Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk added Twitter to his stable of companies on Monday, purchasing the social media platform for $44 billion dollars. Whether he made this purchase to finally realize his aspirations as a "free speech absolutist" or just did it to put an end to his nemesis, @ElonJet, once and for all remains to be seen, but changes are abound for the internet's third-favorite hellsite. Engadget's reporters have some thoughts on what those might be.

There are only two predictions I feel confident making: Twitter will get an edit button, and employees are going to head for the door. Even under the best of circumstances, big acquisitions tend to result in a fair amount of employee turnover and executive shakeup. And for many tweeps, Musk taking over is very far from the best of circumstances. Musk rankled the Twitter rank and file before the deal was even official, with tweets about whether Twitter was “dying” and whether the company's HQ should be converted into a homeless shelter.

But now they have much more to worry about than his usual trolling. Musk’s bid has already negatively impacted recruiting efforts, according toThe New York Times. And current employees still don’t have clear answers on how Musk’s acquisition will affect their stock packages, a significant portion of their total compensation. There are also real, existential questions about how Musk’s questionable views on content moderation will affect the company and the direction of the service. As CEO Parag Agrawal reportedly told employees following the news, "once the deal closes, we don't know what direction the platform will go."

- Karissa Bell, Senior Reporter

It can't get much worse, right?

While I'm sure Twitter's moderation policy will get watered down, it's hard to imagine the doomsday scenarios where it turns into some kind of 4Chan/Stormfront cesspool.

Twitter is an international company, with international advertisers and international users. It's broadly bound to ensure its content is in line with the laws of the countries in which it operates, which severely limits the ability to create the "free speech" oasis of Musk's dreams, at least if he also would like it to be a functional, broadly breakeven company at the same time. The company's moderation of its platform is already terrible, and people either make do by going private/blocking people, or (hi) give up on the whole tweeting thing altogether. So I'm expecting more of the same, which is to say, I'm expecting it to be mostly awful.

- Aaron Souppouris, Executive Editor

I’ve covered Elon Musk in his roles as both head of Tesla and SpaceX for a few years now, witnessing his sneering contempt for journalism, transparency, basic ethics and accountability up close and in person. I’ve sat through his easily-disproved boasts, his myriad empty promises and publicity stunts. This is a man who belittles society’s most vulnerable members to gain the panting adoration of 4Chan trolls, who demonizes the helpers to boost his own fragile ego, a man who would declare himself God-Emperor of Mars before paying his income taxes. Is this your king?

I dread the effects this sale will have, not just for Twitter itself, but the internet writ large. The destabilizing effects social media amplification has on societal and democratic norms have been well studied since the 2016 elections. What is not yet fully understood is what happens when we hand control over that mechanism to the world's wealthiest contrarian. As such, my advice to you are the same wise words Samuel L Jackson had for us in Jurassic Park: Hold onto your butts.

- Andrew Tarantola, Senior Reporter

I think the biggest challenge about trying to predict an Elon Musk-led Twitter is separating the guy's online persona from his business practices. Musk catches a lot of flak (often deservedly) for dumb or insensitive tweets, something most other CEOs know or have been trained to avoid. But at the same time, Elon is a rather shrewd businessman, separately helming what has become the world's biggest EV carmaker alongside the most successful private space aerospace company.

With Tesla and SpaceX there's a clear pattern of high-risk, high-reward behavior, which, due to a combination of luck and smarts, has worked out so far. Musk gives the impression of being a move fast and break stuff type, and his latest disruption looks to be bringing free speech (or his version of it) to Twitter, regardless of how that might impact others. This potentially greenlights every tweet that's not explicitly inciting violence or distributing sensitive info (like the plans for a nuclear bomb or whatever).

In the short term, Must will look to help boost Twitter's bottom line, which the company desperately needs after losing more than $200 million in 2021. Engagement (both good and bad) sells, and turning Twitter into an even bigger battleground would almost certainly result in a quick spike in users. Musk might even do something silly like raise the limit on tweets to 420 characters. Down the line, Musk’s plan to authenticate all humans sounds a lot like a different flavor of Sam Altman’s troubled Worldcoin endeavor, and I‘d bet there’s way more crypto integration coming to the platform in general.

The big concern is that some of Twitter's issues regarding harassment and abuse will continue to go unaddressed. Though that actually might be a feature. Moderation costs money, and by pushing Twitter down the free speech path, Elon conveniently might be able to absolve the company of having to protect its users while simultaneously reducing operating costs. Sure, there’s a chance that eliminating anonymity and linking every tweet to a specific person could stop people from spouting nonsense they wouldn’t dare say in real life. But I wouldn’t count on it. So unless better safeguards are coming too, Twitter could devolve into the most chaotic social media platform around.

- Sam Rutherford, Senior Reporter

Yes, Musk is divisive, a puerile troll that at age 50 seems to have finished his emotional growth decades prior; a loudmouth who is almost constantly spouting off easily disprovable nonsense. His ideas on a "free speech" haven are an echo of the wrong-headed thinking that was a north star for social media founders a decade or more ago, and which they have spent the time since regretfully paddling away from. Musk is also, by accounts, a capricious and vindictive boss whose alleged love of free speech is forever subservient to his hatred of dissent.

And all of this is, more than some outward-facing exodus of users, likely to lead Twitter employees to rethink if it's all worth the agita. Who wants to develop for product categories (moderation in particular) that have effectively been marked for death? Who wants to go to a job that feels more like the What Did My Boss Fuck Up Today sitcom?

