The new artificial intelligence features Google announced just weeks ago are finally breaking through to the mainstream--albeit not in the manner Google might prefer. As you may have gleaned from recent coverage and chatter (or even experienced yourself), the autogenerated A.I. Overviews now sitting atop so many Google search results are giving answers that … well, to call them incorrect is true but doesn't quite nail it. Try surreal and ridiculous and potentially dangerous instead. Since their rollout, A.I. Overviews have told users to smoke cigarettes while pregnant, add glue to their home-baked pizza, sprinkle used antifreeze on their lawns, and boil mint in order to cure their appendicitis. To address the erroneous answers to both straightforward and jokey queries, Google appears to be addressing each incident one by one and tweaking the relevant Overviews accordingly. Still, the broken top-of-Google answers may even be spilling over into the search engine's other features, like its automatic calculator: One U.S.–based user found, posting a screenshot to X, that Google's tech couldn't even scan that the unit cm stands for centimeter, reading the measure as a whole meter.

I am behind the wheel of a Nissan Leaf, circling a parking lot, trying not to let the day's nagging worries and checklists distract me to the point of imperiling pedestrians. Like all drivers, I am unwittingly communicating my stress to this vehicle in countless subtle ways: the strength of my grip on the steering wheel, the slight expansion of my back against the seat as I breathe, the things I mutter to myself as I pilot around cars and distracted pedestrians checking their phones in the parking lot. "Hello, Corinne," a calm voice says from the audio system. The conversation that ensues offers a window into the ways in which artificial intelligence could transform our experience behind the wheel: not by driving the car for us, but by taking better care of us as we drive. Before coronavirus drastically altered our routines, three-quarters of U.S. workers--some 118 million people--commuted to the office alone in a car.

Late last year, I picked up John Carreyrou's "Bad Blood," which chronicles the long con pulled by Elizabeth Holmes, an entrepreneur who dropped out of Stanford at nineteen to found Theranos, a company that she claimed would reinvent the biomedical industry. I was instantly engrossed--"Bad Blood" unfolds like a thriller, offering a breathless barrage of details exposing how Holmes deceived her investors and colleagues at nearly every turn. Holmes wanted to disrupt the blood test: she boasted that her company was developing a method for running hundreds of lab tests from a single drop of blood, employing a machine called "The Edison" that used nanotechnology and robotics to analyze the sample. In just a few short years, thanks to Carreyrou's investigations and leaks from whistle-blowers, Holmes went from Silicon Valley's golden girl--named the youngest self-made female billionaire by Forbes--to a disgraced fraudster whose company was under investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. "Bad Blood" does a formidable job charting the Theranos ordeal, but it doesn't get into Holmes's head.

This year brought no shortage of great science-themed books. Spurred by rapid advances in biotech, the writer Carl Zimmer spun a personal tale around the emerging science of heredity. Investigative reporter John Carreyrou exposed the rotten business at the heart of Theranos, the blood-testing startup built on air. Our past also proved bountiful, with books on that time we made teenage girls glow until their bones rotted (The Radium Girls), and when competing visionaries dueled over how to steward our one and only world (The Wizard and the Profit). If that all seems a bit much, we've got an escape hatch: psychedelics. Lots of them, as recounted by Michael Pollan. But those are just a few of the superb tomes to emerge in 2018.

Silicon Valley has a term for startups that reach the $1 billion valuation mark: unicorns. It suggests not only that hugely successful startups are rare, but also that there's something unreal about them. Founded by a 19-year-old Stanford dropout, Elizabeth Holmes, who went on to become the world's youngest self-made female billionaire, it raised nearly a billion dollars from investors and was valued at $10 billion at its peak. It claimed to have developed technology that dramatically increased the affordability, convenience, and speed of blood testing. It partnered with Safeway and Walgreens, which together spent hundreds of millions of dollars building in-store clinics that were to offer Theranos tests. Tens of thousands of Americans had their blood tested by its proprietary technology. The problem was that Theranos' technology was never close to ready. In a series of devastating articles published in the Wall Street Journal starting in 2015, reporter John Carreyrou reminded us that unicorns are usually found only in fairy tales.

Much of the attention has focused on Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. But another character played a central role behind the scenes in the alleged fraud: Ms. Holmes's boyfriend, Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani, according to more than three dozen former Theranos employees who interacted with Mr. Balwani extensively over a number of years. Mr. Balwani, who met Ms. Holmes when she was a teenager, jointly ran the company with her for seven years as president and chief operating officer and enforced a corporate culture of secrecy and fear until his departure in the spring of 2016, the former employees say. Unlike Ms. Holmes and Theranos, who reached a settlement with the SEC to resolve the agency's civil charges in March without admitting or denying wrongdoing, Mr. Balwani has denied separate charges the SEC filed against him in a parallel action and is fighting them in a California federal court. A spokeswoman for Mr. Balwani provided a statement from his lawyer, Jeffrey B. Coopersmith, saying Mr. Balwani accurately represented Theranos to investors to the best of his ability, worked hard to maximize shareholder value and took on significant risk investing in the company while never benefiting financially from his work.

Last week, Business Insider reported that employees of the troubled startup Theranos had created a Space Invaders-style video game featuring the Wall Street Journal's John Carreyrou as a target. Carreyrou began reporting on the company in 2015 and revealed that Theranos was misleading investors about its technology. Theranos and CEO Elizabeth Holmes said the company could test just a small drop of blood for a number of diseases -- claims the company was never able to back up and eventually led to massive financial troubles, employee layoffs and fraud charges from the SEC. Today, Business Insider shared a video of employees playing the video game at the company. A number of people at the startup are said to blame Carreyrou for Theranos' growing problems and Vanity Fair reported in 2016 that staff erupted in a chant of, "Fuck you, Carreyrou," during a meeting.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. On Monday night, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey rescinded Uber's authority to test autonomous vehicles on the state's streets, following the March 18 crash in Tempe that killed Elaine Herzberg. Uber had already suspended its AV program in the wake of the incident, as it has routinely done after crashes. Since then, the investigation has revealed a safety protocol with more holes than a Scottsdale golf course. Video from the crash revealed that the woman had not come "from the shadows right into the roadway," as Tempe Police Chief Sylvia Moir initially said, but had already crossed several lanes of open, if darkened, asphalt before being hit by the computer-navigated Volvo SUV.

How was science's year, you ask? Oh, not too shabby. A robot rocket fought a robot barge and won. Humans detected gravitational waves from space for Pete's sake. And a certain company that rhymes with Chairanos brought serious drama the biomedical world. So yeah, it was an eventful year for science--thanks for asking.

The year 2016 was supposed to be when the tech bubble finally burst. Instead the world blew up. Amid Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, and the increasingly catastrophic consequences of climate change, the dominance of a handful of technology companies over society became increasingly obvious – from Facebook's troubling impact on democracy to Elon Musk's plan to colonize a new planet before we destroy this one. Still, if there's one thing we can learn from this year in technology, it's that no matter how bad things get, someone in Silicon Valley will make money off it. The social network continued its relentless campaign to swallow the internet whole, racking up almost $6bn in profit in the first three quarters of the year and soaring to 1.79 billion monthly active users.