The EV manufacturer is supported by a robust online community. But Elon Musk's politics and overblown hype about Full Self-Driving are turning some loyalists away. This month, Tesla customers erupted in outrage over what some called a " bait and switch " by the electric vehicle manufacturer. Initially, the company had offered to transfer the Full Self-Driving feature, which is now only available through a subscription model but could once be purchased for a "lifetime" fee that ran as high as $15,000, to any new Tesla purchased by March 31. The deal was most tempting for drivers already enticed by a new base Cybertruck model that cost just $59,990, a price that CEO Elon Musk soon clarified would only last for 10 days, leaving potential buyers a very small window to make up their minds. Then Tesla quietly amended the language of the FSD transfer agreement, stipulating that customers would need to take delivery of a Tesla by March 31 in order to swap their FSD from their last vehicle to the next.

As a child-size mannequin stands in a traffic lane on a rural two-lane road, a Tesla in Full Self-Driving mode barrels toward it. And the car drives on, as if nothing happened. It's the latest salvo from activist organization the Dawn Project, which publishes videos aimed at showing how badly Tesla's automated driving technology can behave. Dan O'Dowd, the wealthy, tech-savvy activist who founded and self-funds the Dawn Project, said he wants to ensure that "the safety-critical systems that everyone's life depends on are fail-safe and can't be hacked." While O'Dowd's stated goal is brand-agnostic, his main target since launching the Dawn Project in 2021 has been Tesla and its controversial Autopilot and Full Self-Driving systems.

A California billionaire has ramped up attacks on Tesla by running a Super Bowl ad questioning the safety of the car maker's self-driving technology. The 30-second commercial shows the electric cars crashing into child-sized mannequins, driving past a stopped school bus and hitting strollers in a parking lot while a narrator proclaims that "Tesla's full self-driving is endangering the public." The ad is the latest in what has been a yearlong campaign by tech executive Dan O'Dowd to have Tesla's Full Self-Driving technology, or FSD, barred from the roads and push lawmakers to increase scrutiny of the technology's safety. Dowd founded a campaign dubbed the Dawn Project to speak out against Tesla, and bugs and security defects in other computer systems. The organization has run a full-page ad in the New York Times and posted similar videos online, but the newest video ran during one of the nation's most watched sporting events, in which a 30-second commercial was reported to cost $6 million to $7 million.

Humanoid robots have long been a common staple of science fiction. Arnold Schwarzenegger killing machines and synthethics like Bishop from the Aliens movies have long been confined to realms of fantasy. However, a wave of innovative tech companies are actively trying to make those visions a reality. "There is a chance that one day life will imitate art and robots and people will look alike," according to a recent report from research firm GlobalData. "If and when that happens, societies will face an ethical conundrum: what rights to give to non-human creatures that look like us?"

Just as Twitter starts banning accounts that impersonate its new owner Elon Musk, it seems the social media platform is also rejecting ads that criticize the Chief Twit's Tesla. The Dawn Project, an anti-Tesla advocacy group, recently took out a full-page advertisement in the New York Times that claims the carmaker's Full Self-Driving system'presents a life-threatening danger to child pedestrians.' The group attempted to promote the ad on Twitter, but received a notification that it was not approved due to being'political.' However, its founder posted the advertisement to his account and it has yet to be taken down. The advertisement discusses testing conducted by the group in October, which claims to show the system does not register or stop for small mannequins crossing a road.

I've been a mum for a relatively short time; I'm not exactly an expert when it comes to this whole parenting thing. Still, there is one piece of advice I can confidently dole out: don't instruct your child to run in front of a moving vehicle so that you can win an argument with strangers on the internet. This month, a software CEO called Dan O'Dowd, who is hellbent on trying to ban Tesla's "full self-driving" programme, launched an ad campaign claiming that if you put a Tesla in this mode it will mow down children. He based this assertion on a test he ran using a child-sized mannequin dressed in a safety vest, which came to a sticky end in the middle of a road in California. Musk's fans, who will not tolerate any criticism of the billionaire, immediately took issue with O'Dowd's assertions and decided to conduct their own tests – using a real child.

A safe-technology advocacy group issued claims Tuesday that Tesla's full self-driving software represents a potentially lethal threat to child pedestrians, the latest in a series of claims and investigations into the technology to hit the world's leading electric carmaker. According to a safety test conducted by the Dawn Project, the latest version of Tesla Full Self-Driving (FSD) Beta software repeatedly hit a stationary, child-sized mannequin in its path. The claims that the technology apparently has trouble recognizing children form part of an ad campaign urging the public to pressure Congress to ban Tesla's auto-driving technology. In several tests, a professional test driver found that the software – released in June – failed to detect the child-sized figure at an average speed of 25mph and the car then hit the mannequin. The Dawn Project' founder, Dan O'Dowd, called the results "deeply disturbing."

Tesla boss Elon Musk has labelled a rival's criticism of his company's self-driving software a "tragic case of ego [over] ability". Dan O'Dowd, chief executive of a firm that provides software to automakers, took out a full-page ad in the New York Times warning people not to be "crash test dummies" in Tesla vehicles equipped with Full Self-Driving (FSD) software. The advert, paid for by Mr O'Dowd's Dawn Project initiative, accused FSD of being the "worst software ever sold by a Fortune 500 company". Mr O'Dowd also appeared on various high-profile news networks in the US to make allegations against Tesla's software, calling for a ban on cars using FSD on public roads. As part of the publicity stunt, he offered a $10,000 reward "to the first person who can name another commercial product from a Fortune 500 company that has a critical malfunction every eight minutes".

Elon Musk is usually far from a technological pessimist. From electric cars to Mars colonies, he's made his name by insisting that the future can get here faster. But when it comes to artificial intelligence, he sounds very different. Speaking at MIT in 2014, he called AI humanity's "biggest existential threat" and compared it to "summoning the demon." He reiterated those fears in an interview published Friday with Recode's Kara Swisher, though with a little less apocalyptic rhetoric.

There's been more than a little discussion of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare, lately, but in addition to – or, perhaps, on a more fundamental than – the myriad insights AI is expected to offer healthcare providers is the impact it's going to have on organizations' IT infrastructure. As a recent report from Tractica puts it, "while organizations are clearly recognizing the value associated with incorporating AI into their business processes, they are also encountering a number of challenges with integrating this new intelligence into operational processes." "Enabling AI at the enterprise scale is not a plug-and-play proposition," Tractica Principal Analyst Keith Kirkpatrick said in a statement. "Significant time, resources, and capital must be deployed, and in most cases, internal company teams are not experienced enough with AI, nor do they have the cutting-edge data science skills to adequately embark upon a truly transformational AI implementation." For health IT managers, among the inevitable decisions is whether their organization's storage systems are going to be able to handle the infrastructure changes needed to process and store new amounts and kinds of data.