But that this sale went through at all is indication enough that, whether led by Musk or literally anyone else, Twitter probably is headed for the great dustbin of history. The people whose job it is to do nothing but turn money into more money ran the numbers and determined no one was or would ever bring a better offer, nor was the company — which almost always posts a loss— was ever going to stabilize into a recurring source of profit.

Musk, the PT Barnum of techno-magic bullshit solutions, would probably gleefully categorize himself as an accelerationist: Accelerating the accumulation of space junk; the eventual drowning of pedestrians in underground tunnels; the mass adoption of combusting non-combustion cars. And in this instance my sense is he will accelerate the demise of Twitter by a few degrees too, but don't give him too much credit, it was headed that way anyhow.

– Bryan Menegus, Senior News Editor

Reality often sits in between our greatest hopes and worst fears, and I'd expect the same for Twitter under Elon Musk. It's easy to see his laissez-faire content moderation leading to the revival of some hate speech and harassment that Twitter previously removed. At the same time, I don't think a Musk-era Twitter will be a full-fledged calamity. Not everyone who was banned will be eager to come back, and Musk may have to rethink his stance if there are any truly toxic elements that resurface.

I say there's a one-in-three chance that Twitter goes sideways within two years of the deal closing — that is, the content moderation and the company's overall direction lead to serious trouble. Those are very distinct possibilities, but they aren't guaranteed and may take years to unfold. They may hinge as much on users' desires as they do on Musk's decisions. I'd expect many of Twitter's anti-toxicity tools to survive, such as downvoting replies.

With that said, I'm fully prepared to be wrong. Musk is legendary for heading in unexpected directions. This is the man who launched a tunnel company after complaining about LA traffic, after all. I just don't see Twitter facing imminent disaster, and it won't be surprising if the company reins in some of Musk's impulses.

- Jon Fingas, Reporter

Keeping an EV's batteries within their optimum operating temperature range is essential to getting the highest performance and longest life cycles possible from them. Too hot and charge seeps from the cells, too cold and the vehicle's range can drop up to 20 percent with charging sessions taking significantly longer than they would in warmer climes. This is why heat pumps, devices that scavenge waste heat from a vehicle's engine components to provide power other systems, have been finding their ways into a number of electric autos in recent years. Tesla has added them to its Model Y, 3, and S Plaid; Polestar includes them with the PS2 single-motor, and Rivian, well, Rivian does it a little different, but on Monday, GM announced its latest entry into waste heat reclamation game with the debut of its "Ultium Energy Recovery" system.

The UER is "based around an advanced automotive grade heat pump that captures and repurposes otherwise wasted energy," Tim Grewe, GM director of electrification strategy, said during a press call last week. "It's more sophisticated than even the most advanced thermal heat pump that you would find in modern homes."

"We could do several things with this energy," he continued, "including increase the range of our EVs, power low-level electrical functions like heating, and even pre-conditioning of our battery for faster charging and acceleration." For an EV like the new Hummer, the estimated ten percent increase in range that this system provides translates into an extra 30 miles of range. Similarly, this heat pump is what drives the Hummer's Watts to Freedom launch control function, autonomously conditioning the battery temperatures to the optimal level with which to dump as much current they can, as fast as they can, in order to propel the 9,000-pound EV SUV from 0 to 60 in 3 seconds flat.

"It's one of those situations where you want to get the magnets in the motor as cold as you can to give you ultimate torque going forward," GM energy recovery system project manager, Lawrence Zeer, said on the call. "And then you want to warm up the battery because the battery is give you a little more power when they're warmed up." Zeer also points out that given the immense size of these batteries — the Hummer's is rumored to weigh more than 2,900 pounds — "it's got a lot of heat capacity to it." Conversely, the pump will also automatically precondition the batteries if the driver selects an upcoming charging station from the nav computer and can cool the cabin as easily as it warms it. 

GM plans to include the recovery system across its electric vehicle lineup including the Hummer EV, the Lyric, and the upcoming Blazer EV. And since the recovery system is already standard throughout GM's EV offerings, folks who've pre-ordered their Lyric and Hummers won't have to turn around and head back to the dealership for a service installation. 

As with most every other aspect of modern society, computerization, augmentation and automation have hyper-accelerated the pace at which wars are prosecuted — and who better to help reshape the US military into a 21st century fighting force than an entire industry centered on moving fast and breaking things? In his latest book, War Virtually: The Quest to Automate Conflict, Militarize Data, and Predict the Future, professor and chair of the Anthropology Department at San José State University, Roberto J González examines the military's increasing reliance on remote weaponry and robotic systems are changing the way wars are waged. In the excerpt below, González investigates Big Tech's role in the Pentagon's high-tech transformations.  

UC Press

Excerpted from War Virtually: The Quest to Automate Conflict, Militarize Data, and Predict the Future by Roberto J. González, published by the University of California Press. © 2022 by Roberto J. González.

Ash Carter’s plan was simple but ambitious: to harness the best and brightest ideas from the tech industry for Pentagon use. Carter’s premise was that new commercial companies had surpassed the Defense Department’s ability to create cutting-edge technologies. The native Pennsylvanian, who had spent several years at Stanford University prior to his appointment as defense secretary, was deeply impressed with the innovative spirit of the Bay Area and its millionaire magnates. “They are inventing new technology, creating prosperity, connectivity, and freedom,” he said. “They feel they too are public servants, and they’d like to have somebody in Washington they can connect to.” Astonishingly, Carter was the first sitting defense secretary to visit Silicon Valley in more than twenty years.

