Last year Anthony Levandowski pleaded guilty to one count of stealing materials from Google, where he was an engineer for its self-driving car efforts before leaving to found a startup that he sold to Uber. The judge said during his sentencing that his theft of documents and emails constituted the "biggest trade secret crime I have ever seen." Now, on the last day of Donald Trump's administration, Trump issued a series of pardons -- the Department of Justice has more information on how those work here -- and commutations that covered people who worked on his campaign like Steve Bannon and Elliott Broidy, as well as Levandowski. A press release from the White House noted tech billionaires Peter Thiel and Palmer Luckey were among those supporting a pardon for Levandowski, and it makes the claim that this engineer "paid a significant price for his actions and plans to devote his talents to advance the public good." It also noted that his plea covered only a single charge, omitting mention of the 33 charges he'd been indicted on.

In a podcast, "Does Revelation Talk About Artificial Intelligence?", he discusses with Robert J. Marks, director of the Walter Bradley Institute, the title question: "Can AI replace the need for belief in God?" Robert J. Marks (right): Let's talk about the theological implications of AI. You have a reputation, not only as a mathematician, but a Christian apologist. And I wanted to go into some of the apologetics that you gave in the book and how it relates to some of the modern perceptions of artificial intelligence. Generally, how will technical advances affect the way in which people, either believers or non-believers, think of God? John Lennox: Well, sometimes technological development has a very positive effect because if, like myself, you believe that God is the intelligence behind the universe, that he's made human beings in his image, so that we are to a certain extent creative and we can produce this technology. Then the existence of the technology and the need for science itself is evidence that there is a God behind it all. So that is a positive development.

If federal prosecutors successfully prosecute Anthony Levandowski for 33 federal charges of theft and attempted theft of trade secrets, the self-driving engineer could face millions in fines and decades in prison. The accusations aren't new--they rehash the core of Waymo's civil case against Uber, which settled in February 2018--but their resurfacing in this format threatens to put a dismal end to a career remarkable for its range and variation. For nearly 20 years, the French-American Levandowski has played a kind of purposeful Forrest Gump for the world of autonomous driving. Rather than stumbling into the center of one momentous event after another, Levandowski has put himself there. And he has left a mixed trail in his wake: Former colleagues have described him as brilliant, engaging, motivating, fast-charging, inconsiderate, a weasel, and just plain evil.

The judge is recommending a criminal probe be opened up into the technology exchange to Uber. Former Google engineer Anthony Levandowski, who quit the tech giant before merging his own startup with Uber, has been charged with stealing Google's self-driving car trade secrets, federal prosecutors announced Tuesday. Levandowski, 39, who served as the head of Uber's self-driving project, had been named in a 2017 lawsuit brought against Uber by Waymo, Google's former self-driving car unit, claiming that the popular ride-sharing app stole trade secrets from Google. That suit ended in a settlement of $245 million. At the time, federal judge William Alsup, who was overseeing the case, recommended criminal charges against Levandowski.

Book a flight now, and Google Flights' says they'll make sure you get the best price. The indictment filed by the U.S. attorney's office in San Jose, California, is an offshoot of a lawsuit filed in 2017 by Waymo, a self-driving car pioneer spun off from Google. Uber agreed to pay Waymo $245 million to settle the case last year, but the federal judge overseeing the lawsuit made an unusual recommendation to open a criminal probe after seeing enough evidence to conclude a theft may have occurred. Uber considered having self-driving technology crucial to survive and counter potential competitive threats from Waymo and dozens of other companies working on robotic vehicles. Uber wants to build self-driving cars so it can eliminate the need to have a human behind the wheel, one of the biggest expenses in its still-unprofitable ride-hailing service.

Anthony Levandowski is aware of his reputation. One of the most controversial figures in autonomous driving, his background has been well-covered, from building the Ghostrider motorcycle that competed in the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2004 and 2005, to his work on Google's self-driving car.

The controversial engineer at the center of Uber's multi-year row with Waymo claims he has completed the longest coast-to-coast trip in a self-driving car across the U.S. Anthony Levandowski, a former Uber engineer, told the Guardian that he didn't touch the autonomous vehicle's steering wheel or pedals during the four-day, 3,099-mile trip from San Francisco to New York City, aside from the occasional rest stop. While the Guardian didn't confirm the details of his trip, if it occurred as Levandowski described, it marks the longest recorded trip by a self-driving car without a human taking over. Levandowski rode in a modified Toyota Prius for the 3,099-mile trip from San Francisco to New York City. The car operates using a semi-autonomous driver-assistance system, named Co-Pilot. Co-Pilot is a level two autonomous system.

It's been a week since we cracked open the champagne to celebrate our 25th birthday, along with our memory banks to take a look at our history of predicting the future. Now that we're back in the present and once again looking forward, it seems like we're not the only outfit reconsidering the road ahead. Chinese automaker NIO thinks it can make battery swapping work this time. Elon Musk reveals yet another Model 3 that costs more than $35,000. Uber and Lyft are defending against claims they make traffic worse--again--and we have yet more confirmation that systems like Tesla's Autopilot are confusing people.

In theory, someone behind the wheel of a self-driving car could kick back and read a book, and leave road worries to the vehicle. The drama, ambition and genius characterizing the race to develop self-driving cars zoom into sharper focus in "Autonomy: The Quest to Build the Driverless Car," a new book by Lawrence D. Burns. Burns (writing with Christopher Shulgan) is uniquely suited to reveal insight into the self-driving car bonanza because of his past role as a tech executive at General Motors and his later role as a consultant with the Google driverless car company, now called Waymo. In "Autonomy" (Ecco, 368 pp., out of four), Burns says he grasped the seismic potential of self-driving cars years before traditional "car guys and bean counters" figured it out. "Nearly all of my fellow GM executives considered autonomous cars to be a half century away, at least – if they even considered the possibility at all," writes Burns, who left the company in 2009.

The big apple's traffic is getting much much worse thanks to carpooling services like Uber and Lyft. Uber has been using its self-driving trucks to transport goods in Arizona. SAN FRANCISCO -- What a long, strange trip it's been for Uber's self-driving truck division. The ride-hailing company announced Monday that it was, for now, parking its effort to develop commercially viable self-driving trucks in order to focus on bringing autonomous cars to its service. "We recently took the important step of returning to public roads in Pittsburgh," Eric Meyhofer, head of Uber Advanced Technologies Group, said in a statement provided to USA TODAY.