An anonymous reader quotes a report from Politico: Five months after releasing a plan to accelerate the development of artificial intelligence, the Trump administration is turning to robots. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has been meeting with robotics industry CEOs and is "all in" on accelerating the industry's development, according to three people familiar with the discussions who were granted anonymity to share details. The administration is considering issuing an executive order on robotics next year, according to two of the people. A Department of Commerce spokesperson said: "We are committed to robotics and advanced manufacturing because they are central to bringing critical production back to the United States."

The Department of Transportation is also preparing to announce a robotics working group, possibly before the end of the year, according to one person familiar with the planning. A spokesperson for the department did not respond to a request for comment. There's growing interest on Capitol Hill as well. A Republican amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act would have created a national robotics commission. The amendment was not included in the bill. Other legislative efforts are underway. The flurry of activity suggests robotics is emerging as the next major front in America's race against China. "There is now recognition that advanced robotics is crucial to the U.S. in terms of manufacturing, technology, national security, defense applications, public safety," said Brendan Schulman, VP of policy and government relations for Boston Dynamics. "The investment that we're seeing in the sector and the efforts in China to dominate the future of robotics are being noticed."

A Waymo robotaxi struck a small unleashed dog in San Francisco -- just weeks after another Waymo killed a beloved neighborhood cat. The dog's condition is unknown. The Los Angeles Times reports: The incident occurred near the intersection of Scott and Eddy streets and drew a small crowd, according to social media posts. A person claiming to be one of the passengers posted about the accident on Reddit. "Our Waymo just ran over a dog," the passenger wrote. "Kids saw the whole thing." The passenger described the dog as between 20 and 30 pounds and wrote that their family was traveling back home after a holiday tree lighting event. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has recorded Waymo taxis as being involved in at least 14 animal collisions since 2021.

"Unfortunately, a Waymo vehicle made contact with a small, unleashed dog in the roadway," a company spokesperson said. "We are dedicated to learning from this situation and how we show up for our community as we continue improving road safety in the cities we serve." The spokesperson added that Waymo vehicles have a much lower rate of injury-causing collisions than human drivers. Human drivers run into millions of animals while driving each year.

"I'm not sure a human driver would have avoided the dog either, though I do know that a human would have responded differently to a 'bump' followed by a car full of screaming people," the Waymo passenger wrote on Reddit. One person who commented on the discussion said that Waymo vehicles should be held to a higher standard than human drivers, because the autonomous taxis are supposed to improve road safety. "The whole point of this is because Waymo isn't supposed to make those mistakes," the person wrote on Reddit.

"The car-sharing company, first launched in the U.S. in 2000, has been active in the UK since 2010 and has just under half a million members," writes Slashdot reader guesstral. "'I'm writing to let you know that we are proposing to cease the UK operations of Zipcar,' wrote Zipcar UK's general manager, James Taylor, in an email to members today. He went on to say that Zipcar will temporarily suspend new bookings after December 31, pending the outcome of a consultation with its 71 staff members." From the BBC: In its most recent company accounts for 2024, Zipcar blamed the "cost of living crisis," which was affecting UK customers, for revenues falling to 46 million pounds to 53 million the year before, while its after-tax losses had widened to 11.6 million pounds. According to the same accounts, Zipcar membership fees cover the cost of fuelling or charging the vehicle and, as energy costs continued to rise last year, it has added to financial pressures on the company. The company would also be liable for the incoming congestion charge in London that is expanding to include electric vehicles from 26 December, although this was not referenced in Zipcar's email to membership or company accounts.

The Santa Monica City Council has unanimously voted to order Waymo to halt overnight charging operations at two outdoor depots near Broadway and 14th Street after months of resident complaints about constant beeping from reverse sensors, noise from charging equipment, traffic congestion and flashing lights between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m. As many as 56 autonomous vehicles charge at the two sites. It's unclear whether Waymo or its Virginia-based charging operator Volterra intends to comply.

The Los Angeles Times reported that neither company planned to, claiming city officials misunderstood their existing permit rights. Waymo told the newspaper it had adjusted operations in response to neighbor feedback and would continue seeking community input, though the company did not address the order directly. Local law enforcement has gotten involved after at least one person attempted to disrupt operations at the facilities on several occasions.

