San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie: 'We Are a City on the Rise' Since taking office, San Francisco's mayor has been on a quest to revitalize the city and increase public safety. He's also kept the National Guard out--with a little help from some very powerful friends. I first met Daniel Lurie, San Francisco's newly minted mayor, about five minutes before we walked onstage at WIRED's Big Interview event, held in his city last week. Lurie's team let me know ahead of time that his window for this conversation was tight: He'd just come from announcing a new city police chief, and had about half an hour for me before he needed to be on to the next thing. Which was? "No idea," Lurie quipped, shortly before we were foisted from backstage and into our conversation in front of several hundred attendees--a local crowd, who, judging from their boisterous reactions to Lurie's every word, are among the 73 percent of San Franciscans who approve of the job he's done since taking office in January of this year. To Lurie's credit, the story of San Francisco right now is largely a positive one. The city is indisputably the global hub of AI innovation and the billions of dollars that accompany it, with companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, along with smaller startups, investors, and plenty of young, AI-focused technologists all calling San Francisco home. Yes, that means rents are up and housing stock remains precariously low. But office vacancy rates are dropping, retail outlets are coming back to the city's downtown, and as Lurie's office is quick to tout, several key metrics measuring municipal crime--including homicides and car break-ins--are at historic lows. I wanted to talk to Lurie about all of that, but I was also curious about the bigger picture: his administration's dynamic with the federal government, particularly in the context of President Trump's October plan to send the National Guard into San Francisco--an endeavor that Lurie managed to thwart, according to The New York Times, by recruiting a powerful coterie of technology executives to work the phones in his favor. Lurie wasn't exactly forthcoming there, in keeping with his diligent efforts to focus conversations on San Francisco, and perhaps avoid attracting the attention, or the ire, of the current administration. It's a different tack than other Democrats governing progressive parts of the country have taken, from New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani to California governor Gavin Newsom. But if the response in the room last week was any indication, Lurie's local fans don't seem to mind his "say less" strategy--at least for now. Someone has a 70-something percent approval rating.

The'Surge' of Troops May Not Come to San Francisco, but the City Is Ready Anyway San Francisco is preparing for federal law enforcement's invasion of the Bay Area, whether it happens or not. Citizens protesting the threat of federal troop deployments in the San Francisco Bay Area held a rally on Thursday at SF City Hall. After months of deployments by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the National Guard across American cities, federal agents have been preparing to descend into San Francisco . Local resistance groups have been coordinating with activists in other cities across the country that have been besieged by federal law enforcement. Thousands of volunteers, coordinating through Signal group chats, Zoom calls, and social media posts, planned protests and spread the word that federal troops are on their way to San Francisco.

Does Society Have Too Many Rules? When regular people seem burdened by bureaucracy, and the powerful act as they choose, it's worth asking whether we've forgotten what makes rules effective. I live in a three-generation household. Our place is big, but crowded: all of us have hobbies, and so every shelf or surface contains toys, books, art supplies, sporting goods, craft projects, cameras, musical instruments, or kitchen gadgets. Before the table can be set for dinner, it must be cleared of a board game or marble run. My desk, where I aim to write in the mornings, has been repurposed as a drone-repair workshop. The property includes two broken-down sheds and a garage.

Fox News' Jonathan Hunt reports the latest on the anti-ICE riots in Los Angeles. Correspondent Rich Edson details Dems' response to Trump deploying the National Guard and'Outnumbered' co-host Kayleigh McEnany weighs in on the escalation. Dozens of protesters have been arrested following a weekend of violence across Los Angeles as tensions hit a boiling point over immigration raids throughout the city. On Sunday, law enforcement officials from multiple agencies arrested 41 protesters as anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) demonstrations spiraled out of control. Of the nearly four-dozen arrests, 21 were made by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), 19 by California Highway Patrol and one by the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department.