The Pentagon has its own research and development agency, DARPA, but its projects tend to pursue objectives that are decades, not months, away. What the new defense secretary wanted was a nimble, streamlined office that could serve as a kind of broker, channeling tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars from the Defense Department’s massive budget toward up-and-coming firms developing technologies on the verge of completion. Ideally, DIUx would serve as a kind of liaison, negotiating the needs of grizzled four-star generals, the Pentagon’s civilian leaders, and hoodie-clad engineers and entrepreneurs. Within a year, DIUx opened branch offices in two other places with burgeoning tech sectors: Boston, Massachusetts, and Austin, Texas.

In the short term, Carter hoped that DIUx would build relationships with local start-ups, recruit top talent, get military reservists involved in projects, and streamline the Pentagon’s notoriously cumbersome procurement processes. “The key is to contract quickly — not to make these people fill out reams of paperwork,” he said. His long-term goals were even more ambitious: to take career military officers and assign them to work on futuristic projects in Silicon Valley for months at a time, to “expose them to new cultures and ideas they can take back to the Pentagon... [and] invite techies to spend time at Defense.”

In March 2016, Carter organized the Defense Innovation Board (DIB), an elite brain trust of civilians tasked with providing advice and recommendations to the Pentagon’s leadership. Carter appointed former Google CEO (and Alphabet board member) Eric Schmidt to chair the DIB, which includes current and former executives from Facebook, Google, and Instagram, among others.

Three years after Carter launched DIUx, it was renamed the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), indicating that it was no longer experimental. This signaled the broad support the office had earned from Pentagon leaders. The Defense Department had lavished nearly $100 million on projects from forty-five companies, almost none of which were large defense contractors. Despite difficulties in the early stages — and speculation that the Trump administration might not support an initiative focused on regions that tended to skew toward the Democratic Party — DIUx was “a proven, valuable asset to the DoD,” in the words of Trump’s deputy defense secretary, Patrick Shanahan. “The organization itself is no longer an experiment,” he noted in an August 2018 memo, adding: “DIU remains vital to fostering innovation across the Department and transforming the way DoD builds a more lethal force.” Defense Secretary James “Mad Dog” Mattis visited Amazon’s Seattle headquarters and Google’s Palo Alto office in August 2017 and had nothing but praise for the tech industry. “I’m going out to see what we can pick up in DIUx,” he told reporters. In early 2018, the Trump administration requested a steep increase in DIU’s budget for fiscal year 2019, from $30 million to $71 million. For 2020, the administration requested $164 million, more than doubling the previous year’s request.

Q BRANCH

Although Pentagon officials portrayed DIUx as a groundbreaking organization, it was actually modeled after another firm established to serve the US Intelligence Community in a similar way. In the late 1990s, Ruth David, the CIA’s deputy director for science and technology, suggested that the agency needed to move in a radically new direction to ensure that it could capitalize on innovations being developed in the private sector, with a special focus on Silicon Valley firms. In 1999, under the leadership of its director, George Tenet, the CIA established a nonprofit legal entity called Peleus to fulfill this objective, with help from former Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine. Soon after, the organization was renamed In-Q-Tel.

The first CEO, Gilman Louie, was an unconventional choice to head the enterprise. Louie had spent nearly twenty years as a video game developer who, among other things, created a popular series of Falcon F-16 flight simulators. At the time he agreed to join the new firm, he was chief creative officer for the toy company Hasbro. In a 2017 presentation at Stanford University, Louie claimed to have proposed that In-Q-Tel take the form of a venture capital fund. He also described how, at its core, the organization was created to solve “the big data problem”:

The problem they [CIA leaders] were trying to solve was: How to get technology companies who historically have never engaged with the federal government to actually provide technologies, particularly in the IT space, that the government can leverage. Because they were really afraid of what they called at that time the prospects of a “digital Pearl Harbor” Pearl Harbor

happened with every different part of the government having a piece of information but they couldn’t stitch it together to say, “Look, the attack at Pearl Harbor is imminent.” The White House had a piece of information, naval intelligence had a piece of information, ambassadors had a piece of information, the State Department had a piece of information, but they couldn’t put it all together [In] 1998, they began to realize that information was siloed across all these different intelligence agencies of which they could never stitch it together [F]undamentally what they were trying to solve was the big data problem. How do you stitch that together to get intelligence out of that data?

Louie served as In-Q-Tel’s chief executive for nearly seven years and played a crucial role in shaping the organization.

By channeling funds from intelligence agencies to nascent firms building technologies that might be useful for surveillance, intelligence gathering, data analysis, cyberwarfare, and cybersecurity, the CIA hoped to get an edge over its global rivals by using investment funds to co-opt creative engineers, hackers, scientists, and programmers. The Washington Post reported that “In-Q-Tel was engineered with a bundle of contradictions built in. It is independent of the CIA, yet answers wholly to it. It is a non- profit, yet its employees can profit, sometimes handsomely, from its work. It functions in public, but its products are strictly secret.” In 2005, the CIA pumped approximately $37 million into In-Q-Tel. By 2014, the organization’s funding had grown to nearly $94 million a year and it had made 325 investments with an astonishing range of technology firms, almost none of which were major defense contractors.

