Waymo and Uber have signed a long-term, strategic partnership to collaborate on long-haul autonomous trucking. They’ll blend Waymo’s self-driving tech with Uber Freight’s network. The idea is to help customers deploy autonomous trucks more efficiently.
Those who buy trucks equipped with the Waymo Driver system will be able to tap into Uber Freight’s marketplace technology, meaning they’ll be able to deploy vehicles on the latter’s network for deliveries. Uber Freight is essentially a version of the regular Uber app designed for shippers, which helps them find truck drivers for on-demand haulage.
Waymo Via — the company’s trucking division — plans to earmark billions of miles of goods-only driverless delivery capacity for the Uber Freight network. It will only make that mileage available “when shippers need it most.”
The companies will trial the integration on Waymo Via’s test fleet at the outset. The timeline for a broader deployment is not clear. The companies say that by letting autonomous systems handle the long-haul aspect of trucking, they foresee a future where drivers will be able to move into short-haul jobs.
Uber and Waymo haven’t always been on the same page. In 2017, Waymo owner Alphabet sued Uber over the alleged theft of trade secrets by former employees. The previous year, Uber bought a self-driving truck startup called Otto, which was founded by a number of ex-Alphabet employees, including engineer Anthony Levandowski.
Alphabet claimed Levandowski downloaded more than “14,000 highly confidential and proprietary design files for Waymo’s various hardware systems” a few weeks before he quit the company. Levandowski was sentenced to 18 months in prison in 2020 and pardoned the following January by outgoing president Donald Trump.
Uber and Waymo settled the suit in 2018. After the companies resolved their differences, it was reported that Uber was open to the idea of collaborating with Waymo.
iPhone users are walking around with great cameras in their pockets, so why not use that with their Macs? That’s the basic idea behind Continuity Camera, a new feature coming to macOS Ventura that’ll let you plop an iPhone on top of your Mac, and use those mobile cameras to power video chats in FaceTime, Teams and any other conferencing app. While cool, the feature is a bit clunkier than typical Apple offerings, since it requires a phone stand. It’s also a slight admission from Apple that its laptop and desktop webcams aren’t the best. (That’s something we noticed with the pricey Studio Display.)
The entire Continuity Camera setup works wirelessly, and it also brings over features like Center Stage, which helps the camera follow you around the room. Additionally, it can tap into your phone’s ultrawide camera to show a top-down view of your desk. Mostly, though, it’s a nice way to get better background blur and lighting effects for all of your video chats. The only problem? You won’t be able to surreptitiously use your phone while you’re stuck in a work meeting.
Broadcom isn’t done attempting major acquisitions. The chip giant is buying cloud- and virtualization-focused software developer VMware for the equivalent of $61 billion in cash and stock. The move would fold Broadcom’s software division into VMware and create a theoretical powerhouse that helps companies run apps in all sorts of environments, including “any” cloud service.
The proposed union would have Broadcom take on $8 billion of VMware’s debt. The deal should close sometime in Broadcom’s fiscal 2023 (no later than early calendar 2023) if regulators approve the deal. Notably, though, VMware isn’t yet locked into the merger — a “go-shop” clause will let it consider and even solicit deals from other companies through July 5th.
If the purchase goes forward, it will represent one of the larger tech acquisitions so far. Appropriately, Dell (whose founder sits on VMware’s board) set a record for several years when it bought VMware’s then-owner EMC for $67 billion in 2015. Microsoft eclipsed that, though, with its still-pending $68.7 billion buyout of Activision Blizzard.
A play like this isn’t completely unexpected. On top of its debt, VMware has seen declining profits and modest revenue gains. This could help the firm overcome those hurdles and help its competitiveness. Broadcom may not want to count on the purchase going through, however. Former President Trump blocked Broadcom’s purchase of Qualcomm in 2018 over national security concerns. While the administration and acquisition target are clearly different this time around, it wouldn’t be surprising if Broadcom faces similar levels of regulatory scrutiny.
Drivers for Amazon’s rapidly growing third-party delivery partner network are being hurt on the job with shocking frequency according to data compiled in a new report by the Strategic Organizing Center (SOC) — and the rate of injuries increased dramatically between 2020 and 2021.
Among the Delivery Service Partner (DSP) drivers it found OSHA data for, SOC claims there was “nearly one injury per five full-time-equivalent workers” in 2021 — an incident rate of 18.3. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’s most recent incident rate average among “couriers and express delivery services” stands at just 7.5 per 100. According to SOC, the 2021 injury numbers represent an approximately 40 percent increase from the previous year.
