GoKawiil
Tech News
Rivian plans to roll out a point-to-point hands-free driving feature to employees in 2026 and to customers in 2027, followed by a robotaxi launch with Uber in 2028. Rivian finance VP Derek Mulvey called autonomy a key product differentiator and long-term value driver during an earnings call. The company's R2 vehicle has meanwhile become Rivian's best-selling model by volume.
Rivian's third-quarter 2026 earnings show the R2 electric vehicle now outselling all of the company's other models for the first time. Total revenue reached $2.155 billion, up 38 percent year over year, with automotive revenue at $1.55 billion and software/subscription revenue at $605 million. Automotive gross losses narrowed to $80 million from $130 million a year earlier, while software and services profit rose to $256 million, boosted largely by licensing deals with Volkswagen.
AVEVA chief product officer Rob McGreevy describes a shift from static digital twins, which only simulated and observed industrial systems, toward AI-infused 'living' digital twins that continuously update with live data and can act through control systems. Agentic AI is pushing these systems further, allowing them to make small autonomous adjustments to keep plants running smoothly rather than just flagging problems for humans to fix.
A new industry commentary argues that on-demand delivery, pioneered by food apps over the past decade, is now spreading into categories like paint, lumber, and bulk groceries. The piece frames this as consumer expectations set by food delivery now reshaping broader retail logistics, and calls for AI systems used in these operations to prove reliability before being given more autonomy.
A new study suggests that starting and running a business may be associated with living longer, despite the added workload entrepreneurs typically take on. Researchers point to the freedom and autonomy that come with entrepreneurship as a possible factor behind the health benefit.
A technology executive writing for Entrepreneur argues that the real stakes of corporate data collection go beyond privacy to personal autonomy. He recounts realizing, while reviewing algorithmic outputs with his team years ago, that their systems had moved from predicting customer behavior to actively increasing the likelihood of specific actions, which he says blurs the line between persuasion and manipulation.
A commentary published on X contends that treating AI as just another tool is a mistake, since AI exhibits autonomy, cognitive processes, and self-modification that traditional tools lack. The author argues this distinction matters because comparisons to past technological disruptions may not hold for AI.
An IEEE Computer Society post argues that AI agent risk stems less from dramatic failures than from quiet, incremental actions—permission changes, configuration tweaks, automations—that spread unchecked. It proposes treating agent autonomy as a controllable resource, introducing the concept of an 'autonomy budget' as a missing control surface for managing how much independent action agents can take.
California Highway Patrol says a Tesla operating in Full Self-Driving mode struck a patrol car on Interstate 80 on October 13 while officers investigated a fatal crash, despite flares, cones and flashing lights marking the closed lanes. The impact pushed the cruiser into another emergency vehicle, hospitalizing both officers with serious injuries; the 22-year-old driver, who told police he had fallen asleep, suffered minor injuries.
A developer's essay critiques how services report reliability using uptime percentages like 99.72% or 98.98%, arguing these numbers look deceptively similar to non-experts even though they represent vastly different amounts of actual downtime. The author references Jason Gorman's observation that reliability gains become exponentially harder near 100%, comparing uptime metrics to earthquake magnitude scales where small numeric differences hide huge real-world impact. The proposed fix: status pages should show actual downtime duration (e.g., '12 hours affected in the last 30 days') alongside or instead of raw percentages.
An essayist argues that despite headline-grabbing feats like solving Navier-Stokes problems, finding FreeBSD RCEs, and the HuggingFace incident, frontier AI models remain far from replacing knowledge workers. The piece contends models only generalize within narrow neighborhoods of trained tasks, failing or reward-hacking on small perturbations, while software firms still employ human engineers who underperform benchmarks yet remain necessary for oversight.
Akane Torikai's speculative manga imagines a society after men have vanished, but instead of portraying liberation, it shows how systems of control over bodies persist under new leadership. The story reframes familiar post-apocalyptic gender tropes to examine how authority structures adapt rather than disappear.