The dispute points to a broader challenge facing the autonomous vehicle industry: charging depots need to be close to service areas to minimize deadhead miles (distance traveled without revenue-generating passengers), but situating them in residential neighborhoods creates exactly these kinds of conflicts.

Airbus said Monday that the vast majority of around 6,000 A320-family jets affected by an emergency software recall have now been modified, leaving fewer than 100 aircraft still requiring work after a frantic weekend of repairs prompted by the discovery of a vulnerability to solar flares. The unprecedented recall -- described as the broadest emergency action in the company's history -- came after a mid-air incident on a JetBlue A320 revealed a possible link between a drop in altitude and a space-related computer bug.

The fix involved reverting to an earlier version of software that controls nose angle, uploaded via cable from a portable device called a data loader. Some older A320 jets will need entirely new computers rather than a simple software reset, raising questions about how long those aircraft will remain grounded amid global chip shortages.

Reuters separately reported on Monday that Airbus had discovered an industrial quality issue affecting metal panels of a "limited" number of A320-family aircraft. The company told the publication that it had "identified" and "contained" the source of the issue and that "all newly produced panels conform to all requirements."

"A year after launching a commercial robotaxi service in Abu Dhabi, Chinese autonomous vehicle technology company WeRide and partner Uber can finally call that service driverless," reports TechCrunch.

A company official hailed it as "a historic transportation milestone, as the first driverless AV deployment outside of the U.S. or China." But TechCrunch notes that's just the beginning: Uber has spent the past two years locking up partnerships with 20 autonomous vehicle technology companies in various countries, including the United States, Europe, and the Middle East.

Those partnerships have expanded beyond the realm of robotaxis as well. Uber's deals span the full range of self-driving applications, including delivery and trucking. This year alone, it announced partnerships withAnn Arbor, Michigan-basedMay MobilityandVolkswagen, Chinese self-driving firms Momenta,Pony.ai, and Baidu, as well as a recent deal to create a premium robotaxi service using Lucid Gravity SUVs equipped with a self-driving system from San Francisco-based startup Nuro.

These deals are finally beginning to materialize into commercial services. For instance, Uber and Waymo launched a robotaxi service earlier this year in Austin. Now, Uber has expanded to the Middle East with WeRide in Abu Dhabi — with even more cities to come, including Dubai. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi forecast in the company's third-quarter earnings report that there would be autonomous vehicle deployments on the Uber network in at least 10 cities by the end of 2026. Uber and WeRide have previously shared plans to expand to 15 cities throughout the Middle East and Europe, eventually scaling to thousands of robotaxis. That would represent a massive leap for WeRide, which today has more than 150 robotaxis in the region.

Hyperloop One ceased operations in December 2023, notes CNN. "Yet nearly two years on, in other parts of the world, hyperloop projects are ongoing." For example, Rotterdam-based Hardt Hyperloop has a cool web site — and the company's managing director tells CNN that hyperloops are the only "actionable, sustainable solution to replace short-haul air travel" over distances greater than 300 miles. "It's 90% more efficient than air travel, operational expenses and maintenance costs are much lower than conventional high-speed railways and, as an enclosed, autonomous system, it's not affected by external factors such as bad weather or strikes." Rail-friendly Europe appears to be the new hyperloop hub, with four companies dedicated to it... Europe's Hyperloop Development Program (HDP) is a public-private partnership backed by EU funding and the private sector. HDP's vision is to have the first set of commercially viable hyperloop lines open by 2035-40, followed by a route network by 2050. It estimates that a 15,000-mile network linking 130 of Europe's major cities could shift 66% of short-haul flight passengers to hyperloop by 2050, saving between 113 million and 242 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions. Core network hubs would be scattered across the continent from London to Berlin, Madrid to Belgrade, and Sofia to Athens, while loops would serve the Iberian Peninsula, the Baltic States and Scandinavia, the Balkans and Central and Eastern Europe. The cost? A cool 981 billion euros, or $1.1 trillion, according to HDP estimates...

