems for domestic purposes.”

AT&T chief engineer and Electrical Review writer John J. Carty projected in his “Prophets Column” in 1891:

“A system of telephony without wires seems one of the interesting possibilities, and the distance on the earth through which it is possible to speak is theoretically limited only by the curvation of the earth.”

Carty also wrote:

“Someday we will build up a world telephone system, making necessary to all peoples the use of a common language or common understanding of languages, which will join all the people of the earth into one brotherhood. There will be heard throughout the earth a great voice coming out of the ether which will proclaim, ‘Peace on earth, good will towards men.'”

In the 1912 article “The Future Home Theatre” in The Independent, S.C. Gilfillan wrote:

“There are two mechanical contrivances … each of which bears in itself the power to revolutionize entertainment, doing for it what the printing press did for books. They are the talking motion picture and the electric vision apparatus with telephone. Either one will enable millions of people to see and hear the same performance simultaneously .. or successively from kinetoscope and phonographic records … These inventions will become cheap enough to be … in every home … You will have the home theatre of 1930, oh ye of little faith.”

Today's Great New Thing

Gartner Group

The promise of great things is real, and the hype is really real, but the reality &/or the time it takes the Great New Thing to deliver on the promise always falls short, or it causes problems that can be quite a bit bigger than the one it was intended to solve.

Adam Conover

Dan Olson

I'm Working On It

Embedding toots that I find on Mastodon isn't working very well.

I'm not sure what I'll be able to do about it, other than continuing to bitch about it to the Mastodon tech nerds.

Reddit finally got it squared away - hope springs eternal.

Sorry, guys.

Today's Beau

Justin King - Beau Of The Fifth Column, on AI and being ready to work harder on your powers of discernment.

Where We Were

... where we are, and where the fuck do we go from here?

First it's a novelty

Then it's a tool

And then it's a weapon

A.I.: Actually Insipid Until It’s Actively Insidious

WASHINGTON — The alien invasion has begun.

Some experts say that when artificial intelligence takes off, it’s going to be like Martians landing on the National Mall.

So far, our mind children, as the roboticist Hans Moravec called our artificially intelligent offspring, are in the toddler phase, as we ooh and aah at the novelty of our creation. They’re headed for the rebellious teenage phase. When A.I. hurtles into adulthood and isn’t so artificial anymore, we’ll be relegated to being the family pets, as a resigned Steve Wozniak put it.

Silicon Valley is reeling at the prowess of an experimental chatbot called ChatGPT, released by OpenAI in late November and deemed “scary good” by Elon Musk. Musk, one of the founders with Sam Altman, left and now Microsoft is a partner.

There’s keening that ChatGPT — couldn’t they have come up with a better name, like HAL? — will eliminate millions of jobs. Why hire a college graduate if a bot can do the same work faster and cheaper? No more arguments about work-from-home rules, no more union fights. You don’t need to lure A.I. back into the office with pizza.

ChatGPT opens a Pandora’s box of existential fears. Silicon Valley brainiacs have talked about safeguards and kill switches for A.I., but you know they won’t pull the plug when their baby turns into M3gan.

Once A.I. can run disinformation campaigns at lightning speed, will democracy stand a chance? We seem headed toward a Matrix where “it will become cheaper to show fakes than to show reality,” Jaron Lanier, the father of virtual reality, wrote in Tablet. Will bad actors use A.I. to promote bigotry or hijack nuclear weapons?

Did you know you can share 10 gift articles a month, even with nonsubscribers?

Share this article.

As Musk once told me about his A.I. angst: “It’s great when the emperor is Marcus Aurelius. It’s not so great when the emperor is Caligula.”

Several years ago, I interviewed the OpenAI founders in San Francisco, as well as other Valley digerati. And that is when I realized that we are doomed. For the Lords of the Cloud, as they form their sleek new world, we’re VCRs.

That is why I feel free to kick back and shoot the breeze with our incipient overlords. I read that you could use advanced A.I. to interview historical figures. So I conducted my dream interview with Shakespeare, bantering with the Bard.

“Greetings, fair sir or madam,” ChatGPT said, embodying Shakespeare.

