🦾 The Future of Tech Special Edition

The first time you see a car glide through a San Francisco intersection with no one behind the wheel, you hold your breath.

Wait there long enough, however, and the sight becomes mundane. It’s not uncommon to see half a dozen Alphabet Waymos, Amazon Zooxes, and Tesla Robotaxis at the same light. Sherwood News’ Rani Molla had reservations about riding in one, like the majority of Americans, but as our senior technology correspondent, it was time to give them a fair try — despite feeling that “driverless cars, like the AI that powers them, are cringe.”

• Molla spent a couple of weeks traversing the San Francisco Bay Area with family, friends, and sources in driverless cars. 

• Everyone she spoke to who had actually used them — a former BART driver who takes Waymos, the Tesla Robotaxi safety monitors whose jobs may soon end, residents who are finding new ways around their old city — said some version of the same thing: this is the future.

• “That’s why it pains me to say that over dozens of rides,” Molla wrote, “through rain and shine, at night and during the day, on crowded city streets and highways — my experience with robotaxis was consistently good.” So good in fact, she came to prefer them for a variety of reasons.

• That said, there were hiccups, and pros and cons for each of the three services Molla tried. Waymo came out on top as the “Platonic ideal of a robotaxi service: no driver, just an easy-to-use app and a near flawless ride.” Dive deeper into her reviews of Waymo, Zoox, and Robotaxi here.

Things seem different now than when Uber first trialed autonomous rides in 2018. As one resident told Molla, “ I 100% think it’s safer. I feel safer as a rider in an autonomous vehicle, as a driver around other AVs, because they’re driving the speed limit, they stop for people crossing the street. I feel safer as a biker, as a walker… I feel safer on all accounts.” 

The Takeaway

Autonomous vehicles are starting to expand far beyond ride-sharing, as they mold not only the future of human transport but also how goods move around the planet. Silicon Valley historian Margaret O’Mara said she thinks we could be heading for a tipping point.

It isn’t that the technology has become flawless; the awkward drop-offs and “edge cases” prove it’s still very much a work in progress. But as Molla found in just a few weeks, it’s easy to start treating these cars like any other piece of infrastructure. 

The driverless car is coming — not because it has mastered the world, but because we are learning how to live with it.

See what it’s like to ride in different robotaxis

In recent years, publicly traded quantum computing upstarts have been whipped around by grand pronouncements from the world’s largest companies and the presumption of support from the government of the world’s largest economy, causing massive waves of retail money into and out of their stocks.

In other words, speculation drove speculative stocks.

Thursday’s massive gains in Infleqtion, D-Wave Quantum, and Rigetti Computing were no exception. The surges came as the Trump administration awarded grants to these firms, among others, in exchange for equity stakes.

• In interviews with Sherwood, the CEOs of Infleqtion and D-Wave called the government’s backing “validating” and an “important endorsement,” respectively, making the case that the funding signals their technology is no longer speculative — and leaves them well positioned to prove it.

• “ The US government decided to take a very hard look at the state of the quantum computing industry and walked away with the conclusion that we are closer than most had thought,” said Infleqtion CEO Matthew Kinsella. “Therefore the US government felt it was time to invest taxpayer money into quantum computing companies because it’s a critical technology that they deem no longer speculative.”

• “ This is about accelerating our R&D program,” said D-Wave CEO Dr. Alan Baratz. “With this government funding, we’re able to make a more significant investment sooner and accelerate that work, and in the case of our gate-model program, potentially up to a three-year acceleration.”

“At the highest level, what do we need to get useful quantum computing? We need a lot of very high-quality qubits, and then we need to error-correct them,” Kinsella said. “ You can think about this funding being directly associated with accelerating one of those three things: more qubits, higher-quality qubits, and error correction.”

The Takeaway

For Baratz, this marks the culmination of a multiyear effort to get the US government to pay more attention to annealing quantum computing, D-Wave’s leading technology. To oversimplify, gate-based models have more potential power and flexibility in problem-solving, while annealing computers provide solutions to more specific optimization queries.

 “Up until now, the US government has been primarily focused on gate-model quantum computing,” he said. “This is an important endorsement for the first time from the US government in annealing quantum computing, and I think that’s a very important and very strong statement, and we’re very excited about it.”

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As AI tools become more sophisticated, they’re increasingly being used to imitate the voices and likenesses of the dead, with and without permission. Val Kilmer, James Earl Jones, and Judy Garland are among the departed entertainers whose AI-generated appearance or voice are being used with authorization, but there’s also a proliferation of unauthorized AI-generated deepfakes and songs, which has created a secondary market for third-party companies to help platforms and estates detect deepfakes across the internet. 

The big business of bringing back the dead