There are some important limitations to the findings SOC — which itself is a collaboration between Service Employees International Union, Teamsters, Communications Workers of America and United Farmworkers of America — published however. Because DSPs are subcontracted, their injury data is submitted individually to OSHA; SOC was able to obtain incident logs for 201 such delivery companies that work with Amazon, but estimates that pool represents just ten percent of the total DSP workforce. Still, given the wealth of reporting on injury rates among Amazon’s warehouse staff, the report indicates that trend may be broadly applicable to the company’s workforce.
Working for a DSP, according to a lawsuit filed by one such company earlier this year, involves assenting to “near complete control” by Amazon without the ecommerce giant providing the “required safeguards.” DSP drivers are also regularly monitored by Amazon through the company’s Mentor app and surveillance cameras installed in their vehicles. According to one driver in Indianapolis that SOC spoke to in March, Amazon uses a system of scores that rank drivers against their own co-workers in terms of delivery speed and completion rate; the driver said she knew of 15 drivers who were terminated for not meeting Amazon’s performance demands. The aforementioned lawsuit notes that “exceedingly aggressive time limits that could rarely be safely met” are a mainstay.
“This report cherry-picks data from less than 10% of our delivery partners to tell an inaccurate and misleading story,” Kelly Nantel, an Amazon spokesperson, told Engadget. “Safety is a priority across our network, which is why we’ve rolled out technology like innovative camera systems that have helped lead to an overall reduction in accident rates of nearly 50%, and we’ll keep investing in new safety tools to try and get better every day.” It’s not clear if DSPs are obligated to share their injury data with Amazon as well as OSHA; Engadget has reached out for clarification.
The DSP program — which Amazon first launched in 2018 to reduce its reliance on USPS, UPS and Fedex — has grown rapidly since then to a network of over 2,000 companies. As Bloombergnoted, many DSP operators are veterans, retirees, first-time business owners and other neophytes to the logistics business. The same productivity demands placed on drivers are similarly leveraged against DSP owners who have reported razor-thin margins, and a feeling of being trapped in the program by “exit fees” if they choose to leave.
It’s not quite summer yet, but Memorial Day is often seen as the unofficial start of the grilling season. To help you prepare for the next few months, we’ve compiled a list of the best gear for your outdoor cooking adventures. Based on reviews and test…
Never mind reading generic guides or practicing with friends — Google is betting that algorithms can get you ready for a job interview. The company has launched an Interview Warmup tool that uses AI to help you prepare for interviews across various roles. The site asks typical questions (such as the classic “tell me a bit about yourself”) and analyzes your voiced or typed responses for areas of improvement. You’ll know when you overuse certain words, for instance, or if you need to spend more time talking about a given subject.
Interview Warmup is aimed at Google Career Certificates users hoping to land work, and most of its role-specific questions reflect this. There are general interview questions, though, and Google plans to expand the tool to help more candidates. The feature is currently only available in the US.
AI has increasingly been used in recruitment. To date, though, it has mainly served companies during their selection process, not the potential new hires. This isn’t going to level the playing field, but it might help you brush up on your interview skills.
As part of Cooking Week, we set out to test some of the most niche (and, in some cases, ridiculous) kitchen gadgets we could find. We wanted to know if these impressive-looking appliances actually do what they claim and if they’re worth the splurge. These are our findings.
Some devices, through their longevity, ubiquity, market saturation and the frightening power of economies of scale, have become essentially unimprovable. Among these, arguably, is the humble toaster — a product which has in the 130-odd years since its invention become so thoroughly standardized and affordable that most consumers probably could not tell you what brand of the thing is sitting on their kitchen counter. They all do the same thing (turn bread into crunchy bread) and they’re all somewhere in the neighborhood of $30.
Does such a device truly need to be improved upon? The team at Revolution evidently believe so, or one assumes they would not have spent time and money developing the InstaGLO R270 smart toaster.
Out of the box, the InstaGLO’s distractingly bright touchscreen has a number of settings for the level of desired toasting based on different kinds of bread (sourdough, multigrain, bagel, etc.) or different states of bread readiness (fresh, frozen, reheat.) Then again, so does my fully analog $30 Cuisinart. And in the defense of the cheaper option, I’d feel comfortable with and capable of disassembling that toaster and replacing anything that broke while the InstaGLO presents an impenetrable enigma of unnecessary engineering complications.
