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This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here

I love a good rivalry story. In soda it’s Coke vs. Pepsi, in baseball it’s Yankees vs. Red Sox, and in EV fast chargers it’s Tesla vs. everyone else.

Fine, that last one might not be quite at the same level as the others just yet, but it’s a battle that’s been heating up. Tesla’s electric vehicles have long included a port that’s different from what most other vehicles use in the US. But in recent weeks, several automakers and charging networks have signed on to adopt Tesla’s charging technology.

These moves are changing the dynamics in the battle over chargers, in a way that could have significant impacts on how we get around. So let’s dig into what’s happening with this rivalry, why it matters, and what it could mean for your future driving (and charging) habits.

Charging up

Tesla is known for its supercharging network, which it began building over a decade ago (eschewing a previous plan to build battery swapping stations).

In the US, it is actually bigger than all other such networks combined, with just over 19,000 fast chargers installed, compared with just over 15,000 from all other operators. Globally, Tesla operates 45,000 superchargers.

And earlier this year, Tesla announced that it would open up some superchargers to other EVs in the US. It was a big change, apparently aimed at tapping into some of the $7.5 billion in funding the Biden administration has set aside for public chargers. (The key word here is “public,” meaning not just for Tesla drivers.)

Most other electric vehicles sold in the US today that can handle fast charging are equipped with what’s called the Combined Charging System (CCS) port, while Tesla uses its own technology. To accommodate other drivers in these newly public stations, Tesla plans to add what it calls a Magic Dock to chargers. Basically, these are adapters that allow Tesla’s special chargers to connect to CCS ports. The move could mean that all EV drivers in the US have access to up to 7,500 of Tesla’s chargers by the end of 2024.

But Tesla isn’t just opening up its network to other vehicles. It’s also trying to get other companies to use its technology. The company renamed its connector the National American Charging Standard (NACS) in late 2022.

Then, in late May, Ford announced that it planned to offer integration that would allow existing EVs to use Tesla’s superchargers (including the ones without Magic Dock) via an adapter and some software integration. Starting as soon as 2025, the automaker plans to offer vehicles with Tesla’s NACS charging port built in.

Just last week, GM joined in on the fun, announcing it would follow Ford’s lead and adopt Tesla’s technology too, providing adapters to customers sometime in 2024 and offering Tesla’s NACS ports in its vehicles starting in 2025.

The participation of Ford and GM could also mean new revenue for Tesla from other drivers using its charging network: up to $3 billion annually by 2030, according to one report. The move left other charging networks scrambling. Several, including Blink Charging Co. and EVGo, followed up this week with announcements that they’d offer chargers compatible with Tesla’s NACS standard.

So there’s been a rush toward Tesla’s way of doing things. The company says its chargers are smaller and more powerful than the current CCS standard.

But it’s a shift that the Biden administration seems to want to put the brakes on: the White House said Friday that Tesla’s charging stations could qualify for federal funding—but only as long as they also included the US standard CCS connection too, Reuters reported.

If you’ve ever tried to find an iPhone charger in a room full of Android users (or vice versa), you know how annoying different charging standards can be. It’ll be interesting to see how this tension develops going forward. Will more automakers sign on or hold out? Will Tesla eventually take over and establish NACS as the new charging standard? I’m definitely keeping my eyes peeled on this one.

By the way, I want to note here that I worked as a battery technology intern at Tesla for three months in 2016. I don’t have any ties to the company today.

Read More

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By: Casey Crownhart
Title: In the clash of the EV chargers, it’s Tesla vs. everyone else
Sourced From: www.technologyreview.com/2023/06/15/1074775/ev-chargers-tesla-nacs-superchargers/
Published Date: Thu, 15 Jun 2023 10:00:00 +0000

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The Download: Uber’s flawed facial recognition, and police drones

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9 hours ago

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September 27, 2023

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1f5bc

This is today’s edition of The Download our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.