But one effort from the US Department of Defense does seem to be effective: xView2. Though it's still in its early phases of deployment, this visual computing project has already helped with disaster logistics and on the ground rescue missions in Turkey. An open-source project that was sponsored and developed by the Pentagon's Defense Innovation Unit and Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute in 2019, xView2 has collaborated with many research partners, including Microsoft and the University of California, Berkeley. It uses machine-learning algorithms in conjunction with satellite imagery from other providers to identify building and infrastructure damage in the disaster area and categorize its severity much faster than is possible with current methods. Ritwik Gupta, the principal AI scientist at the Defense Innovation Unit and a researcher at Berkeley, tells me this means the program can directly help first responders and recovery experts on the ground quickly get an assessment that can aid in finding survivors and help coordinate reconstruction efforts over time.

Since Russia's invasion began, Ukraine's allies have been sending UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) assistance. A crucial component of the war, the usage of drones is complex in legal and technical terms. But as UAVs have continued to change modern warfare, humanitarian drones carry out vital missions in Ukraine to save lives. When the war started on February 24, the non-profit Revived Soldiers Ukraine (RSU) contacted DraganFly, a North American-based drone company, to supply its cutting-edge technology. The base rate for a Draganfly drone is $35,000, but add-ons such as thermal cameras can push costs upward of $80,000.

In a project for the Defense Department's Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), computer scientists have turned to artificial intelligence and aerial imagery to construct a detailed damage assessment solution. The tool can be used remotely and automatically to determine the amount of damage to buildings and structures from a natural disaster or catastrophe. The prototype, known as the xView II model, was tested this fall, with the goal of rolling out a more finalized operational version next year. In the last few years, the U.S. military has seen an enormous amount of weather-related damage to some of its facilities, including the destruction at Tyndall Air Force Base, Florida, from Hurricane Michael in 2018; extensive water damage at Camp LeJeune, North Carolina, from Hurricane Florence's torrential rains in 2018; and flooding of the Missouri River and area creeks that impacted one-third of Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska, in 2019. Meanwhile, this fall, California's wildfires raged over 4 million acres causing irreparable damage, while repeated hurricanes barraged the Gulf Coast.

As fires get larger and more dangerous, various government and private agencies have turned to AI to detect, and potentially predict wildfires. The National Guard has been carrying out reconnaissance flights in California during the late summer and fall for the pew years, but now the drones used to carry out these flights have received upgrades with AI algorithms intended to automatically generate maps of fires within a particular region. Creating fire maps is an incredibly difficult process that requires data analysis to map constantly changing fires as they move over rugged terrain. Both air and ground observations are used to make fire maps, and fire maps are typically only updated once every day or so. Large fires can move as far as 15 miles during a single day, as witnessed by some of the fires this fire season.

More than 3 million acres of California have burned this year, and 18,000 firefighters are still battling 27 major wildfires across the sooty state sometimes called golden. And every day, high above the smoke, a military drone with a wingspan roughly 10 times that of LeBron James feeds infrared video of the flames back to March Air Reserve Base, east of Los Angeles, to help map the destruction and assist firefighters. These MQ-9 "Reaper" drones don't usually fly domestic--they're on standby in case the Air Force needs them for overseas reconnaissance. But climate change has helped make crisscrossing California gathering video a new fall tradition for the 163rd Attack Wing. Its drones have helped map wildfires every year since 2017, thanks to special permission from the secretary of defense.

The coronavirus pandemic has revealed that "just-in-time" supply lines don't always operate as they should. Fortune 500 companies use predictive analytics to improve their ability to deal with the unexpected -- and now so do planners with U.S. Northern Command. The Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, or JAIC, has built a prototype AI tool that uses a wide variety of data streams to predict COVID-19 hotspots and related logistics and supply-chain problems. "You have to be looking a little in the future," said Nand Mulchandani, chief technical officer at the JAIC. Dubbed Salus, for the Roman goddess of health and well-being, the tool can work on a scale as wide as the entire nation but can also drill down on specific zip codes and, in some cases, individual stores, said Mulchandani.