The foremost of these is perhaps the most obvious feature upon use: there’s no lever AKA the sticky-outie plastic tab you press down to carry the bread into its miniature furnace. Tapping ‘BEGIN’ on the front plate sends the bread gently downward all on its own, and shortly thereafter the same mechanism levitates it back up to a comfortable grabbing height, “so you never have to reach into the toaster with a fork again,” so says Revolution’s marketing copy. Grabbing hot food from the toaster has never presented much of an obstacle for me — perhaps I’m just built different! — but that is a problem easily solved by wooden toast tongs, which can be had for around $5. Or leftover takeout chopsticks, for free. Or just allowing the passage of time to cool the toast to a handleable temperature. Also free. (I can’t recommend sticking a metal fork into an electrical device.)
Bryan Menegus / Engadget
Of course if moving carbohydrates up and down a few inches was its only selling point the InstaGLO would be a transparent racket. No, the foremost stated innovation is faster heating, which Revolution claims “sears” bread rather than drying it out — crispy on the outside, soft on the inside, or so I’m told. While it certainly does manage to put a frozen slice of country wheat through the Maillard reaction a bit faster, whatever promises of a softer interior had been made were either unrealized or undetectable by my toast-stuffed mouth. And if several hundred dollars of unrealized toast dreams are already burning a hole in your pocket, maybe try one of those steam-based ones that were (are?) popular in Japan. Never tried it, but I hear good things.
It’s possible — likely even — that there are more discerning toast connoisseurs who would notice, appreciate and feel comfortable paying a premium for that experience. The time saved was essentially immaterial to me, as I typically spend the time the bread is cooking to feed the cat, make tea or whatever other morning puttering needs doing. If money is no object and you absolutely have to choke down a slice of crisp multigrain between your morning spin class and 9AM executive meeting, sure, do what makes you happy. But that speedier toasting time also presents a major flaw when it comes to the InstaGLO’s accessories. (Yes, there are now dongles. For a toaster. What bold and unprecedented times we live in.)
For a jaw-dropping $80 you can separately purchase a miniature panini press — another kitchen apparatus that can be had for $30 to $40 from any number of no-name manufacturers. Despite having two toasting slots, the InstaGlo Panini Press only works in the right-hand side, and in truth does a better job of smooshing bread into the approximate shape of a panini than actually cooking one. After several attempts using fresh and frozen bread, lightly oiling the insides of the press (or not), I was met with disappointing results every time. Not only did the exterior fail to reach the crunchiness one expects with a pressed sandwich, I suspect the faster cook time is to blame for the failure of the cheese to melt. At all. I gave this thing the easy task of thinly sliced, low-moisture mozzarella and it just couldn’t stick the landing.
Bryan Menegus / Engadget
Notably, too, the InstaGLO Panini Press is tiny. Some fussing is required to fit even supermarket-style square loaf slices inside. And while I tend towards the Alton Brown axiom of never buying unitasker devices for my (small, already crowded) kitchen a true panini press — or hell, even one of those George Foreman things — can comfortably fit slices from the center of a boule (as god intended) or a halved baguette (if you’re in a desperate situation. I’m not here to judge that.) And it bears mentioning, this problem isn’t limited to the panini add-on either. As with any cheap, conventional toaster, and longer slices will require a flip-and-retoast maneuver, somewhat undermining Revolution’s promise of “no double toasting needed.”
The Warming Rack ($30) sits over top of the device and, despite the toaster as a whole having the ability to cook bread for varying amounts of time, the rack simply has no options whatsoever. It does its thing and if your pastry or whatever is not warm enough, either cycle it again or deal with it. I tested this with a slice of some banana bread I’d made a few days prior. The exterior facing the heating elements wasn’t even warm enough to melt butter; the top was room temperature.
Should you buy a fancy toaster? Hell, we’re probably heading into another major recession, but who am I to tell you what to do with your money. And this model’s shockingly bright touchscreen (which as best as I can tell can never be turned off) makes a good night light if you’re trying to find the bathroom at 3am. Despite bold claims though, there’s very little that’s revolutionary about the InstaGLO.
Do not be swayed by the dulcet dial-tones of tomorrow’s AIs and their siren songs of the singularity. No matter how closely artificial intelligences and androids may come to look and act like humans, they’ll never actually be humans, argue Paul Leonardi, Duca Family Professor of Technology Management at University of California Santa Barbara, and Tsedal Neeley, Naylor Fitzhugh Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, in their new book The Digital Mindset: What It Really Takes to Thrive in the Age of Data, Algorithms, and AI— and therefore should not be treated like humans. The pair contends in the excerpt below that in doing so, such hinders interaction with advanced technology and hampers its further development.