What is your response to those who think “The Merchant of Venice” is antisemitic?

“While it is true that some of the language and imagery used in the play may be considered offensive by modern standards,” he replied, Shylock “is a complex and multifaceted figure who is both villain and victim.”

The Bard of Avon, as he called himself, cautioned that while the Oscar-winning movie “Shakespeare in Love” was “whimsical,” “it should not be taken as a factual representation of my life.”

Can you write me a love sonnet?

He could, even though, as he said, he was “a mere machine.” One stanza read: “With eyes that shine like stars upon the sea, And lips as sweet as summer’s ripest fruit, Thou art the one my heart doth long to see, And in thy beauty, all my dreams take root.”

Shakespeare, it ain’t. Still, I tell him, I would love to be the heroine in a Shakespearean comedy! It took ChatGPT only moments to write “The Clever Maid.”

“Act I, Scene 1: A grand ball is being held in a grand estate. You, the fair maiden, are in attendance, dressed in the finest gowns. However, you are not there to dance and make merry, for you have a secret mission.

“Act II, Scene 1: You sneak away from the ball and make your way to the estate’s library. There, you discover a hidden door, which leads to a secret chamber. Inside, you find a chest filled with precious jewels.

“Act III, Scene 1: As you are admiring the jewels, you hear a noise. It is the estate’s owner, a wealthy and arrogant nobleman. He catches you red-handed but instead of punishing you, he is taken by your wit and charm.

“Act IV, Scene 1: The nobleman reveals that the jewels were a test of character and he had been seeking a clever and resourceful woman to be his wife. You are overjoyed and accept his proposal.

“Act V, Scene 1: The play ends with a grand wedding ceremony and a celebration of your cleverness and wit.”

Sounds more like a Salma Hayek heist movie. I spent the rest of the afternoon soliciting love poems from John Donne, Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allan Poe, who called me a “telltale columnist.” I tried to channel Sylvia Plath, but ChatGPT told me that would be “inappropriate.”

The most entertaining mimicry was when A.I. Kendrick Lamar wrote me a rap: “Listen up, I got a story to tell, ’bout a journalist who’s sharp as a nail. She’s got the pen and the power, To make politicians cower.”

For now, ChatGPT is typing, not writing. The creative spark requires humanity. But soon, A.I. could be sentient. Then we’ll need our dog bowls.

To be clear - a machine is a machine is a machine. When it goes from electro-mechanical to bio-chemical, then I'll start to reconsider - but only if you can convince me this new type of machine can produce "original thought", and demonstrate some kind of organic curiosity.

How do I believe this artificial thing can recognize, much less develop a true appreciation for beauty?

How does it learn right from wrong, and how can it make those really awful decisions on doing the right thing for the wrong reasons, or the wrong thing for the right reasons?

I can easily understand the high probability for AI to be total nerds that love math and have no fucking clue about how to get along socially. But how likely is it that an AI will be completely enamored with arts and language, but considers math and science to be a mystical wonderment?

Will AI invent gods?

On That "Truth" Thing

Trump's new venture - Truth Social - crashed. Because most new software thingies crash when first released, and...

No, actually they fucking don't. Not when they're developed and managed by professionals who know what the fuck they're doing.

Yes, there's always a glitch or two. And yes, the Beta Version is always kind of a wreck at first, which is why you do the Beta thing in a very limited environment. You don't just put the thing out there in wide release and let it crap out in public so everybody can see what a fucking disaster it is.

Of course, this is Trump, so - yeah.

A tech product that doesn't work as if by magic is not ready for the market.

BTW - all the hyperbolic attacks on "big tech" are being orchestrated (IMO) as pretext to the "conservative" plan to turn around and seize control of the platforms for information distribution, and of the info itself.

They make a big noise...

"All you faithful hard-working Americans are being victimized by Big Tech, and you need the strength of a strong leader to strongly show those weak-but-somehow-amazingly-powerful nerds who the strongest and strongly strengthiest boss really is."

...which makes it easier to convince people you're doing all this really nasty shit for all the right reasons.

Today's Tweet

Flying cars!