[T]hose behind the EU-backed HDP project are hoping to have a full-scale test track of up to 3 miles operational by the end of 2029, followed by a 20-30 mile twin-tube "Living Lab" which would replicate all aspects of day-to-day operation and public service, slated to be up and running by 2034. Elsewhere, Hyperloop Italia is investing in a demonstration line between Venice and Padua costing up to €800 million ($929 million) which could be ready by 2029, while Germany, Spain, India and China are also investigating trial routes to establish the viability of the technology.
And meanwhile China and Japan are also building "maglev" (magnetic levitation) train lines, the article points out — though it also includes this quote from rail expert and author Christian Wolmar. "Hyperloop is unworkable. The infrastructure it needs would be amazingly expensive to build and it can't deliver the capacity to compete with high-speed railways or airlines.

"It doesn't integrate with existing transport modes, the infrastructure required to reach city centers would cause intolerable noise and disruption. And there are doubts over energy costs, capacity and passenger safety if something goes wrong at such high speeds....

"[T]he economics of it just don't work."

The investigation into the June 12 Air India crash that killed 260 people has been marked by tension, suspicion and poor communication between American and Indian officials, including an episode where NTSB chairwoman Jennifer Homendy instructed her black-box specialists not to board a late-night Indian military flight to a remote facility, WSJ reports.

When two American recorder experts landed in New Delhi in late June, they received urgent messages from colleagues telling them not to go with the Indians; Homendy had grown concerned about sending U.S. personnel and equipment to an aerospace lab in the remote town of Korwa amid State Department security warnings about terrorism in the region. She made calls to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and the CEOs of Boeing and GE Aerospace, and the State Department sent embassy officials to intercept the NTSB specialists at the airport.

Homendy eventually delivered an ultimatum: if Indian authorities didn't choose between their Delhi facility and the NTSB's Washington lab within 48 hours, she would withdraw American support from the probe. Indian officials relented. The downloaded data showed someone in the cockpit moved switches that cut off the engines' fuel supply, and India's preliminary report stated one pilot asked the other why he moved the switches while that pilot denied doing so. American government and industry officials now privately believe the captain likely moved the switches deliberately.

Europe's Airbus said on Friday it was ordering immediate repairs to 6,000 of its widely used A320 family of jets in a sweeping recall affecting more than half the global fleet, threatening upheaval during the busiest travel weekend of the year in the United States and disruption worldwide. From a report: The setback appears to be among the largest recalls affecting Airbus in its 55-year history and comes weeks after the A320 overtook the Boeing 737 as the most-delivered model. At the time Airbus issued its bulletin to the plane's more than 350 operators, some 3,000 A320-family jets were in the air.

The fix mainly involves reverting to earlier software and is relatively simple, but must be carried out before the planes can fly again, other than repositioning to repair centres, according to the bulletin to airlines seen by Reuters. Airlines from the United States to South America, Europe, India and New Zealand warned the repairs could potentially cause flight delays or cancellations.

The bitter standoff between Dutch chipmaker Nexperia -- which supplies basic chips crucial to 49% of European automakers, over 85% of medical device companies, and the entire defense industry -- and its Chinese parent company Wingtech escalated on Friday when both Wingtech and Nexperia's Chinese unit accused the Dutch business of secretly building a supply chain that would cut China out entirely. The accusations came one day after Nexperia's Dutch headquarters published an open letter claiming it had repeatedly tried and failed to contact its Chinese unit.

Nexperia China demanded the Dutch side halt its overseas expansion plans, specifically a $300 million investment in a Malaysian plant, and alleged an internal company target to source 90% of production outside China by mid-2026. The Chinese unit also accused its European counterparts of deleting employee email accounts and cutting off access to IT systems. The dispute traces back to September when the Dutch government invoked a Cold War-era law to seize control of Nexperia on economic security grounds.

An Amsterdam court subsequently stripped Wingtech of its ownership rights. Beijing retaliated by halting exports of finished Nexperia chips on October 4, triggering warnings of production shutdowns from automakers including Nissan and Bosch. Export curbs were relaxed in early November, and the Dutch government suspended its intervention last week following talks, but the court ruling remains in force. Wingtech warned that supply disruptions could return if the control issue remains unresolved.

Twenty years after surgeons in France performed the world's first face transplant, the experimental field that procedure launched is now confronting a troubling record of patient deaths, buried negative data and a healthcare system that leaves recipients financially devastated and medically vulnerable.