If In-Q-Tel sounds like something out of a James Bond movie, that’s because the organization was partly inspired by — and named after — Q Branch, a fictional research and development office of the British secret service, popularized in Ian Fleming’s spy novels and in the Hollywood blockbusters based on them, going back to the early 1960s. Ostensibly, both In-Q-Tel and DIUx were created to transfer emergent private-sector technologies into the US intelligence and military agencies, respectively. A somewhat different interpretation is that these organizations were launched “to capture technological innovations... [and] to capture new ideas.” From the perspective of the CIA these arrangements have been a “win-win,” but critics have described them as a boondoggle — lack of transparency, oversight, and streamlined procurement means that there is great potential for conflicts of interest. Other critics point to In-Q-Tel as a prime example of the militarization of the tech industry.

There’s an important difference between DIUx and In-Q-Tel. DIUx is part of the Defense Department and is therefore financially dependent on Pentagon funds. By contrast, In-Q-Tel is, in legal and financial terms, a distinct entity. When it invests in promising companies, In-Q-Tel also becomes part owner of those firms. In monetary and technological terms, it’s likely that the most profitable In-Q-Tel investment was funding for Keyhole, a San Francisco–based company that developed software capable of weaving together satellite images and aerial photos to create three-dimensional models of Earth’s surface. The program was capable of creating a virtual high-resolution map of the entire planet. In-Q-Tel provided funding in 2003, and within months, the US military was using the software to support American troops in Iraq.

Official sources never revealed how much In-Q-Tel invested in Keyhole. In 2004, Google purchased the start-up for an undisclosed amount and renamed it Google Earth. The acquisition was significant. Yasha Levine writes that the Keyhole-Google deal “marked the moment the company stopped being a purely consumer-facing internet company and began integrating with the US government [From Keyhole, Google] also acquired an In-Q-Tel executive named Rob Painter, who came with deep connections to the world of intelligence and military contracting.” By 2006 and 2007, Google was actively seeking government contracts “evenly spread among military, intelligence, and civilian agencies,” according to the Washington Post.

Apart from Google, several other large technology firms have acquired startups funded by In-Q-Tel, including IBM, which purchased the data storage company Cleversafe; Cisco Systems, which absorbed a conversational AI interface startup called MindMeld; Samsung, which snagged nanotechnology display firm QD Vision; and Amazon, which bought multiscreen video delivery company Elemental Technologies. While these investments have funded relatively mundane technologies, In-Q-Tel’s portfolio includes firms with futuristic projects such as Cyphy, which manufactures tethered drones that can fly reconnaissance missions for extended periods, thanks to a continuous power source; Atlas Wearables, which produces smart fitness trackers that closely monitor body movements and vital signs; Fuel3d, which sells a handheld device that instantly produces detailed three-dimensional scans of structures or other objects; and Sonitus, which has developed a wireless communication system, part of which fits inside the user’s mouth. If DIUx has placed its bets with robotics and AI companies, In-Q-Tel has been particularly interested in those creating surveillance technologies — geospatial satellite firms, advanced sensors, biometrics equipment, DNA analyzers, language translation devices, and cyber-defense systems.

More recently, In-Q-Tel has shifted toward firms specializing in data mining social media and other internet platforms. These include Dataminr, which streams Twitter data to spot trends and potential threats; Geofeedia, which collects geographically indexed social media messages related to breaking news events such as protests; PATHAR, a company specializing in social network analysis; and TransVoyant, a data integration firm that collates data from satellites, radar, drones, and other sensors. In-Q-Tel has also created Lab41, a Silicon Valley technology center specializing in big data analysis and machine learning.

Big box electronics retailer Best Buy announced the launch of a new appliance recycling program Thursday that will allow customers to have up to two large pieces (and an unlimited amount of small items) of unwanted tech hauled away for a $200 fee.

Best Buy already operates a number of consumer electronics recycling programs, with customers either dropping off items in-store for gift cards or paying a $30 to 50 fee to have their old appliances taken away when their Best Buy-bought replacements are delivered. This new Standalone Haul-Away service does not require any additional purchases and comes with a 20 percent discount to Best Buy TotalTech subscribers (a $200-a-year scheme that includes on-demand GeekSquad access). However Haul-Away is limited in what it can take. 

Customers can get rid of up to two (2) all-in-one computers, TVs, large appliances and refrigerators as well as as many hard drives, gaming consoles, laptops and un-regiftable immersion blenders as they are willing to part with. If you're looking to offload old musical instruments, DVDs, software, or legacy formats, on the other hand, you'd best look elsewhere because Best Buy won't take them. 

On November 21st, Trevor Jacob's single-engine airplane fell out of the sky — a harrowing experience that the YouTuber just so happened to catch on film and upload to social media. In January, aviation experts began investigating the incident (as they are wont to do in the event of most every aviation crash) and, on Thursday, the Federal Aviation Administration formally accused Jacob of staging the entire incident and intentionally crashing his 1940 Taylorcraft for online clout.

At the time, Jacob, a former Olympic snowboarder, claimed that his plane had malfunctioned, forcing him to bail out and parachute to safely while the aircraft crashed into the Los Padres National Forest in Southern California. However, in a letter dated April 11th, the FAA informed him that he had operated his plane in a “careless or reckless manner so as to endanger the life or property of another,” a violation of aviation regulations. The FAA also revoked his pilot's license effective immediately.