Students at the National Polytechnic Institute of Cambodia have designed a prototype drone that they hope can eventually be used to ferry people around and help firefighters https://t.co/uuS4m7eRjN pic.twitter.com/CIUhKgqT8G

— Reuters (@Reuters) September 21, 2021

Today's PSA

I've never felt overly threatened being pulled over by the cops, so I have no real frame of reference, and it's hard to imagine the kind of abject terror someone of color would experience.

I may flash on something like, "Well shit, I guess this could be the end of my 20-year streak of no traffic tickets", but I've never ever ever thought, "Fuck me - I could be dead in a few minutes."

Here's something that may be of some help - and of course, I'm thinking there's a whole mess of authoritarian assholes who'll be attacking this with fervor and all due haste, using the usual sly reverse shit to fool the rubes into offering themselves up to be sacrificed by convincing them that it's actually just another scam by Soros and his cannibalistic space alien pedophiles to sucker them all into providing their personal data and specific location and blah blah foil-hat-bullshit blah.

Anyway, it's our right - and our responsibility - to accept a certain level of risk in order to hold power to account, and I think that's what this is aimed at accomplishing.

(I think this is kind of a stoopidly long and involved process that will likely flummox the majority of users, but here it is - it's a start anyway.)

Business Insider:

How to use the Siri 'I'm Getting Pulled Over' shortcut to record police encounters during traffic stops with your iPhone

Launched as part of Apple's iOS 12 update, the Shortcuts app lets you create automated routines for your phone. In other words, with the Shortcuts app, you can say a phrase or tap a button, and your phone will perform multiple tasks at once.

Although it's made to let you create your own shortcuts, you can also download pre-made shortcuts from third-party apps or developers.

Arizona resident Robert Petersen used this update to create his own third-party shortcut, initially known as "Police" and now known as "I'm Getting Pulled Over." It aims to assist users during traffic stops by automatically recording their interactions with police officers.

Here's how to download and set up the "I'm Getting Pulled Over" shortcut, and then activate it with Siri.

How the "Siri, I'm getting pulled over" shortcut works

First developed in 2018, the shortcut activates the Do Not Disturb feature, turning off all incoming calls, messages, and notifications. This is to reduce the chance that a police officer will be startled by your phone ringing or flashing, and act aggressively.

Next, it'll send a text message with your current location to all the contacts that you've selected beforehand.

At the same time, your phone will start recording a video with the front camera (i.e. the one above the phone's screen).

These are the default settings, but you can customize them in various ways — for example, you can set it so it records with the rear camera instead.

How to download the "Siri, I'm Getting Pulled Over" shortcut

Enable Untrusted Shortcuts on your iPhone

Since the shortcut is made by a third-party, your iPhone will consider it an "untrusted" shortcut. This means you'll need to adjust your phone settings before you download and use it.

Important: Before you can enable untrusted shortcuts, you'll need to run at least one "trusted" shortcut. If you haven't done this yet, open the Shortcuts app and set up — then run — one of the "Starter Shortcuts." It should only take a few moments.

1. Open your Settings app and tap on Shortcuts. Depending on your version of iOS, it'll either be listed with the other iOS apps, or with the larger list of apps at the bottom.

2. Toggle on Allow Untrusted Shortcuts. Again, remember that before you can select this, you'll have to create and run at least one "trusted" Shortcut.

3. A pop-up window will warn you of potential risks. To continue, tap "Allow," and then enter your passcode.

Download the shortcut

1. Open this link in your iPhone's Safari browser.

2. The Shortcuts app will open, listing all of the shortcut's features. At the bottom, tap "Add Untrusted Shortcut."



3. Choose which contacts will receive a message with your location. Then hit "Continue."

4. Next, select which contacts will receive a copy of the video.

5. Now select "Done."



6. Back on the My Shortcuts tab, tap "All Shortcuts," and then tap the three dots (...) on the I'm getting pulled over shortcut.