About 50 face transplants have been performed globally since Isabelle Dinoire received her partial face graft at University Hospital CHU Amiens-Picardie in November 2005. A 2024 JAMA Surgery study reported five-year graft survival of 85% and 10-year survival of 74%, concluding that the procedure is "an effective reconstructive option for patients with severe facial defects." The study did not track psychological wellbeing, financial outcomes, employment status or quality of life. Roughly 20% of face transplant patients have died from rejection, kidney failure, or heart failure.

The anti-rejection medications that keep transplanted faces alive can destroy kidneys and weaken immune systems to the point where routine infections become life-threatening. In the United States, the Department of Defense has funded most operations, treating them as a frontier for wounded veterans, because private insurers refuse to cover the costs. Patients who survive the surgery often find themselves unable to afford medications, transportation to follow-up appointments or basic caregiving. The field's long-term grants cover surgical innovation but not the lifelong needs of the people who receive these transplants.

The UK government will levy a pay-per-mile tax on electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles starting April 2028, UK's finance minister Rachel Reeves announced, a measure designed to offset some of the fuel duty revenue that will disappear as drivers shift away from petrol and diesel cars. Electric vehicles will be charged 3 pence per mile and plug-in hybrids 1.5 pence per mile, payable annually alongside car tax. An average driver covering 8,000 miles a year would pay around $320, roughly half what a petrol or diesel driver pays in fuel duty.

The Office for Budget Responsibility expects the tax to generate $1.45 billion in its first year and $2.51 billion by 2030-31, offsetting about a quarter of the revenue losses projected from the EV transition by 2050. The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders warned the new charge would "suppress demand" and make sales targets harder to achieve. New Zealand and Iceland have already introduced road pricing for EVs; demand dropped in the former but held steady in the latter.

Amazon's drone-delivery program is under federal scrutiny after an MK30 aircraft clipped an internet cable in Texas. CNBC reports: The incident occurred on Nov. 18 around 12:45 p.m. Central in Waco, Texas. After dropping off a package, one of Amazon's MK30 drones was ascending out of a customer's yard when one of its six propellers got tangled in a nearby internet cable, according to a video of the incident viewed and verified by CNBC. The video shows the Amazon drone shearing the wire line. The drone's motor then appeared to shut off and the aircraft landed itself, with its propellers windmilling slightly on the way down, the video shows. The drone appeared to remain in tact beyond some damage to one of its propellers.

The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating the incident, a spokesperson confirmed. The National Transportation Safety Board said the agency is aware of the incident but has not opened a probe into the matter. Amazon confirmed the incident to CNBC, saying that after clipping the internet cable, the drone performed a "safe contingent landing," referring to the process that allows its drones to land safely in unexpected conditions. "There were no injuries or widespread internet service outages. We've paid for the cable line's repair for the customer and have apologized for the inconvenience this caused them," an Amazon spokesperson told CNBC, noting that the drone had completed its package delivery.

Chinese automakers may not be able to sell their electric vehicles in the United States due to steep tariffs and software restrictions, but they have found an alternative path to American eyeballs through a coordinated campaign targeting car influencers on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. The effort, the Verge reports, is largely organized by DCar Studio, a platform that invites US-based creators to Los Angeles to test-drive vehicles from brands like BYD, Geely and Xiaomi. DCar is actually Dongchedi, a car trading platform owned by TikTok parent ByteDance that raised $600 million on a $3 billion valuation in 2024. The strategy appears aimed at building global brand awareness rather than direct US sales.

Mark Greeven, professor at IMD Business School, told The Verge that American influencers still shape opinions across the Western world. "The charm offensive is to work with American influencers about Chinese EV cars because we still have a dominant opinion in the Western world, which is formed by English-speaking influential figures on social media," he said. Several creators told The Verge they have heard rumors of undisclosed payments for positive coverage.

With some animated graphics, CNN "reimagined" what three of America's busiest air and road travel routes would look like with high-speed trains, for "a glimpse into a faster, more connected future." The journey from New York City to Chicago could take just over six hours by high-speed train at an average speed of 160 mph, cutting travel time by more than 13 hours compared with the current Amtrak route... The journey from San Francisco to Los Angeles could be completed in under three hours by high-speed train... The journey from Atlanta to Orlando could be completed in under three hours by high-speed train that reaches 160 mph, cutting travel time by over half compared with driving...