Uber’s facial recognition is locking Indian drivers out of their accounts

One evening in February last year, a 23-year-old Uber driver named Niradi Srikanth was getting ready to start another shift, ferrying passengers around the south Indian city of Hyderabad. He pointed the phone at his face to take a selfie to verify his identity. The process usually worked seamlessly. But this time he was unable to log in.

Srikanth suspected it was because he had recently shaved his head. After further attempts to log in were rejected, Uber informed him that his account had been blocked. He is not alone. In a survey conducted by MIT Technology Review of 150 Uber drivers in the country, almost half had been either temporarily or permanently locked out of their accounts because of problems with their selfie.

Hundreds of thousands of India’s gig economy workers are at the mercy of facial recognition technology, with few legal, policy or regulatory protections. For workers like Srikanth, getting blocked from or kicked off a platform can have devastating consequences. Read the full story.

—Varsha Bansal

I met a police drone in VR—and hated it

Police departments across the world are embracing drones, deploying them for everything from surveillance and intelligence gathering to even chasing criminals. Yet none of them seem to be trying to find out how encounters with drones leave people feeling—or whether the technology will help or hinder policing work.

A team from University College London and the London School of Economics is filling in the gaps, studying how people react when meeting police drones in virtual reality, and whether they come away feeling more or less trusting of the police.

MIT Technology Review’s Melissa Heikkilä came away from her encounter with a VR police drone feeling unnerved. If others feel the same way, the big question is whether these drones are effective tools for policing in the first place. Read the full story.

Melissa’s story is from The Algorithm, her weekly newsletter covering AI and its effects on society. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Monday.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Twitter won’t be able to cope with the next natural disaster
Its looser moderation and verification make it harder to sift out reliable information. (Wired $)
The platform is now poorly equipped to fend off bad actors too. (Slate $)
There’s still no clear viable alternative to Twitter. (The Verge)
Twitter’s potential collapse could wipe out vast records of recent human history. (MIT Technology Review)

2 Crypto’s staunchest defenders are trying to rewrite history 
The same people who lobbied against regulations are now criticizing the US government for not reigning in Sam Bankman-Fried. (The Atlantic $)
FTX’s collapse was triggered by its reliance on four tokens. (WSJ $)
Goldman Sachs is planning a crypto spending spree. (Reuters)

3 Neuralink is being investigated for animal cruelty
The number of deaths is higher than it needs to be, according to staff complaints. (Reuters)

4 Women are suing Apple after their exes used AirTags to stalk them
Despite the company’s claim the device is “stalker-proof.” (Bloomberg $)

5 Facebook is threatening to pull news from its platform in the US
If Congress passes new pro-publisher legislation. (WSJ $)

6 America’s drug shortages are getting worse
Essential drug shortages are becoming more frequent, and longer-lasting. (Vox)
The pandemic has likely changed children’s microbiomes. (The Atlantic $)
The next pandemic is already here. Covid can teach us how to fight it. (MIT Technology Review)

7 Who should pay for gene therapy?
While it’s possible the cost will drop over time, we don’t know how long the effects of the therapies will last. (Wired $)
This family raised millions to get experimental gene therapy for their children. (MIT Technology Review)

8 A spirituality influencer’s fans keep getting arrested 
Rashad Jamal’s followers have been accused of killing several people. (Motherboard)

9 How TikTok makes, and breaks, aspiring singers
Wannabe artists can perform to online audiences of millions before they’ve played a single in-person show. (New Yorker $)
TikTok is expected to ride out the social media advertising freeze. (FT $)

10 Microscopic replicas of famous paintings could help to foil forgers
🖼
Thanks to a bit of inspiration from butterflies. (New Scientist $)

Quote of the day

“Do we really need to say,

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————

By: Rhiannon Williams
Title: The Download: Uber’s flawed facial recognition, and police drones
Sourced From: www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/06/1064334/download-uber-flawed-facial-recognition-police-drones/
Published Date: Tue, 06 Dec 2022 13:10:00 +0000

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I met a police drone in VR—and hated it

Published

11 hours ago

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September 27, 2023

By

screenshot3

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here.