Treat AI Like a Machine, Even If It Seems to Act Like a Human
We are accustomed to interacting with a computer in a visual way: buttons, dropdown lists, sliders, and other features allow us to give the computer commands. However, advances in AI are moving our interaction with digital tools to more natural-feeling and human-like interactions. What’s called a conversational user interface (UI) gives people the ability to act with digital tools through writing or talking that’s much more the way we interact with other people, like Burt Swanson’s “conversation” with Amy the assistant. When you say, “Hey Siri,” “Hello Alexa,” and “OK Google,” that’s a conversational UI. The growth of tools controlled by conversational UIs is staggering. Every time you call an 800 number and are asked to spell your name, answer “Yes,” or say the last four numbers of your social security number you are interacting with an AI that uses conversational UI. Conversational bots have become ubiquitous in part because they make good business sense, and in part because they allow us to access services more efficiently and more conveniently.
For example, if you’ve booked a train trip through Amtrak, you’ve probably interacted with an AI chatbot. Its name is Julie, and it answers more than 5 million questions annually from more than 30 million passengers. You can book rail travel with Julie just by saying where you’re going and when. Julie can pre-fill forms on Amtrak’s scheduling tool and provide guidance through the rest of the booking process. Amtrak has seen an 800 percent return on their investment in Julie. Amtrak saves more than $1 million in customer service expenses each year by using Julie to field low-level, predictable questions. Bookings have increased by 25 percent, and bookings done through Julie generate 30 percent more revenue than bookings made through the website, because Julie is good at upselling customers!
One reason for Julie’s success is that Amtrak makes it clear to users that Julie is an AI agent, and they tell you why they’ve decided to use AI rather than connect you directly with a human. That means that people orient to it as a machine, not mistakenly as a human. They don’t expect too much from it, and they tend to ask questions in ways that elicit helpful answers. Amtrak’s decision may sound counterintuitive, since many companies try to pass off their chatbots as real people and it would seem that interacting with a machine as though it were a human should be precisely how to get the best results. A digital mindset requires a shift in how we think about our relationship to machines. Even as they become more humanish, we need to think about them as machines— requiring explicit instructions and focused on narrow tasks.
x.ai, the company that made meeting scheduler Amy, enables you to schedule a meeting at work, or invite a friend to your kids’ basketball game by simply emailing Amy (or her counterpart, Andrew) with your request as though they were a live personal assistant. Yet Dennis Mortensen, the company’s CEO, observes that more than 90 percent of the inquiries that the company’s help desk receives are related to the fact that people are trying to use natural language with the bots and struggling to get good results.
Perhaps that was why scheduling a simple meeting with a new acquaintance became so annoying to Professor Swanson, who kept trying to use colloquialisms and conventions from informal conversation. In addition to the way he talked, he made many perfectly valid assumptions about his interaction with Amy. He assumed Amy could understand his scheduling constraints and that “she” would be able to discern what his preferences were from the context of the conversation. Swanson was informal and casual—the bot doesn’t get that. It doesn’t understand that when asking for another person’s time, especially if they are doing you a favor, it’s not effective to frequently or suddenly change the meeting logistics. It turns out it’s harder than we think to interact casually with an intelligent robot.
Researchers have validated the idea that treating machines like machines works better than trying to be human with them. Stanford professor Clifford Nass and Harvard Business School professor Youngme Moon conducted a series of studies in which people interacted with anthropomorphic computer interfaces. (Anthropomorphism, or assigning human attributes to inanimate objects, is a major issue in AI research.) They found that individuals tend to overuse human social categories, applying gender stereotypes to computers and ethnically identifying with computer agents. Their findings also showed that people exhibit over-learned social behaviors such as politeness and reciprocity toward computers. Importantly, people tend to engage in these behaviors — treating robots and other intelligent agents as though they were people — even when they know they are interacting with computers, rather than humans. It seems that our collective impulse to relate with people often creeps into our interaction with machines.
This problem of mistaking computers for humans is compounded when interacting with artificial agents via conversational UIs. Take for example a study we conducted with two companies who used AI assistants that provided answers to routine business queries. One used an anthropomorphized AI that was human-like. The other wasn’t.
Workers at the company who used the anthropomorphic agent routinely got mad at the agent when the agent did not return useful answers. They routinely said things like, “He sucks!” or “I would expect him to do better” when referring to the results given by the machine. Most importantly, their strategies to improve relations with the machine mirrored strategies they would use with other people in the office. They would ask their question more politely, they would rephrase into different words, or they would try to strategically time their questions for when they thought the agent would be, in one person’s terms, “not so busy.” None of these strategies was particularly successful.
