Federal employees say that flying is still safe despite the strain on air traffic controllers. But expect even more airport delays ahead. It hasn't been a good year for federal aviation safety workers. January saw the worst US commercial airline disaster in decades, quickly followed by sudden layoffs, staffing shortfalls, major technology glitches at one of the nation's busiest airports, and short timelines to rebuild the systems that govern national airspace. It somehow got worse this month, when a stalemate between congressional Republicans and Democrats led to a government shutdown.

The governing board for the electric carmaker Tesla has put forward a pay package for CEO Elon Musk that could make him the world's first trillionaire -- but only if he meets a series of high-performance standards over the next 10 years. The proposal became public on Friday, as part of the company's regulatory filings. Musk is already considered one of the world's wealthiest businessmen, and one of his eye-popping pay packages from 2018 continues to be the subject of a legal battle. But if approved, the latest proposal would likely be the largest corporate pay package in United States history. Tesla shareholders will vote on the compensation scheme on November 6.

This week, government agencies in countries including South Korea and Australia have blocked access to Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) startup DeepSeek's new AI chatbot programme, mostly for government employees. Other countries, including the United States, have said they may also seek to block DeepSeek from government employees' mobile devices, according to media reports. All cite "security concerns" about the Chinese technology and a lack of clarity about how users' personal information is handled by the operator. Last month, DeepSeek made headlines after it caused share prices in US tech companies to plummet, after it claimed that its model would cost only a fraction of the money its competitors had spent on their own AI programmes to build. The news caused social media users to joke: "I can't believe ChatGPT lost its job to AI." Here's what we know about DeepSeek and why countries are banning it.

The Transform Technology Summits start October 13th with Low-Code/No Code: Enabling Enterprise Agility. In April 2020, news broke that Banjo CEO Damien Patton, once the subject of profiles by business journalists, was previously convicted of crimes committed with a white supremacist group. According to OneZero's analysis of grand jury testimony and hate crime prosecution documents, Patton pled guilty to involvement in a 1990 shooting attack on a synagogue in Tennessee. Amid growing public awareness about algorithmic bias, the state of Utah halted a $20.7 million contract with Banjo, and the Utah attorney general's office opened an investigation into matters of privacy, algorithmic bias, and discrimination. But in a surprise twist, an audit and report released last week found no bias in the algorithm because there was no algorithm to assess in the first place.

This country has something of a love/hate relationship with government jobs. We hate that most government workers are guaranteed overtime and coffee breaks when not working strictly 9-5. But then who wouldn't love being well paid, with early retirement and congressional-level benefits for such effort. Thus, for those of us in the private sector it might seem a bit of career karma that a recent federal study finds automation can eliminate five percent of all government jobs and 30 percent of the work the remaining employees do. I'd like now to offer the perspective I've gained over three decades helping build an industry-leading company designing the information technology systems now automating those government jobs and workloads.

What would you do if you had a machine to catch a thief? If you were a corrupt Chinese bureaucrat, you would want to ditch it, of course. Resistance by government officials to a groundbreaking big data experiment is only one of many challenges as the Chinese government starts using new technology to navigate its giant bureaucracy. According to state media, there were more than 50 million people on China's government payroll in 2016, though analysts have put the figure at more than 64 million – slightly less than the population of Britain. To turn this behemoth into a seamless operation befitting the information age, China has started adapting various types of sophisticated technology.

In recent years, artificial intelligence has emerged as a concept on the cusp of revolutionizing everything from medical research to workplace collaboration. And while the technology has recently begun touching into government operations in the form of chatbots, a new study finds that states and cities should begin gearing up for big changes -- and big savings -- from AI tech. According to a new report by Deloitte University Press, by automating many of the simple and repetitive tasks government employees perform every day, AI could free up or eliminate millions of hours of labor in the federal government alone. "At the low end of the spectrum, we estimate, automation could save 96.7 million federal hours annually, with a potential savings of $3.3 billion; at the high end, this rises to 1.2 billion hours and a potential annual savings of $41.1 billion," the report reads. Cognitive technologies could help push these cost savings not just by freeing workers from mundane tasks but also by creating more accurate cost projections and overcoming resource constraints, the report notes.

Provided by The Next Web China this week announced an AI-powered unmanned police station will open in one of its capitol cities, proving once again that no other country quite embraces artificial intelligence like it does. The station appears to be designed with driver and vehicle related matters in mind, making it more like a Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) than a cop shop. It will provide driver's examinations via simulator, registration services, and feature advanced face-scanning technology developed by Tencent, according to a report from Chinese financial paper Caijing Neican. Setting aside the myriad of law enforcement related implications, there's still plenty to unpack concerning the idea of unmanned government buildings. This station will be open to the public 24/7, and since citizens will presumably be dealing with dedicated hardware there should be far less points of failure than web-based solutions tend to have.

China this week announced an AI-powered unmanned police station will open in one of its capitol cities, proving once again that no other country quite embraces artificial intelligence like it does. The station appears to be designed with driver and vehicle related matters in mind, making it more like a Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) than a cop shop. It will provide driver's examinations via simulator, registration services, and feature advanced face-scanning technology developed by Tencent, according to a report from Chinese financial paper Caijing Neican. Setting aside the myriad of law enforcement related implications, there's still plenty to unpack concerning the idea of unmanned government buildings. This station will be open to the public 24/7, and since citizens will presumably be dealing with dedicated hardware there should be far less points of failure than web-based solutions tend to have.

William D. Eggers is the executive director of the Deloitte Center for Government Insights. Dr. Peter Viechnicki is a strategic analysis manager and data scientist with the center. This piece is adapted from their new study, How much time and money can AI save government? Government agencies are no exception, and today this requires endless staff hours spent inputting, processing and sharing information across systems. The work needs to get done, so someone has to peck away at a keyboard, right?