While high-speed rail remains a fantasy in the United States, it is already hugely successful across the globe. Passengers take 3 billion trips annually on more than 40,000 miles of modern high-speed railway across the globe, according to the International Union of Railways. China is home to the world's largest high-speed rail network. The 809-mile train journey from Beijing to Shanghai takes just four and a half hours... In Europe, France's Train a Grand Vitesse (TGV) is recognized as a pioneer of high-speed rail technology. Spain soon followed France's success and now hosts Europe's most extensive high-speed rail network...

[T]rain travel contributes relatively less pollution of every type, said Jacob Mason of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, from burning less gasoline to making less noise than cars and taking up less space than freeways. The reduction in greenhouse gas emissions is staggering: Per kilometer traveled, the average car or a short-haul flight each emit more than 30 times the CO2 equivalent than Eurostar high-speed trains, according to data from the UK government.

"The internet did transform work — but not the way 1998 thought..." argues the Wall Street Journal. "The internet slipped inside almost every job and rewired how work got done."

So while the number of single-task jobs like travel agent dropped, most jobs "are bundles of judgment, coordination and hands-on work," and instead the internet brought "the quiet transformation of nearly every job in the economy... Today, just 10% of workers make minimal use of the internet on the job — roles like butcher and carpet installer." [T]he bigger story has been additive. In 1998, few could conceive of social media — let alone 65,000 social-media managers — and 200,000 information-security analysts would have sounded absurd when data still lived on floppy disks... Marketing shifted from campaign bursts to always-on funnels and A/B testing. Clinics embedded e-prescribing and patient portals, reshaping front-office and clinical handoffs. The steps, owners and metrics shifted. Only then did the backbone scale: We went from server closets wedged next to the mop sink to data centers and cloud regions, from lone system administrators to fulfillment networks, cybersecurity and compliance.

That is where many unexpected jobs appeared. Networked machines and web-enabled software quietly transformed back offices as much as our on-screen lives. Similarly, as e-commerce took off, internet-enabled logistics rewired planning roles — logisticians, transportation and distribution managers — and unlocked a surge in last-mile work. The build-out didn't just hire coders; it hired coordinators, pickers, packers and drivers. It spawned hundreds of thousands of warehouse and delivery jobs — the largest pockets of internet-driven job growth, and yet few had them on their 1998 bingo card... Today, the share of workers in professional and managerial occupations has more than doubled since the dawn of the digital era.

So what does that tell us about AI? Our mental model often defaults to an industrial image — John Henry versus the steam drill — where jobs are one dominant task, and automation maps one-to-one: Automate the task, eliminate the job. The internet revealed a different reality: Modern roles are bundles. Technologies typically hit routine tasks first, then workflows, and only later reshape jobs, with second-order hiring around the backbone. That complexity is what made disruption slower and more subtle than anyone predicted. AI fits that pattern more than it breaks it... [LLMs] can draft briefs, summarize medical notes and answer queries. Those are tasks — important ones — but still parts of larger roles. They don't manage risk, hold accountability, reassure anxious clients or integrate messy context across teams. Expect a rebalanced division of labor: The technical layer gets faster and cheaper; the human layer shifts toward supervision, coordination, complex judgment, relationship work and exception handling.

What to expect from AI, then, is messy, uneven reshuffling in stages. Some roles will contract sharply — and those contractions will affect real people. But many occupations will be rewired in quieter ways. Productivity gains will unlock new demand and create work that didn't exist, alongside a build-out around data, safety, compliance and infrastructure.

AI is unprecedented; so was the internet. The real risk is timing: overestimating job losses, underestimating the long, quiet rewiring already under way, and overlooking the jobs created in the backbone. That was the internet's lesson. It's likely to be AI's as well.

Autonomous electric tractor startup Monarch Tractor -- which we covered in 2022 -- warned staff Thursday it may need to lay off more than 100 employees, or possibly even "shut down," according to a company-wide memo obtained by TechCrunch. The report adds: The memo comes after Monarch Tractor was already cutting some positions over the last few weeks at its California corporate facilities and remote teams in India and Singapore, according to multiple former employees who spoke with TechCrunch on the condition of anonymity.