When reached by the New York Times this week, Jacob claimed to not be aware of the April 11 letter but declined to comment, on advice of his attorney. Although the FAA can't actually prosecute anybody for violating regulations, should Jacob fail to surrender his pilot's license he can be held liable for "further legal enforcement action" and fined up to $1,644 a day until he does.

For humans, identifying items in a scene — whether that’s an avocado or an Aventador, a pile of mashed potatoes or an alien mothership — is as simple as looking at them. But for artificial intelligence and computer vision systems, developing a high-fidelity understanding of their surroundings takes a bit more effort. Well, a lot more effort. Around 800 hours of hand-labeling training images effort, if we’re being specific. To help machines better see the way people do, a team of researchers at MIT CSAIL in collaboration with Cornell University and Microsoft have developed STEGO, an algorithm able to identify images down to the individual pixel.

MIT CSAIL

Normally, creating CV training data involves a human drawing boxes around specific objects within an image — say, a box around the dog sitting in a field of grass — and labeling those boxes with what’s inside (“dog”), so that the AI trained on it will be able to tell the dog from the grass. STEGO (Self-supervised Transformer with Energy-based Graph Optimization), conversely, uses a technique known as semantic segmentation, which applies a class label to each pixel in the image to give the AI a more accurate view of the world around it.

Whereas a labeled box would have the object plus other items in the surrounding pixels within the boxed-in boundary, semantic segmentation labels every pixel in the object, but only the pixels that comprise the object — you get just dog pixels, not dog pixels plus some grass too. It’s the machine learning equivalent of using the Smart Lasso in Photoshop versus the Rectangular Marquee tool.

The problem with this technique is one of scope. Conventional multi-shot supervised systems often demand thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of labeled images with which to train the algorithm. Multiply that by the 65,536 individual pixels that make up even a single 256x256 image, all of which now need to be individually labeled as well, and the workload required quickly spirals into impossibility.

Instead, “STEGO looks for similar objects that appear throughout a dataset,” the CSAIL team wrote in a press release Thursday. “It then associates these similar objects together to construct a consistent view of the world across all of the images it learns from.”

“If you're looking at oncological scans, the surface of planets, or high-resolution biological images, it’s hard to know what objects to look for without expert knowledge. In emerging domains, sometimes even human experts don't know what the right objects should be,” MIT CSAIL PhD student, Microsoft Software Engineer, and the paper’s lead author Mark Hamilton said. “In these types of situations where you want to design a method to operate at the boundaries of science, you can't rely on humans to figure it out before machines do.”

Trained on a wide variety of image domains — from home interiors to high altitude aerial shots — STEGO doubled the performance of previous semantic segmentation schemes, closely aligning with the image appraisals of the human control. What’s more, “when applied to driverless car datasets, STEGO successfully segmented out roads, people, and street signs with much higher resolution and granularity than previous systems. On images from space, the system broke down every single square foot of the surface of the Earth into roads, vegetation, and buildings,” the MIT CSAIL team wrote.

MIT CSAIL

“In making a general tool for understanding potentially complicated data sets, we hope that this type of an algorithm can automate the scientific process of object discovery from images,” Hamilton said. “There's a lot of different domains where human labeling would be prohibitively expensive, or humans simply don’t even know the specific structure, like in certain biological and astrophysical domains. We hope that future work enables application to a very broad scope of data sets. Since you don't need any human labels, we can now start to apply ML tools more broadly.”

Despite its superior performance to the systems that came before it, STEGO does have limitations. For example, it can identify both pasta and grits as “food-stuffs” but doesn't differentiate between them very well. It also gets confused by nonsensical images, such as a banana sitting on a phone receiver. Is this a food-stuff? Is this a pigeon? STEGO can’t tell. The team hopes to build a bit more flexibility into future iterations, allowing the system to identify objects under multiple classes.

Tesla built 305,000 vehicles in the first quarter of this year, delivered 310,000 of them, posted $3.3 billion in net income, and opened two new factories — in Berlin and Austin — all while CEO Elon Musk sought a highly publicized hostile takeover of Twitter.

Tesla's recent factory investments, as well as efforts to shore up its battery component supply chain, are part of the company's localization strategy, which seeks to lower production costs by building vehicles closer to the markets they'll eventually be sold in. But like the rest of the automotive industry, Tesla faces an increasingly tight supply of critical semiconductors and rising prices spurred by inflation itself brought on by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. It also is currently navigating the shuttering of its Gigafactory in Shanghai, which closed due to COVID outbreaks in the region. Work at the factory has only partially resumed in recent days.

At the opening of the Austin Gigafactory earlier this month, Musk confirmed that the long-awaited Cybertruck would finally be going on sale in 2023 and that a wide beta of its Full Self-Driving technology would be rolling out throughout North America this year. Q1 2022 also saw price increases across Tesla's model lineup and the elimination of gratis mobile charging equipment.

Tesla will hold its quarterly investor teleconference at 5:30pm ET today, stay tuned for updates from that call along with whatever fun tidbits fall out of Elon's head during it.

Developing

As automobiles gain increasing autonomy and their occupants spend less time actively paying attention to the task of driving, Audi is reimagining the role of the vehicle’s cabin space — from a rigid, safety-centered, face-forward setup to a more open, communal design. The automaker showcased this evolution in its new Urbansphere EV concept, which it unveiled on Tuesday.