I’m standing in the parking lot of an apartment building in East London, near where I live. It’s a cloudy day, and nothing seems out of the ordinary.

A small drone descends from the skies and hovers in front of my face. A voice echoes from the drone’s speakers. The police are conducting routine checks in the neighborhood.

I feel as if the drone’s camera is drilling into me. I try to turn my back to it, but the drone follows me like a heat-seeking missile. It asks me to please put my hands up, and scans my face and body. Scan completed, it leaves me alone, saying there’s an emergency elsewhere.

I got lucky—my encounter was with a drone in virtual reality as part of an experiment by a team from University College London and the London School of Economics. They’re studying how people react when meeting police drones, and whether they come away feeling more or less trusting of the police.

It seems obvious that encounters with police drones might not be pleasant. But police departments are adopting these sorts of technologies without even trying to find out.

“Nobody is even asking the question: Is this technology going to do more harm than good?” says Aziz Huq, a law professor at the University of Chicago, who is not involved in the research.

Screenshot from VR experiment
UCL DEPT OF SECURITY AND CRIME SCIENCE

The researchers are interested in finding out if the public is willing to accept this new technology, explains Krisztián Pósch, a lecturer in crime science at UCL. People can hardly be expected to like an aggressive, rude drone. But the researchers want to know if there is any scenario where drones would be acceptable. For example, they are curious whether an automated drone or a human-operated one would be more tolerable.

If the reaction is negative across the board, the big question is whether these drones are effective tools for policing in the first place, Pósch says.

“The companies that are producing drones have an interest in saying that [the drones] are working and they are helping, but because no one has assessed it, it is very difficult to say [if they are right],” he says.

It’s important because police departments are racing way ahead and starting to use drones anyway, for everything from surveillance and intelligence gathering to chasing criminals.

Last week, San Francisco approved the use of robots, including drones that can kill people in certain emergencies, such as when dealing with a mass shooter. In the UK most police drones have thermal cameras that can be used to detect how many people are inside houses, says Pósch. This has been used for all sorts of things: catching human traffickers or rogue landlords, and even targeting people holding suspected parties during covid-19 lockdowns.

Virtual reality will let the researchers test the technology in a controlled, safe way among lots of test subjects, Pósch says.

Even though I knew I was in a VR environment, I found the encounter with the drone unnerving. My opinion of these drones did not improve, even though I’d met a supposedly polite, human-operated one (there are even more aggressive modes for the experiment, which I did not experience.)

Ultimately, it may not make much difference whether drones are “polite” or “rude” , says Christian Enemark, a professor at the University of Southampton, who specializes in the ethics of war and drones and is not involved in the research. That’s because the use of drones itself is a “reminder that the police are not here, whether they’re not bothering to be here or they’re too afraid to be here,” he says.

“So maybe there’s something fundamentally disrespectful about any encounter.”

Deeper Learning

GPT-4 is coming, but OpenAI is still fixing GPT-3

The internet is abuzz with excitement about AI lab OpenAI’s latest iteration of its famous large language model, GPT-3. The latest demo, ChatGPT, answers people’s questions via back-and-forth dialogue. Since its launch last Wednesday, the demo has crossed over 1 million users. Read Will Douglas Heaven’s story here.

GPT-3 is a confident bullshitter and can easily be prompted to say toxic things. OpenAI says it has fixed a lot of these problems with ChatGPT, which answers follow-up questions, admits its mistakes, challenges

Read More

————

By: Melissa Heikkilä
Title: I met a police drone in VR—and hated it
Sourced From: www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/06/1064323/police-are-rolling-out-new-technologies-without-knowing-their-effects-on-people/
Published Date: Tue, 06 Dec 2022 11:05:42 +0000

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The Download: China’s EV success in Europe, and ClimateTech is coming

Published

13 hours ago

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September 27, 2023

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This is today’s edition of The Download our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.

Meet Europe’s surprising best-selling Chinese EV maker

China’s electric vehicle sector has been lavished with fame and attention. But its global ambitions hit a roadblock this month when the European Commission launched an investigation into whether Chinese-made EVs benefit from excessive government subsidies.

