News Updates

California is seeing heated political debate about allowing driverless trucks on its roadways, with one camp favoring speedy authorization to support technological competitiveness and the other worried about how truck drivers and communities will be affected. Sociologist Steve Viscelli would favor humans over technology. “The questions that should shape the future of trucking are not simply about how technology can increase productivity and reduce shipping costs and time,” he argues in Issues. “They are about the lives and compensation of human truckers, road infrastructure, and trucking’s environmental impacts. Policy in all these areas will shape how self-driving technology develops.”

Art created by artificial intelligence cannot be copyrighted, a federal judge recently ruled, stressing that “human authorship is a bedrock requirement.” In Issues, Deepak Somaya and Lav R. Varshney examine arguments for and against such a hardline stance—and offer policy options that might “strike the right balance for supporting innovation.” Intellectual property rights could be granted for shorter duration to put AI creations more quickly into the public domain, they suggest, or creations could be automatically licensed at a flexible price that supports their wider use while compensating those who developed or applied the AI during the creative process.

In what it calls a major effort to limit climate change, the US Department of Energy is awarding up to $1.2 billion to two projects—in Texas and Louisiana—to remove planet-warming carbon dioxide from the air and store it underground. As a backdrop, Gyami Shrestha surveys in Issues the range of federal research on all aspects of carbon dioxide removal, which she helped identify in a comprehensive compendium. Knowing the landscape, she writes, can “illustrate how these activities are spread across agencies, which can suggest possible opportunities for partnership,” and “identify the most critical remaining research questions,” among other benefits.

An artificial intelligence system designed to spot unknown asteroids heading Earth’s way has scored its first success—and astronomers believe more potentially dangerous space rocks are out there. How to keep our planet safe? NASA has turned to the public for input. Mahmud Farooque and Jason L. Kessler led the engagement efforts, and in Issues they review the process and results. Beyond specific useful comments, a broader message emerged. As Kessler writes, “To discover and develop the utility of shared decisionmaking, I believe leaders of technical organizations should support an office or team with the capacity and resources to champion more such engagements.”