"The Agency" star Katherine Waterston admitted she finds AI generally "terrifying" for Hollywood and beyond. Screenwriter Paul Schrader, known for his critically acclaimed works like "Taxi Driver," "Raging Bull" and "First Reformed," surprised fans when he shared his apparent approval of artificial intelligence. In a series of posts last week, the Oscar-nominee marveled at AI and ChatGPT's capabilities when it came to his profession. "I've just come to realize AI is smarter than I am. Has better ideas, has more efficient ways to execute them," he wrote on Jan 16. "Taxi Driver" screenwriter and director Paul Schrader surprised fans with his interest in artificial intelligence.

AI governance and ethics in AI development have become critical concerns, prompting active discussions among tech companies, governments, and researchers about the potential risks AI poses to our democracies. This short essay aims to highlight one such risk: how generative AI includes or excludes equity-deserving groups in its outputs. The findings reveal that generative AI is not equitably inclusive regarding gender, race, age, and visible disability. Mutual Impacts: Technology and Democracy Technology is a human creation and, as such, inherently reflects our values, prejudices, and biases. Additionally, it plays a crucial role in shaping societal norms and social contracts.

This paper introduces a new LLM based agent framework for simulating electric vehicle (EV) charging behavior, integrating user preferences, psychological characteristics, and environmental factors to optimize the charging process. The framework comprises several modules, enabling sophisticated, adaptive simulations. Dynamic decision making is supported by continuous reflection and memory updates, ensuring alignment with user expectations and enhanced efficiency. The framework's ability to generate personalized user profiles and real-time decisions offers significant advancements for urban EV charging management. Future work could focus on incorporating more intricate scenarios and expanding data sources to enhance predictive accuracy and practical utility.

This paper presents an extended version of the SPADE platform, which aims to empower intelligent agent systems with normative reasoning and value alignment capabilities. Normative reasoning involves evaluating social norms and their impact on decision-making, while value alignment ensures agents' actions are in line with desired principles and ethical guidelines. The extended platform equips agents with normative awareness and reasoning capabilities based on deontic logic, allowing them to assess the appropriateness of their actions and make informed decisions. By integrating normative reasoning and value alignment, the platform enhances agents' social intelligence and promotes responsible and ethical behaviors in complex environments.

Drivers in ridesharing platforms exhibit cognitive atrophy and fatigue as they accept ride offers along the day, which can have a significant impact on the overall efficiency of the ridesharing platform. In contrast to the current literature which focuses primarily on modeling and learning driver's preferences across different ride offers, this paper proposes a novel Dynamic Discounted Satisficing (DDS) heuristic to model and predict driver's sequential ride decisions during a given shift. Based on DDS heuristic, a novel stochastic neural network with random activations is proposed to model DDS heuristic and predict the final decision made by a given driver. The presence of random activations in the network necessitated the development of a novel training algorithm called Sampling-Based Back Propagation Through Time (SBPTT), where gradients are computed for independent instances of neural networks (obtained via sampling the distribution of activation threshold) and aggregated to update the network parameters. Using both simulation experiments as well as on real Chicago taxi dataset, this paper demonstrates the improved performance of the proposed approach, when compared to state-of-the-art methods.

In recent years many novel applications have appeared that promote the provision of services and activities in a collaborative manner. The key idea behind such systems is to take advantage of idle or underused capacities of existing resources, in order to provide improved services that assist people in their daily tasks, with additional functionality, enhanced efficiency, and/or reduced cost. Particularly in the domain of urban transportation, many researchers have put forward novel ideas, which are then implemented and evaluated through prototypes that usually draw upon AI methods and tools. However, such proposals also bring up multiple non-technical issues that need to be identified and addressed adequately if such systems are ever meant to be applied to the real world. While, in practice, legal and ethical aspects related to such AI-based systems are seldomly considered in the beginning of the research and development process, we argue that they not only restrict design decisions, but can also help guiding them. In this manuscript, we set out from a prototype of a taxi coordination service that mediates between individual (and autonomous) taxis and potential customers. After representing key aspects of its operation in a semi-structured manner, we analyse its viability from the viewpoint of current legal restrictions and constraints, so as to identify additional non-functional requirements as well as options to address them. Then, we go one step ahead, and actually modify the existing prototype to incorporate the previously identified recommendations. Performing experiments with this improved system helps us identify the most adequate option among several legally admissible alternatives.

Urban mobility efficiency is of utmost importance in big cities. Taxi vehicles are key elements in daily traffic activity. The advance of ICT and geo-positioning systems has given rise to new opportunities for improving the efficiency of taxi fleets in terms of waiting times of passengers, cost and time for drivers, traffic density, CO2 emissions, etc., by using more informed, intelligent dispatching. Still, the explicit spatial and temporal components, as well as the scale and, in particular, the dynamicity of the problem of pairing passengers and taxis in big towns, render traditional approaches for solving standard assignment problem useless for this purpose, and call for intelligent approximation strategies based on domain-specific heuristics. Furthermore, taxi drivers are often autonomous actors and may not agree to participate in assignments that, though globally efficient, may not be sufficently beneficial for them individually. This paper presents a new heuristic algorithm for taxi assignment to customers that considers taxi reassignments if this may lead to globally better solutions. In addition, as such new assignments may reduce the expected revenues of individual drivers, we propose an economic compensation scheme to make individually rational drivers agree to proposed modifications in their assigned clients. We carried out a set of experiments, where several commonly used assignment strategies are compared to three different instantiations of our heuristic algorithm. The results indicate that our proposal has the potential to reduce customer waiting times in fleets of autonomous taxis, while being also beneficial from an economic point of view.

We examine the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on productivity in the context of taxi drivers. The AI we study assists drivers with finding customers by suggesting routes along which the demand is predicted to be high. We find that AI improves drivers' productivity by shortening the cruising time, and such gain is accrued only to low-skilled drivers, narrowing the productivity gap between high- and low-skilled drivers by 14%. The result indicates that AI's impact on human labor is more nuanced and complex than a job displacement story, which was the primary focus of existing studies.

In order to make this article didactic, a simple and basic environment has been chosen that does not add too much complexity to the training, so that the learning of the Q-Learning algorithm can be fully appreciated. The environment is OpenAI Gym's Taxi-v3 [1], which consists of a grid world where the agent is a taxi driver who must pick up a customer and drop him off at his destination. As for the action space, the following discrete actions are available for the agent to interact with the environment: go forward, go backward, go right, go left, pick up a passenger and drop him off. This makes a total of 6 possible actions, which in turn are encoded in numbers from 0 to 5 for ease of programming. The correspondences between actions and numbers are shown in Figure 1.

In the summer of 1956, 10 scientists met at Dartmouth College and invented artificial intelligence. Researchers from fields like mathematics, engineering, psychology, economics, and political science got together to find out whether they could describe learning and human thinking so precisely that it could be replicated with a machine. Hardly a decade later, these same scientists contributed to dramatic breakthroughs in robotics, natural language processing, and computer vision. Although a lot of time has passed since then, robotics, natural language processing, and computer vision remain some of the hottest research areas to this day. One could say that we're focused on teaching AI to move like a human, speak like a human and see like a human.