Audi

The Urbansphere is the third in a trifecta of futuristic Audi EV concepts. It joins the Skysphere — a 623-HP EV roadster announced last August reminiscent of the Disco-era Chevy Camaro or Jaguar XJ6 — and the Grandsphere touring coupe announced in September. All three are built with level 4 autonomous vehicle technology in mind, a project that Audi is collaborating on with CARIAD, Volkswagen Group’s software business. The hope is to get to market in the second half of this decade.

The Urbansphere is the largest of the trio and the biggest Audi concept vehicle to date. It sits on 24-inch rims and measures a whopping 18 feet in length — the same as GM’s Hummer EV; it's over 6.5 feet wide (a Paul Pierce wingspan) and 5.8 feet tall (approximately one entire Tom Hardy!) And because the Urbansphere doesn’t have to account for a conventional arrangement of a combustion-powered car's components “it prioritizes the occupants’ need to experience ample space as a distinctive comfort factor,” the company wrote in a Tuesday press release.

Audi

As such, the Urbansphere’s interior offers two bucket seats in both rows, the rear pair boasting seatbacks that recline up to 60 degrees with extendable footrests. The front seats swivel to enable fed-up parents to more easily get at their misbehaving progeny without having to pull this goddamn car over and then NOBODY’S going to Disneyland, though a series of privacy dividers and seat back-mounted television screens should help keep the peace.

Audi

Audi also has plans to include a “large-format and transparent OLED screen” that pivots vertically from the roof down between the two rows. It would span the entire width of the cabin interior, like a taxi divider, and allow the rear passengers to watch movies or take conference calls. (Because even in the most idealized future Audi can imagine, we are still inconvenienced by conference calls.) When not in use, the screen will remain transparent or will fold up against the vehicle’s equally clear glass roof.

Audi

The vehicle could include an anxiety detection program that “uses facial scans and voice analysis to determine how passengers are feeling" and might offer "personalized suggestions” to relieve stress. Audi does appear to be taking the relaxation of the Urbansphere’s conceptual drivers quite seriously, incorporating calming wood accents throughout the cabin and obscuring display panels in the central infotainment screen until the car powers on.

Audi

Part of the experience that Audi envisions is the Urbansphere serving as a pseudo-assistant, allowing the driver to, say, make restaurant reservations from inside or order groceries for curbside pickup. It might also leverage level 4 capabilities to ferry riders to their destination then independently find a parking or charging station.

Audi

With an 800V architecture supporting a 270 kw max DC charging speed, it shouldn’t take too long to top off the Urbansphere’s cells. Its 120 KwH battery pack requires just 25 minutes to charge from 5 to 80 percent of its 466-mile range capacity. Overall, Audi estimates it can wring 186 miles out of a quick 10-minute charge.

There's nobody better at persecuting a war than the United States — we've got the the best-equipped and biggest-budgeted fighting force on the face of the Earth. But does carrying the biggest stick still constitute a strategic advantage if the mere act of possessing it seems to make us more inclined to use it?

In his latest book, Future Peace (sequel to 2017's Future War) Dr. Robert H. Latiff, Maj Gen USAF (Ret), explores how the American military's increasing reliance on weaponized drones, AI and Machine Learning systems, automation and similar cutting-edge technologies, when paired with an increasingly rancorous and often outright hostile global political environment, could create the perfect conditions for getting a lot of people killed. In the excerpt below, Dr. Latiff looks at the impact that America's lionization of its armed forces in the post-Vietnam era and new access to unproven tech have on our ability to mitigate conflict and prevent armed violence.

Notre Dame University Press

Excerpted from Future Peace: Technology, Aggression, and the Rush to War by Robert H. Latiff. Published by University of Notre Dame Press. Copyright © 2022 by Robert H. Latiff. All rights reserved.

Dangers of Rampant Militarism

I served in the military in the decades spanning the end of the Vietnam War to the post-9/11 invasion of Iraq and the war on terror. In that time, I watched and participated as the military went from being widely mistrusted to being the subject of veneration by the public. Neither extreme is good or healthy. After Vietnam, military leaders worked to reestablish trust and competency and over the next decade largely succeeded. The Reagan buildup of the late 1980s further cemented the redemption. The fall of the USSR and the victory of the US in the First Gulf War demonstrated just how far we had come. America’s dominant technological prowess was on full display, and over the next decade the US military was everywhere. The attacks of 9/11 and the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, followed by the long war on terror, ensured that the military would continue to demand the public’s respect and attention. What I have seen is an attitude toward the military that has evolved from public derision to grudging respect, to an unhealthy, unquestioning veneration. Polls repeatedly list the military as one of the most respected institutions in the country, and deservedly so. The object of that adulation, the military, is one thing, but militarism is something else entirely and is something about which the public should be concerned. As a nation, we have become alarmingly militaristic. Every international problem is looked at first through a military lens; then maybe diplomacy will be considered as an afterthought. Non-military issues as diverse as budget deficits and demographic trends are now called national security issues. Soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines are all now referred to as “warfighters,” even those who sit behind a desk or operate satellites thousands of miles in space. We are endlessly talking about threats and dismiss those who disagree or dissent as weak, or worse, unpatriotic.