If the inquiry finds evidence for this claim, which experts say is very likely, it could result in increased import duties for Chinese-made EVs, which would likely make them less competitive in European markets.

Many of the Chinese brands that are causing concern are well-known names in China, like the established giant BYD and the promising startup Nio. But there’s one name in the mix you might not expect—former British luxury sports car maker MG. Read the full story.

—Zeyi Yang

Zeyi’s story is from China Report, MIT Technology Review’s weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on all things happening in tech in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday.

If you’re interested in reading more about China’s car sector, why not check out:

+ Europe is about to crack down on Chinese electric cars. The European Commission is set to launch an anti-subsidy investigation into Chinese automakers. Here’s what you need to know about the likely impact.

+ From generous government subsidies to support for lithium batteries, here’s how China managed to build a world-leading industry in electric vehicles.

China’s car companies are turning into tech companies. China has already won the race to electrify its vehicles. Now it’s pushing ahead and adding more features and services to attract new customers. Read the full story.

+ A race for autopilot dominance is giving China the edge in autonomous driving. Electric vehicle makers and AI companies are taking Tesla FSD-like systems to China, but it’s still out of reach for most consumers. Read the full story.

ClimateTech is coming

How can we build a sustainable, greener future? Next week, MIT Technology Review is holding our second annual ClimateTech conference to discuss the innovations accelerating the transition to a green economy.

ClimateTech is taking place at the MIT Media Lab on MIT’s campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 4-5. You can register for the event and either attend in-person or online, here—before it’s too late!

MIT Technology Review flash sale!

If you haven’t already, you can subscribe to MIT Technology Review to read more of our incisive reporting. We’re holding a flash sale for just 48 hours, allowing you to subscribe from just $8 a month.

Even better, you’ll receive a free print copy of our 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2023 issue as well. Sign up today and save 17% off the full price.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Amazon is being sued by the FTC in a landmark monopoly case
It’s accused of using illegal tactics to stifle online competition. (Wired $)
Head honcho Andy Jassy is facing an uphill climb. (NYT $)
The Federal Trade Commission avoided calling to break Amazon up. (Bloomberg $)

2 OpenAI is seeking a new valuation
To the tune of between $80 billion and $90 billion, to be exact. (WSJ $)
ChatGPT is about to revolutionize the economy. We need to decide what that looks like. (MIT Technology Review)

3 An astronaut has touched down on Earth after 371 days in space
That’s a new US record. (CBS News)
Traveling to space should teach us how to better accommodate disabled people. (Wired $)

4 Linda Yaccarino’s first 100 days at X have been a wild ride
Forget pressure from advertisers: managing Elon Musk is her biggest challenge. (FT $)
X appears to have disabled an election misinformation reporting measure. (Reuters)

5 YouTube rewarded a creator who livestreamed attacks on Indian Muslims
Hindu nationalist Monu Manesar has been linked to multiple killings this year. (WP $)

6 Microsoft wants to use nuclear energy to power its AI data centers
It’s looking to nuclear fission to keep those expensive centers ticking over. (CNBC)
We were promised smaller nuclear reactors. Where are they? (MIT Technology Review)

7 Maybe we didn’t need to learn to code after all
Generative AI is making it easier than ever to write code, even if it’s far from perfect. (The Atlantic $)
Learning to code isn’t enough. (MIT Technology Review)

8 Inside China’s brave online feminist revolution
The country’s burgeoning women’s rights movement is fighting back against a conservative society. (Rest of World)

9 Attempting to reverse your age is

Read More

————

By: Rhiannon Williams
Title: The Download: China’s EV success in Europe, and ClimateTech is coming
Sourced From: www.technologyreview.com/2023/09/27/1080342/the-download-chinas-ev-success-in-europe-and-climatetech-is-coming/
Published Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2023 12:10:00 +0000

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https://mansbrand.com/the-metaverse-fashion-stylists-are-here/

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