Tesla has long attempted to play catch-up against rival Waymo, owned by Google-parent Alphabet, whose driverless taxis have traversed the streets of San Francisco for years - and now operate in several more cities. This month, Musk is supposed to be overseeing Tesla's launch of a batch of autonomous robo-taxis in Austin, Texas. He posted to X last week that the electric vehicle maker had been testing the Model Y with no drivers on board. "I believe 90% of the future value of Tesla is going to be autonomous and robotics," Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives told the BBC this week, adding that the Austin launch would be "a watershed moment". "The first task at hand is ensuring the autonomous vision gets off to a phenomenal start," Ives added.

Tesla shares closed up nearly 22% on Thursday – their biggest single-day gain in over a decade – as Elon Musk's bold forecast of surging sales reassured investors he was still looking to grow its core business of selling electric cars. At close, nearly 150bn was added to the company's market value. Musk forecast 20-30% in sales growth next year, promising to launch an affordable vehicle in the first half of 2025, and said efforts to slash production costs boosted margins in the third quarter. The stock rose to a session high of 262.2 with volumes of roughly 200 million shares. It was the biggest gain since May 2013, and erased recent losses on concerns that Musk was distracted by new projects like the recently unveiled robotaxi.

For a businessman who perpetually struggles with broken promises, Elon Musk has given himself quite a to-do list at Tesla's long-awaited Hollywood unveiling of its driverless robotaxis. After traversing the fake streets of the Warner Bros movie studio set in a sleek, silver two-door "Cybercab" prototype, Musk promised on Thursday night that the company's popular Model 3 and Model Y vehicles would be able to operate without driver supervision in California and Texas by next year. Musk said the company would start building the fully autonomous Cybercab by 2026 at a price of less than 30,000, and showed off a robovan capable of transporting 20 people around town – which he said would reshape cities by "turning parking lots into parks". Later came the dancing humanoid robots that also mixed drinks at the bar, which Musk said Tesla will also eventually sell for 20,000 to 30,000 each. "I think this will be the biggest product ever, of any kind," he declared.

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.

Elon Musk has long used his mighty Twitter megaphone to amplify the idea that Tesla's automated driving software isn't just safe -- it's safer than anything a human driver can achieve. That campaign kicked into overdrive last fall when the electric-car maker expanded its Full Self-Driving "beta" program from a few thousand people to a fleet that now numbers more than 100,000. The $12,000 feature purportedly lets a Tesla drive itself on highways and neighborhood streets, changing lanes, making turns and obeying traffic signs and signals. As critics scolded Musk for testing experimental technology on public roads without trained safety drivers as backups, Santa Monica investment manager and vocal Tesla booster Ross Gerber was among the allies who sprang to his defense. "There has not been one accident or injury since FSD beta launch," he tweeted in January.

What is a democratic internet, and how does it intersect with the evolving nature of HCI? In fact, experts like Elizabeth Gerber, professor and co-director of the Center for Human Computer Interaction Design at Northwestern University, say there is not a single aspect of many humans' lives that is not touched by near-ubiquitous internet access and adoption of connected devices. And while "near ubiquitous" is not the same as ubiquitous and there are still a great number of people without easy access to an internet connection, Gerber says for those who do, computing technology is becoming as invisible and essential as oxygen. As a result, many forget the extent to which they have set up their lives and businesses to depend on it. The internet is a powerful tool, and humans can use it in many powerful ways--including to create social change.

SAN FRANCISCO--At Tesla's "Autonomy Day" event in April 2019, Chief Executive Elon Musk said that by mid-2020 Tesla would have over a million self-driving vehicles where riders "could go to sleep" during a trip. Tesla has not achieved that goal and on Thursday Musk is staging another event, called "AI Day," to promote his electric car company as the place to work for the engineers he needs to make good on his promises for autonomous vehicles. Musk has walked back some of his claims for Tesla's "Full Self-Driving" (FSD) system in recent months, saying Tesla cars are "not fully self-driving yet." U.S. safety regulators earlier this week opened an investigation into Tesla's driver assistant system because of accidents where Tesla cars crashed into stationary police cars and fire trucks. Two U.S. senators also called on the Fair Trade Commission to investigate Tesla's claims of "Full Self-Driving" and "Autopilot." "Expectations have been significantly reduced from investors … Tesla has got some harder questions to answer, what's going on with the safety probe?

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug 18 (Reuters) - At Tesla's "Autonomy Day" event in April 2019, Chief Executive Elon Musk said that by mid-2020 Tesla (TSLA.O) would have over a million self-driving vehicles where riders "could go to sleep" during a trip. Tesla has not achieved that goal and on Thursday Musk is staging another event, called "AI Day," to promote his electric car company as the place to work for the engineers he needs to make good on his promises for autonomous vehicles. Musk has walked back some of his claims for Tesla's "Full Self-Driving" (FSD) system in recent months, saying Tesla cars are "not fully-self driving yet." U.S. safety regulators earlier this week opened an investigation into Tesla's driver assistant system because of accidents where Tesla cars crashed into stationary police cars and fire trucks. "Expectations have been significantly reduced from investors ... Tesla has got some harder questions to answer, what's going on with the safety probe? And how they market FSD?" asked Gene Munster, managing partner at venture capital firm Loup Ventures.

"There are some things money can't buy. But what makes Mastercard tick? The global payment & technology company leverages artificial intelligence to enhance data safety and reduce cyber risks. After its initial deployment of AI and ML in 2016, Mastercard has acquired Brighterion and Ekata to strengthen its AI capabilities. Mastercard's AI strategy is built on "five pillars".

As with just about every industry, AI has increasingly infiltrated the financial sector -- from visual AI tools that monitor customers and workers to automating the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) application process. Talking at VentureBeat's Transform 2021 event today, Johan Gerber, executive VP for security and cyber innovation at Mastercard, discussed how Mastercard is using AI to better understand and adapt to cyber risk, while keeping people's data safe. On the one hand, consumers have never had it so easy -- making payments is as frictionless as it has ever been. Ride-hail passengers can exit their cab without wasting precious minutes finalizing the transaction with the driver, while home-workers can configure their printer to automatically reorder ink when it runs empty. "As easy as it is for the consumer, the complexity lies in the background -- we have seen the evolution of this hyper connected world in the backend just explode," Gerber said.