7. Scroll down to the "Location" section and select "Allow Access," then tap "Allow While Using App."

8. Scroll down to the Messages, Camera, and Photo sections and do the same thing — tap "Allow Access," and then "OK."

9. In the Camera section, select Front or Back depending on what camera you want to start the recording with.



10. Scroll down to the Scripting "Choose from Menu" settings and choose where to store your video when the shortcut ends. You'll have the following options:

• iCloud Drive
• Dropbox
• Do not upload

You can tap one of the red minus options to delete a location, or the green plus to add one.

11. When complete, choose "Done" to confirm your settings.

SkyNet Rising

We need constant reminding that we have to address the questions of "Can We Do This" versus "Should We Do This".

There's always a power dynamic at work, so even though "new stuff" is almost always originally intended to "make the world a better place", there are always people looking to devise ways of weaponizing it, and turning it to their own purposes in order to serve their own political agendas.

Media Assignment: Real Genius, 1985 - Val Kilmer, Gabriel Jarret, Jon Gries, William Atherton.

MIT Technology Review:

Once it was fashionable to fret about the prospect of super-intelligent machines taking over the world. The past year showed that AI may cause all sorts of hazards long before that happens.

The latest AI methods excel at perceptual tasks such as classifying images and transcribing speech, but the hype and excitement over these skills have disguised how far we really are from building machines as clever as we are. Six controversies from 2018 stand out as warnings that even the smartest AI algorithms can misbehave, or that carelessly applying them can have dire consequences.

1. Self-crashing cars

After a fatal accident involving one of Uber’s self-driving cars in March, investigators found that the company’s technology had failed catastrophically, in a way that could easily have been prevented.

Carmakers like Ford and General Motors, newcomers like Uber, and a horde of startups are hurrying to commercialize a technology that, despite its immaturity, has already seen billions of dollars in investment. Waymo, a subsidiary of Alphabet, has made the most progress; it rolled out the first fully autonomous taxi service in Arizona last year. But even Waymo’s technology is limited, and autonomous cars cannot drive everywhere in all conditions.

What to watch for in 2019: Regulators in the US and elsewhere have so far taken a hands-off approach for fear of stifling innovation. The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has even signaled that existing safety rules may be relaxed. But pedestrians and human drivers haven’t signed up to be guinea pigs. Another serious accident in 2019 might shift the regulators’ attitudes.

2. Political manipulation bots

In March, news broke that Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting company, had exploited Facebook’s data sharing practices to influence the 2016 US presidential election. The resulting uproar showed how the algorithms that decide what news and information to surface on social media can be gamed to amplify misinformation, undermine healthy debate, and isolate citizens with different views from one another.

During a congressional hearing, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg promised that AI itself could be trained to spot and block malicious content, even though it is still far from being able to understand the meaning of text, images, or video.

What to watch for in 2019: Zuckerberg’s promise will be tested in elections held in two of Africa’s biggest countries: South Africa and Nigeria. The long run-up to the 2020 US election has also begun, and it could inspire new kinds of misinformation technology powered by AI, including malicious chatbots.

3. Algorithms for peace

Last year, an AI peace movement took shape when Google employees learned that their employer was supplying technology to the US Air Force for classifying drone imagery. The workers feared this could be a fateful step towards supplying technology for automating deadly drone strikes. In response, the company abandoned Project Maven, as it was called, and created an AI code of ethics.

Academics and industry heavyweights have backed a campaign to ban the use of autonomous weapons. Military use of AI is only gaining momentum, however, and other companies, like Microsoft and Amazon, have shown no reservations about helping out.

What to watch out for in 2019: Although Pentagon spending on AI projects is increasing, activists hope a preemptive treaty banning autonomous weaponswill emerge from a series of UN meetings slated for this year.

4. A surveillance face-off

AI’s superhuman ability to identify faces has led countries to deploy surveillance technology at a remarkable rate. Face recognition also lets you unlock your phone and automatically tags photos for you on social media.

Civil liberties groups warn of a dystopian future. The technology is a formidable way to invade people’s privacy, and biases in training data make it likely to automate discrimination.

In many countries—China especially—face recognition is being widely used for policing and government surveillance. Amazon is selling the technologyto US immigration and law enforcement agencies.

What to watch out for in 2019: Face recognition will spread to vehicles and webcams, and it will be used to track your emotions as well as your identity. But we may also see some preliminary regulation of it this year, too.