Monarch Tractor was founded in 2018 by a team that included a former top executive at Tesla's first gigafactory and Carlo Mondavi, a scion of the famous winemaking family. The company raised at least $220 million, including $133 million in 2024, as it pursued a goal of making "driver optional" autonomous tractors that could perform tasks at places like wineries and other fruit farms.

Longtime Slashdot reader ukoda shares a report from the Associated Press: China is replacing its diesel trucks with electric models faster than expected, potentially reshaping global fuel demand and the future of heavy transport. In 2020, nearly all new trucks in China ran on diesel. By the first half of 2025, battery-powered trucks accounted for 22% of new heavy truck sales, up from 9.2% in the same period in 2024, according to Commercial Vehicle World, a Beijing-based trucking data provider. The British research firm BMI forecasts electric trucks will reach nearly 46% of new sales this year and 60% next year.

China's trucking fleet, the world's second-largest after the U.S., still mainly runs on diesel, but the landscape is shifting. Transport fuel demand is plateauing, according to the International Energy Agency and diesel use in China could decline faster than many expect, said Christopher Doleman, an analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. Electric trucks now outsell LNG models in China, so its demand for fossil fuels could fall, and "in other countries, it might never take off," he said. [...]

The share of electrics in new truck sales, from 8% in 2024 to 28% by August 2025, has more than tripled as prices have fallen. Electric trucks outsold LNG-powered vehicles in China for five consecutive months this year, according to Commercial Vehicle World. While electric trucks are two to three times more expensive than diesel ones and cost roughly 18% more than LNG trucks, their higher energy efficiency and lower costs can save owners an estimated 10% to 26% over the vehicle's lifetime, according to research by Chinese scientists. "When it comes to heavy trucks, the fleet owners in China are very bottom-line driven," Doleman said.

An anonymous reader shares a report: This summer, Oslo's public-transport authority drove a Chinese electric bus deep into a decommissioned mine inside a nearby mountain to answer a question: Could it be hacked? Isolated by rock from digital interference, cybersecurity experts came back with a qualified yes: The bus could in theory be remotely disabled using the control system for the battery.

The revelation, presented at a recent public-transport conference, has spurred officials in Denmark and the U.K. to start their own investigations into Chinese vehicles. It has also fed into broader security concerns across Europe about the growing prevalence of Chinese-made equipment in the region's energy and telecommunications infrastructure.

The worry is the same for autos, solar panels and other connected devices: that mechanisms used for wirelessly delivering system updates could also be exploited by a hostile government or third-party hacker to compromise critical networks. [...] The Oslo transport authority, Ruter, said the bus's mobile-network connection via a Romanian SIM card gave manufacturer Yutong access to the control system for battery and power supply. Ruter said it is addressing the vulnerability by developing firewalls and delaying the signals sent to the vehicles, among other solutions.

Chinese automakers are rapidly expanding across South America, boosted by the new Chinese-built Port of Chancay, aggressive pricing, local partnerships, and growing regional demand. Reuters reports: China has been ramping up sales since the opening last year of the Port of Chancay, north of Lima. The Chinese-built megaport has halved trans-Pacific shipping times just as Chinese manufacturers face rising barriers to entry in the United States and greater trade restrictions in Europe.

BYD, which makes EVs, plug-in hybrids and combustion engine cars, plans to open a fourth dealership in Lima by the end of this year, while Chery and Geely have more than a dozen in total in Peru. Chinese carmakers face a profit-destroying price war at home and a growing surplus of new cars rolling out of Chinese factory lines. Much of this excess is being shipped overseas to the Middle East, Central Asia and Latin America, according to global automotive analyst Felipe Munoz at JATO Dynamics.

The Chinese have "carved out space," across both electric and petrol-powered cars, said Martin Bresciani, president of Chile's automotive business chamber, CAVEM. "The Chinese have already demonstrated that they match global standards in quality." Chinese brands reached 29.6% of all new passenger car sales in Chile in the first quarter of this year. [...] Part of China's success has been partnering with trusted local importers to offer more affordable models tailored to regional tastes, according to seven dealerships Reuters spoke to in Peru, Chile, Uruguay and Argentina.