When Face Recognition Doesn't Know Your Face Is a Face An estimated 100 million people live with facial differences. As face recognition tech becomes widespread, some say they're getting blocked from accessing essential systems and services. Autumn Gardiner thought updating her driving license would be straightforward. After getting married last year, she headed to the local Department of Motor Vehicles office in Connecticut to get her name changed on her license. While she was there, Gardiner recalls, officials said she needed to update her photo.

When it comes to the California DMV, is this a case of brand new year, same old tune? It's a positive sign that the massive bureaucracy's director has been checking out reader complaints about the license renewal process for drivers after age 70, and here's a news bulletin: He's even tossing out some of the crazy test questions that many of you have been griping about. I'll get to that in a moment, but first let's dip into the mail bag, which continues to overflow with tales from the Department of Motor Vehicles. Dave Warburton, 76, of Santa Clarita went to renew his license the first week of January and was told there was no record of his pre-registration in the computer system. "Not off to a good start," he wrote in an email.

Seven years after Tesla released the automated driving feature it calls Full Self-Driving, and two-and-a-half years after opening an investigation into it, the California Department of Motor Vehicles is alleging false advertising, which could carry serious implications for the electric car maker. Tesla is defending itself by saying, in effect, that the DMV let the company slide for so many years, the case no longer has legal standing. Plus, the company, run by Chief Executive Elon Musk, says the DMV is violating its free speech rights under the U.S. Constitution's 1st Amendment. The DMV "has been aware that Tesla has been using the brand names Autopilot and Full Self-Driving Capability since Tesla started using those names in 2014 and 2016 respectively," the company said in a response filed in a state administrative court Friday. The company "relied upon [the DMV's] implicit approval of these brand names" and "the DMV chose not to take any action against Tesla or otherwise communicate to Tesla that its advertising or use of these brand names was or might be problematic," the response notice states.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom walked out of the Tesla gigafactory in China last month feeling jazzed about the future. A future where people do a lot less driving, instead being whisked around by autonomous cars and flying taxis. A future where, he said, the "entire transportation system is completely reorganized." "I think it's going to come very fast," Newsom said to reporters on the last day of his trip to China promoting clean energy partnerships with California. "With AI in particular aiding this advancement, I think it's just going to explode and you're going to start seeing driverless flying cars as well."

GM's autonomous vehicle Cruise division is already going through a rough patch, with the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) recently suspending its driverless permits over safety issues. Now, several new reports have highlighted other issues with the company, including problems with its autonomous vehicles (AVs) recognizing children and the frequency with which human operators must remotely take control. The company also just announced that it's temporarily suspending production of its fully autonomous Origin transport. The most concerning issue is that Cruise reportedly kept its vehicles on the streets even though it knew they had problems recognizing children, The Intercept reported. According to internal, previously unreported safety assessment materials, Cruises autonomous vehicles may have been unable to effectively detect children in order to take extra precautions.

In the wake of California withdrawing Cruise's permit to operate self-driving cars in the state, the company said on Friday it's suspending all U.S. robotaxi operations. The move comes after the California Department of Motor Vehicles alleged that Cruise withheld from regulators video footage of a Cruise robotaxi dragging a person down a city street. The future for the company is anybody's guess. Its parent company, General Motors, has lost $1.9 billion on Cruise thus far this year, including a $732-million loss in the third quarter, according to its latest earnings report. Competitor Ford shut down its Argo robotaxi unit in 2002, concluding that the possibility of far-off profits weren't worth the enormous cash drain.

The California Legislature passed a bill earlier this month to require human safety drivers in heavy-duty robot trucks for at least the next five years. On Friday, Gov. Gavin Newsom killed it. "Considering... the existing regulatory framework that presently and sufficiently governs this particular technology, this bill is not needed at this time," the governor said in a veto message. The bill was sponsored by the Teamsters union and backed by highway safety advocates. Opposed: driverless technology companies, Silicon Valley lobbyists, and various chambers of commerce and business leadership groups.

Robotaxis keep tangling with firefighters on the streets of San Francisco, and the fire chief is fed up. "They're not ready for prime time," Chief Jeanine Nicholson said. Nicholson is talking about the driverless taxis from Waymo and Cruise that are picking up passengers and dropping them off in designated sections of the city. Now those companies want to rapidly expand service throughout the entire city, in unlimited numbers, in any kind of weather, day or night. And state regulators appear ready to approve their request.

When Teslas are in self-driving mode, they've been recorded crossing into oncoming traffic and hitting parked cars. But what would happen if an 80,000-pound, 18-wheel driverless truck suddenly went off the rails? That's an experiment some California legislators aren't ready to run. They argue that the state Department of Motor Vehicles has so badly mishandled the driverless car industry that it can't be trusted to oversee big rigs barreling down the highways autonomously. AB 316 -- which would wrest control of driverless truck testing and deployment from the DMV and require human drivers in the cab for at least five years while a safety record is collected -- passed in the Assembly on Wednesday.

While the implications of AI-driven solutions can be complicated, certain opportunities exist for their use that offers objective and essential benefits. The public sector is one such area that is ripe – and perhaps long overdue – for a digital transformation. Waiting in line at the DMV is an infamously painful experience shared by anyone who has had the unfortunate fate of needing federally issued documents in the United States. Considering that these documents are necessary to qualify for and benefit from many government services, it is vexing that the infrastructure in place is still slow enough to be parodied as an animated sloth in a children's movie. But for many, the archaic and inaccessible process of the DMV is no laughing matter.