The young men and women who serve deserve our greatest regard and the best equipment the US has to offer. Part of the respect we could show them, however, is to attempt to understand more about them and to question the mindset that is so eager to employ them in conflicts. In the words of a soldier frequently deployed to war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan, “[An] important question is how nearly two decades of sustained combat operations have changed how the Army sees itself... I feel at times that the Army culturally defines itself less by the service it provides and more by the wars it fights. This observation may seem silly at first glance. After all, the Army exists to fight wars. Yet a soldier’s sense of identity seems increasingly tied to war, not the service war is supposed to provide to our nation.” A 1955 American Friends Service Committee pamphlet titled Speak Truth to Power described eloquently the effects of American fascination with militarism:

The open-ended nature of the commitment to militarization prevents the pursuit of alternative diplomatic, economic, and social policies that are needed to prevent war. The constant preparation for war and large-scale investment in military readiness impose huge burdens on society, diverting economic, political and psychological resources to destructive purposes. Militarization has a corrosive effect on social values… distorting political culture and creating demands for loyalty and conformity… Under these conditions, mass opinion is easily manipulated to fan the flames of nationalism and military jingoism.

Barbara Tuchman described the national situation with regard to the Vietnam War in a way eerily similar to the present. First was an overreaction and overuse of the term national security and the conjuring up of specters and visions of ruin if we failed to meet the imagined threat. Second was the “illusion” of omnipotence and the failure to understand that conflicts were not always soluble by the application of American force. Third was an attitude of “Don’t confuse me with the facts”: a refusal to credit evidence in decision-making. Finally — and perhaps most importantly in today’s situation — was “a total absence of reflective thought” about what we were doing. Political leaders embraced military action on the basis of a perceived, but largely uninformed, view of our technological and military superiority. The public, unwilling to make the effort to challenge such thinking, just went along. “There is something in modern political and bureaucratic life,” Tuchman concluded, “that subdues the functioning of the intellect.”

High Tech Could Make Mistakes More Likely

Almost the entire world is connected and uses computer networks, but we’re never really sure whether they are secure or whether the information they carry is truthful. Other countries are launching satellites, outer space is getting very crowded, and there is increased talk of competition and conflict in space. Countries engage in attacks on adversary computers and networks, and militaries are rediscovering the utility of electronic warfare, employing radio-frequency (RF) signals to damage, disrupt, or spoof other systems. While in cyber war and electronic warfare the focus is on speed, they and space conflict are characterized by significant ambiguity. Cyber incidents and space incidents as described earlier, characterized as they are by such great uncertainty, give the hotheads ample reason to call for response, and the cooler heads reasons to question the wisdom of such a move.

What could drag us into conflict? Beyond the geographical hot spots, a mistake or miscalculation in the ongoing probes of each other’s computer networks could trigger an unwanted response. US weapon systems are extremely vulnerable to such probes. A 2018 study by the Government Accountability Office found mission-critical vulnerabilities in systems, and testers were able to take control of systems largely undetected. Worse yet, government managers chose not to accept the seriousness of the situation. A cyber probe of our infrastructure could be mistaken for an attack and result in retaliation, setting off response and counter response, escalating in severity, and perhaps lethality. Much of the DOD’s high-priority traffic uses space systems that are vulnerable to intrusion and interference from an increasing number of countries. Electronic warfare against military radios and radars is a growing concern as these capabilities improve.

China and Russia both have substantial space programs, and they intend to challenge the US in space, where we are vulnerable. With both low-earth and geosynchronous orbits becoming increasingly crowded, and with adversary countries engaging in close approaches to our satellites, the situation is ripe for misperception. What is mere intelligence gathering could be misconstrued as an attack and could generate a response, either in space or on the ground. There could be attacks, both direct and surreptitious, on our space systems. Or there could be misunderstandings, with too-close approaches of other satellites viewed as threatening. Threats could be space-based or, more likely, ground-based interference, jamming, or dazzling by lasers. Commercial satellite imagery recently revealed the presence of an alleged ground-based laser site in China, presumed by intelligence analysts to be for attacks against US satellites. Russia has engaged in close, on-orbit station-keeping with high-value US systems. New technology weapons give their owners a new sense of invincibility, and an action that might have in the past been considered too dangerous or provocative might now be deemed worth the risk.

Enormous vulnerability comes along with the high US dependence on networks. As the scenarios at the beginning of this chapter suggest, in a highly charged atmosphere, the uncertainty and ambiguity surrounding incidents involving some of the new war-fighting technologies can easily lead to misperceptions and, ultimately, violence. The battlefield is chaotic, uncertain, and unpredictable anyway. Such technological additions — and the vulnerabilities they entail — only make it more so. A former UK spy chief has said, “Because technology has allowed humans to connect, interact, and share information almost instantaneously anywhere in the world, this has opened channels where misinformation, blurred lines, and ambiguity reign supreme.”

It is easy to see how such an ambiguous environment could make a soldier or military unit anxious to the point of aggression. To carry the “giant armed nervous system” metaphor a bit further, consider a human being who is excessively “nervous.” Psychologists and neuroscientists tell us that excessive aggression and violence likely develop as a consequence of generally disturbed emotional regulation, such as abnormally high levels of anxiety. Under pressure, an individual is unlikely to exhibit what we could consider rational behavior. Just as a human can become nervous, super sensitive, overly reactive, jumpy, perhaps “trigger-happy,” so too can the military. A military situation in which threats and uncertainty abound will probably make the forces anxious or “nervous.” Dealing with ambiguity is stressful. Some humans are able to deal successfully with such ambiguity. The ability of machines to do so is an open question.