5. Fake it till you break it

A proliferation of “deepfake” videos last year showed how easy it is becoming make fake clips using AI. This means fake celebrity porn, lots of weird movie mashups, and, potentially, virulent political smear campaigns.

Generative adversarial networks (GANs), which involve two dueling neural networks, can conjure extraordinarily realistic but completely made-up images and video. Nvidia recently showed how GANs can generate photorealistic faces of whatever race, gender, and age you want.

What to watch for in 2019: As deepfakes improve, people will probably start being duped by them this year. DARPA will test new methods for detecting deepfakes. But since this also relies on AI, it’ll be a game of cat and mouse.

6. Algorithmic discrimination

Bias was discovered in numerous commercial tools last year. Vision algorithms trained on unbalanced data sets failed to recognize women or people of color; hiring programs fed historic data were proven to perpetuate discrimination that already exists.

Tied to the issue of bias—and harder to fix—is the lack of diversity across the AI field itself. Women occupy, at most, 30% of industry jobs and fewer than 25% of teaching roles at top universities. There are comparatively few black and Latin researchers as well.

What to expect in 2019: We’ll see methods for detecting and mitigating bias and algorithms that can produced unbiased results from biased data. The International Conference on Machine Learning, a major AI conference, will be held in Ethiopia in 2020 because African scientists researching problems of bias could have trouble getting visas to travel to other regions. Other events could also move.
The Long Term Hopeful part is that better people than this current crop of Daddy State assholes have been trying to conquer the world for more than 40,000 years, and the world remains undefeated.

The Short Term Worrisome part is that it's always a painful and bloody process convincing them of their folly.

New Tech

Don't get me wrong - this is just too damned cool, but it reminds me strongly of using leeches and maggots to treat certain ailments.

They're making such great progress, even though they're still hung up on an Analog kind of approach.

The question is: When will we see this become the "weird shit they used to do"?

A Brief History

So, what was the internet like back in your day, Grandpa?

Holiday Safety Tip

Nothing spoils the Christmas mood like some thieving asshole.

And while I'd rather watch these dripping dicks get blown up, that wouldn't exactly be in keeping with the spirit of the season - or the law, for that matter. 

It's just good to know there are people out there who know how to do stuff, and do it in a way that makes the point while staying inside the boundaries (something we've been sorely missing of late).

May the fake lord bless you and keep you, Super Nerds.

Kara Swisher

On Real Time with Bill Maher:

"...(social media) wasn't hacked by the Russians. They just walked right in and used them exactly the way they were intended to be used."

"...move fast and break things...well you've broken a lot of things, now what're you going to fix?"

I think I've got me a new crush.

Trashed

Knowing this is the state of our existence on Earth's surface...

...does it come as some kind of news that we'd have similar problems in our planetary neighborhood?

Is it really necessary to point out that we're headed for a bad end if we don't stop fouling the nest?

The Kessler Syndrome:

The Kessler syndrome is troublesome because of the domino effect and feedback runaway wherein impacts between objects of sizable mass spall off debris from the force of collision. The shrapnel can then hit other objects, producing even more space debris: if a large enough collision or explosion were to occur, such as between a space station and a defunct satellite, or as the result of hostile actions in space, then the resulting debris cascade could make prospects for long-term viability of satellites in low earth orbit extremely low.[6][7] However, even a catastrophic Kessler scenario at LEO would pose minimal risk for launches continuing past LEO, or satellites traveling at medium Earth orbit (MEO) or geosynchronous orbit (GEO)...
And if we're really serious about wanting to explore beyond our little cluster of cosmic dust particles, here's the kicker:

.. The catastrophic scenarios predict an increase in the number of collisions per year, as opposed to a physically impassable barrier to space exploration that occurs in higher orbits.

So, lemme see - if there's no chain reaction that kills all the tech shit that we have to have just to stay alive - much less go rocketing off into deep space - then the continued accumulation of space junk around the planet will constitute a barrier that we can't navigate thru as we try to rocket off into deep space.

For the one species with a big brain and all the smarts to rise above the other critters, we sure are pretty fuckin' stoopid sometimes.