Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. Jillian Lauren, a best-selling author who is married to the bassist from the rock band Weezer, appears in court at the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center in Los Angeles on May 13, 2025. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . Jillian Lauren was arrested after authorities said she brandished a gun and fired toward police officers.

Companies have been trying out automatons to serve food in restaurants, make home deliveries or do chores in stores, partly in hopes of easing the worker shortage. Among the disenchanted, FedEx Corp. said last month it was powering down Roxo, its last-mile delivery robot, to prioritize several "nearer-term opportunities," a spokeswoman said. Inc. said it was ending field tests of Scout, its home-delivery robot, after learning that some aspects of its "unique delivery experience" weren't "meeting customers' needs," a company spokeswoman said. And over the summer, DoorDash Inc. said it was shutting down its Chowbotics business -- best known for Sally, the salad-making robot -- roughly 18 months after buying it. "While we gained valuable insights into how to better serve this market, we concluded our current approach was not meeting our very high thresholds for continued investment," a DoorDash spokesman said.

Among the disenchanted, FedEx Corp. said last month it was powering down Roxo, its last-mile delivery robot, to prioritize several "nearer-term opportunities," a spokeswoman said. Inc. said it was ending field tests of Scout, its home-delivery robot, after learning that some aspects of its "unique delivery experience" weren't "meeting customers' needs," a company spokeswoman said. And over the summer, DoorDash Inc. said it was shutting down its Chowbotics business--best known for Sally, the salad-making robot--roughly 18 months after buying it. "While we gained valuable insights into how to better serve this market, we concluded our current approach was not meeting our very high thresholds for continued investment," a DoorDash spokesman said. Companies have entertained hopes that the growing variety of robots could help them not only weather the worker shortage, but speed up labor-intensive tasks, improve customer service by reducing the number of things the human workers have to do, and as an added bonus, position their brands as innovative and forward-leaning.

CMO Today delivers the most important news of the day for media and marketing professionals. Companies like Alphabet Inc.'s Google and Meta Platforms Inc.'s Facebook have long recorded users' web behavior to target them with ads. Retailers such as Walmart Inc. and Kroger Co. can track when, where and how you shop for the benefit of brands that advertise with them. Uber has been building its ad business for several years, though most of its growth to date has come from ads placed on the Uber Eats food-delivery app, said Mark Grether, general manager of Uber Advertising. The ride-hailing ad business could grow far larger, Mr. Grether said, especially when self-driving cars become more common.

The 2021 Cadillac Escalade is available with the latest version of GM's hands-free Super Cruise highway driving aid. Fox News Autos Editor Gary Gastelu lets it take him for a ride. Where's RoboCop when you need him? A Cruise autonomous car fleet is being tested as a taxi service in San Francisco. A San Francisco police patrol was befuddled one night in early April when it pulled over a Chevrolet Bolt EV with its headlights off only to discover the driver's seat was empty.

The rides are free and currently only available to Waymo employees. The Alphabet Inc. unit since 2017 has been operating autonomous cars in suburban Phoenix, which is a much less challenging traffic environment. In 2020, it opened rides up to the public in Chandler, Ariz.--which has a population of less than 300,000--and took away drivers. Waymo's latest move comes nearly two months after its biggest competitor, Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors Co., started offering driverless rides to the public in San Francisco. The rides are also free and only available at night, from 10:30 p.m. to 5 a.m.

Last August, Vince Patton was watching a YouTube video of a Tesla owner who had made a startling observation: Tesla drivers could now play a video game on their car's touch-screen dashboard – while the vehicle is moving. Curious to see for himself, Patton drove his own 2021 Tesla Model 3 to an empty community college parking lot, activated a game called "Sky Force Reloaded" from a menu and did a few loops. "And I was dumbfounded by that. That just seems so inherently dangerous," said Patton, a 59-year-old retired broadcast journalist who lives near Portland, Oregon. He tried Solitaire, too, and was able to activate that game while driving.

Over the past year Walmart has started to remove or turn off the 17-foot-tall machines often placed at the front of stores. About 300 machines are being removed from stores, and around 1,300 "hibernated" while Walmart focuses on other services, said Larry Blue, chief executive of Bell & Howell, a Durham, N.C.-based automation services company that installed and maintains the devices for the retailer. "The customer told us they want one pickup spot, and they want that pickup spot to be outside," said a Walmart spokeswoman. The pickup towers act as a vending machine for online orders, holding items inside until they are collected by shoppers. Walmart frequently highlighted the machines in presentations to media and investors in recent years, saying it aimed to offer shoppers a quicker way to pick up online orders at a lower cost.

Nuro, one of the nation's best-funded self-driving vehicle startups, has begun using its robots to ferry food and medical supplies around a California stadium that has been converted into a coronavirus treatment facility, CEO Dave Ferguson announced on Wednesday. "We realized that we could potentially use our R2 unmanned vehicles to provide truly contactless delivery of goods, where we remove any possible interaction between a driver dropping off goods and a person picking them up," Ferguson wrote. Contactless delivery could reduce the spread of COVID-19. In a Tuesday phone interview, Nuro policy chief David Estrada told Ars that the robots are ferrying food, supplies, and medical equipment from the parking lot of Sleep Train Arena, home of the Sacramento Kings, into the stadium itself. Human workers at designated locations load the vehicles at one end of a trip and unload them at the other.

Delays and cancellations are not only annoying for passengers. They also cost airlines a lot of money. They sometimes have to provide replacement crews and pay compensation to passengers. That is why the industry does a lot to prevent such disruptions in operations. Lufthansa is now also relying on artificial intelligence.