Technologies are not perfect, especially those that depend on thousands or millions of lines of software code. A computer or human error by one country could trigger a reaction by another. A computer exploit intended to gather intelligence or steal data might unexpectedly disrupt a critical part of an electric grid, a flight control system, or a financial system and end up provoking a non proportional and perhaps catastrophic response. The hyper-connectedness of people and systems, and the almost-total dependence on information and data, are making the world—and military operations—vastly more complicated. Some military scholars are concerned about emerging technologies and the possibility of unintended, and uncontrollable, conflict brought on by decisions made by autonomous systems and the unexpected interactions of complex networks of systems that we do not fully understand. Do the intimate connections and rapid communication of information make a “knee-jerk” reaction more, or less, likely? Does the design for speed and automation allow for rational assessment, or will it ensure that a threat impulse is matched by an immediate, unfiltered response? Command and control can, and sometimes does, break down when the speed of operations is so great that a commander feels compelled to act immediately, even if he or she does not really understand what is happening. If we do not completely understand the systems—how they are built, how they operate, how they fail—they and we could make bad and dangerous decisions.

Technological systems, if they are not well understood by their operators, can cascade out of control. The horrific events at Chernobyl are sufficient evidence of that. Flawed reactor design and inadequately trained personnel, with little understanding of the concept of operation, led to a fatal series of missteps. Regarding war, Richard Danzig points to the start of World War I. The antagonists in that war had a host of new technologies never before used together on such a scale: railroads, telegraphs, the bureaucracy of mass mobilization, quick-firing artillery, and machine guns. The potential to deploy huge armies in a hurry put pressure on decision makers to strike first before the adversary was ready, employing technologies they really didn’t understand. Modern technology can create the same pressure for a first strike that the technology of 1914 did. Americans are especially impatient. Today, computer networks, satellites in orbit, and other modern infrastructures are relatively fragile, giving a strong advantage to whichever side strikes first. Oxford professor Lucas Kello notes that “in our era of rapid technological change, threats and opportunities arising from a new class of weapons produce pressure to act before the laborious process of strategic adoption concludes.” In other words, we rush them to the field before we have done the fundamental work of figuring out their proper use.

Decorated Vietnam veteran Hal Moore described the intense combat on the front lines with his soldiers in the Ia Drang campaign in 1965. He told, in sometimes gruesome detail, of the push and shove of the battle and how he would, from time to time, step back slightly to gather his thoughts and reflect on what was happening and, just as importantly, what was not happening. Political leaders, overwhelmed by pressures of too much information and too little time, are deprived of the ability to think or reflect on the context of a situation. They are hostage to time and do not have the luxury of what philosopher Simone Weil calls “between the impulse and the act, the tiny interval that is reflection.”

Today’s battles, which will probably happen at lightning speed, may not allow such a luxury as reflection. Hypersonic missiles, for instance, give their targets precious little time for decision-making and might force ill-informed and ill-advised counter decisions. Autonomous systems, operating individually or in swarms, connected via the internet in a network of systems, create an efficient weapon system. A mistake by one, however, could speed through the system with possibly catastrophic consequences. The digital world’s emphasis on speed further inhibits reflection.

With systems so far-flung, so automated, and so predisposed to action, it will be essential to find ways to program our weapon systems to prevent unrestrained independent, autonomous aggression. However, an equally, if not more, important goal will be to identify ways to inhibit not only the technology but also the decision makers’ proclivity to resort to violence.

Like an ambitious butcher trying to cleave a dollar of meat out of a ten cent steak, Major League Baseball announced on Thursday that it is carving out a bit more of its television broadcast rights, renewing its four season-old deal for the "MLB Game of the Week Live on YouTube" with the Alphabet property. But unlike other recently struck deals, these streaming exclusives will be free to watch and without local blackout restrictions.

Beginning with the Rockies-Nats game on May 5th (first pitch 3:10 ET), YouTube will once again be home to more than a dozen MLB games throughout the 2022 season. Broadcasters Scott Braun and Yonder Alonso return to call the play-by-play. The full lineup is as follows:

• Washington Nationals at Colorado Rockies — Thursday, May 5 @ 3:10 ET

• Milwaukee Brewers at Cincinnati Reds — Wednesday, May 11 @ 12:35 ET

• Arizona Diamondbacks at Chicago Cubs — Friday, May 20 @ 2:20 ET

• Detroit Tigers at Minnesota Twins — Wednesday, May 25 @ 1:10 ET

• Kansas City Royals at Cleveland Guardians — Wednesday, June 1 @ 1:10 ET

• Toronto Blue Jays at Kansas City Royals — Wednesday, June 8 @ 2:10 ET

• Minnesota Twins at Seattle Mariners — Wednesday, June 15 @ 4:10 ET

YouTubeTV subscribers will be able to find these games on the service's dedicated Game of the Week channel while everybody else will see them on the MLB YouTube page. Fans will be able to interact with the broadcasts either via the live chat, "featuring game commentary from MLB superfan YouTube creators," as well as in-game polls and, for subscribers, access to real-time game stats.  

The 2022 MLB season is riddled with exclusive broadcast deals. Beyond the standard local blackout rules, 18 Sunday games will be only available with a $10/month Peacock subscription, AppleTV+ ($6/month) gets the Friday Doubleheaders, and ESPN has dibs on Sunday Night Baseball. There's also MLB.TV which has rights to everything but is far more expensive than its alternatives, at least until the All-Star break.