In contrast, workers at the other company reported much greater satisfaction with their experience. They typed in search terms as though it were a computer and spelled things out in great detail to make sure that an AI, who could not “read between the lines” and pick up on nuance, would heed their preferences. The second group routinely remarked at how surprised they were when their queries were returned with useful or even surprising information and they chalked up any problems that arose to typical bugs with a computer.
For the foreseeable future, the data are clear: treating technologies — no matter how human-like or intelligent they appear — like technologies is key to success when interacting with machines. A big part of the problem is they set the expectations for users that they will respond in human-like ways, and they make us assume that they can infer our intentions, when they can do neither. Interacting successfully with a conversational UI requires a digital mindset that understands we are still some ways away from effective human-like interaction with the technology. Recognizing that an AI agent cannot accurately infer your intentions means that it’s important to spell out each step of the process and be clear about what you want to accomplish.
Peloton is still busy expanding its connected fitness lineup despite its ongoing financial woes. The company has teased plans to introduce its first rowing machine, promising a mix of cardio and strength training. The company didn’t go into detail during its Homecoming 2022 event, but a sneak peek video (below) shows that it’s largely what you’d expect — a minimalist rower with a large screen to show classes and stats.
There was no mention of a release date or price for the rowing machine. Peloton previewed features for existing products, though. You can soon schedule workouts with friends through the app, Bike or Tread. Blind and low-vision users will get to navigate the Tread’s interface through the Google TalkBack screen reader. And you’ll finally have the option to track cycling, running and other workouts through the Peloton app. You won’t have to participate in a class just to have exercise count toward member challenges and streaks.
The expansion comes just days after Peloton revealed a massive $751.1 million loss in its latest quarter, not to mention dropping revenue. The company has been struggling to adapt to the pandemic recovery as people return to gyms and the office, and the combination of price cuts and the Guide camera hasn’t done much to turn things around. The rowing machine is a gamble in that regard, as Peloton is clearly hoping more aggressive investments now will pay off in the long term.
With that said, it may be a shrewd move. The smart rowing machine market is relatively small, with brands like Echelon and Hydrow leading the pack. Peloton might carve out a signification position in that market through name recognition and its well-known classes.
OnePlus fans have the chance to get the company’s latest flagship plus an extra perk from Amazon today. The online retailer includes a $100 gift card when you buy a OnePlus 10 Pro, so while you’re not getting a discount on the handset itself, you are getting an extra $100 to use on future purchases. If you’d prefer to buy directly from OnePlus, you’ll find a different promotion there: today only, you can get a free OnePlus Watch with the purchase of a 10 Pro. That’s actually a bigger discount of sorts since the Watch costs $159, but considering the many drawbacks to OnePlus’ wearable, you may be better off going with Amazon’s gift card option.
The OnePlus 10 Pro earned a score of 79 from us mostly because we found it to be very similar to last year’s OnePlus 9 Pro. That’s not a bad thing, but we were anticipating more big improvements from this generation. You’re getting a 6.7-inch 120Hz AMOLED LTPO display on the 10 Pro along with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chip, an upgraded selfie camera and triple rear camera array that includes a 48-megapixel primary sensor, an ultra-wide lens and a telephoto camera.
The 120Hz screen is gorgeous and its adaptive brightness feature learns your preferences over time and can make adjustments before you need to do so manually. The handset handled everything we threw at it well and it has Oppo’s HyperBoost game engine, which boosts the touchscreen’s responsiveness while helping to stabilize frame rates during gaming sessions. We also appreciate its speedy fingerprint and face unlock features.
But arguably the standout feature of the OnePlus 10 Pro is its fast-charging capabilities. The phone supports 80W SUPERVOOC charging, which allows it to fully power up in only 32 minutes. However, US users won’t get this feature because 110 or 120-volt AC power, the standards in the US, don’t support 80W SUPERVOOC charging. US users will get 65W SUPERVOOC charging instead, which remains the fastest standard available in the States, but still it’s a bit of a bummer when 80W is available in other regions.
The biggest drawback of the OnePus 10 Pro is its 8MP telephoto camera. The other two rear cameras take lovely, detailed photos, but those taken by the telephoto lens are blurry and low-detail. If you’re looking for an upgrade in your next phone’s camera, the 10 Pro may not be the best choice — especially when you can get Google’s Pixel 6 Pro for the same price, or even the forthcoming Pixel 6a in a few months for much less. But if you’re a big fan of the OnePlus brand and OxygenOS, these flash sales are a good opportunity to grab the latest from the company and get something extra on top of it.
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