Hasta La Gadget!

<img width="1280" height="720" src="https://cdn.slashgear.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/gm-cruise-car-1280×720.jpg" class="webfeedsFeaturedVisual wp-post-image" alt="GM Cruise car on road" loading="lazy" style="margin: auto;margin-bottom: 5px;max-width: 100%" data-attachment-id="710323" data-permalink="https://www.slashgear.com/gms-cruise-brings-self-driving-car-rides-to-the-public-in-san-francisco-02710314/gm-cruise-car/" data-orig-file="https://cdn.slashgear.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/gm-cruise-car.jpg" data-orig-size="1600,900" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="gm-cruise-car" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="

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” data-medium-file=”https://cdn.slashgear.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/gm-cruise-car-1280×720.jpg” data-large-file=”https://cdn.slashgear.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/gm-cruise-car-1280×720.jpg” />Cruise, the autonomous car company acquired by General Motors in 2016, has announced the launch of driverless car rides in San Francisco. The rides are offered to the public for free at this time, giving more people the opportunity to experience self-driving car technology — though, the company notes, only a small number of users will get access initially. Cruise … Continue reading

Experts share the red flags that your relationship with a friend might come to an end.

Google has two lost prominent members of its Ethical AI research group, reports Bloomberg. On Wednesday, researcher Alex Hanna and software engineer Dylan Baker left the company to join Timnit Gebru’s Distributed AI Research Institute. Gebru founded the nonprofit in December following her controversial exit from the tech giant in 2020.

Up until the end of that year, Gebru was one of the co-leads of Google’s Ethical AI research group. After publishing a paper the company said didn’t meet its bar for publication, Gebru claims Google fired her. The company, however, has maintained she resigned. In February 2021, several employees left the unit in protest of Google’s handling of the situation. Later that same month, the company fired Margaret Mitchell, the other co-lead of the Ethical AI research group. Hanna and Baker told Bloomberg the dismissals weighed heavily on them, and that they wanted to work with Gebru again.

“I am quitting because I’m tired,” Hanna wrote on Medium after announcing her departure from the company. The post is in many ways a call to action. “In a word, tech has a whiteness problem. Google is not just a tech organization. Google is a white tech organization,” Hanna writes. “More specifically, tech organizations are committed to defending whiteness through the ‘interrelated practices, processes, actions and meanings,’ the techniques of reproducing the organization. In this case, that means defending their policies of recruitment, hierarchization, and monetization.”

The post also touches on the paper at the center of Gebru’s dismissal from the company. Hanna says the claim Jeff Dean, the head of Google’s AI division, made about the robustness of the company’s publishing process was “laughable.” She points to analysis the group Google Walkout for Real Change published in 2020. “Google management remained silent when an article on the Google Walkout page pointed out that there were many counterexamples, like how nearly half of papers in the system were approved within a day or less of the deadline,” Hanna said.

Hanna and Baker told Bloomberg they also believe Google has become less willing to listen to employees in recent years. They specifically pointed to the company’s pursuit of potential contracts from the Pentagon over the past and the very public objections of its workers.

“We appreciate Alex and Dylan’s contributions — our research on responsible AI is incredibly important, and we’re continuing to expand our work in this area in keeping with our AI Principles,” A Google spokesperson told Engadget. “We’re also committed to building a company where people of different views, backgrounds and experiences can do their best work and show up for one another.”

Freezing your butt off thanks to February’s bitterly cold temperatures? It could be so much worse: You could be on a tropical vacation from hell! As these 12 horror, cult, and thriller picks will prove, sometimes there’s no more worse place to be than a warm, sunny beach.

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Spotify reported its Q4 2021 earnings today, and while the numbers showed a strong close to last year, the issue at the front of everyone’s mind is Joe Rogan. CEO Daniel Ek began his prepared remarks by broadly addressing the company’s “notable few days.” Ek explained that Spotify is working to combat misinformation and that there’s still work to be done. During the Q&A portion of the earnings call, he was directly asked about The Joe Rogan Experience.

“We’re trying to balance creative expression with the safety of our users,” Ek said. He continued by saying the company doesn’t bend its content rules to fit individual creators. “While Joe has a massive audience, he also has to abide by those policies.” 

Previously, Spotify has said it reviewed all episodes of JRE and none of them met the criteria for removal, despite several discussions of controversial topics — most notably COVID-19 vaccines and treatments. Until this weekend, those policies weren’t posted publicly as the company provided details while announcing it would add a “content advisory” to any podcast episodes that discuss COVID-19. When Neil Young pulled his music from the service last week, Spotify said it had pulled “over 20,000 podcast episodes related to COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic.”

Ek admitted that Spotify should’ve posted its content guidelines before this past weekend and took sole responsibility for not doing so sooner. He also said he doesn’t expect any “churn” or loss of customers due to the current podcast predicament. He was clear it’s too early to tell, but that “controversies” usually play out in “months instead of days.” 

Rogan has issued an apology, pledging to include a wider array of opinions on future episodes. “I will do my best to try to balance out these more controversial viewpoints with other people’s perspectives so we can maybe find a better point of view,” he said.