The next time San Francisco residents stop a taxi, they may step into a car with no one behind the wheel. Driverless taxis are now allowed to come on the city’s streets. On June 2, 2022, Cruise, a division of General Motors (GM), was approved to charge for rides in its self-driving cars, becoming the first company allowed to operate commercial driverless cars in a major US city.

Though Cruise is regarding it as a big win, its self-driving cars aren’t totally free to run on the streets of San Francisco as they please. Cruise vehicles will be limited to transporting passengers in less crowded areas of the city between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. The speed limit is 30 mph. They are also not allowed to operate in heavy rain or fog. The rules are meant to reduce any injuries or accidents.

Cruise plans to launch the service gradually with a team of just 30 cars. The first robotaxis will be improved versions of GM’s Chevrolet Bolt. However, the company is seeking approval to get its custom-built Cruise Origin on public roads. The driverless electric vehicle has no wheels or pedals (踏板) and can attain highway speeds. The car consists mostly of a siting space, where passengers can face each other.

Cruise’s ability to obtain the commercial permit to operate is a big step forward. However, the company still has to convince passengers that its technology is safe. Many remain concerned about safety. A 2021 survey by the American Automobile Association found that 74 percent of Americans are afraid to ride in a self-driving vehicle.

It remains to be seen how the new driverless taxi experiment will play out in San Francisco. But based on the vast number of companies that are racing to develop self-driving vehicles and the tens of thousands of people on waitlists for robotaxi rides, the Cruise pioneering program is at least set for popularity, if not success.

Google’s £ 400m acquisition of the UK artificial intelligence research company DeepMind in 20l4 was testimony to the quality of British scientific research. Furthermore, the insistence of the three UK co-founders that their company would not move to California was seen as evidence of London’s potential to become a successful centre for technology innovation. Four years later, the future of the UK capital’s tech aspirations and of DeepMind’s centre of gravity look a lot less certain.

DeepMind’s announcement last week that it would transfer control of its health unit to a new Google Health division in California has raised questions about data privacy. The health unit has access to the records of 1. 6m patients of Britain’s National Health Service. After four years of relative operating freedom, the company is confronting the hard reality of being owned by Google. For Google, however, which has been patient so far about its return on investment, the time for DeepMind’s work to be commercialised-specifically a patient management App called Streams-appears to have arrived.

The UK Company founded by Demis Hassabis, Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman has repeatedly vindicated Google’s assessment of its world class artificial intelligence research. In2016, its AlphaGo programme beat the world’s best player of the fiendishly complex board game “Go” after thousands of practice games. In2017 its progeny, AlphaGo Zero, did it again---without any expert human input.

When algorithms beat humans at their own games it is impressive; when they start beating them at their work it becomes unsettling. This year, another DeepMind algorithm proved better than retinal specialists at London’s Moorfields Eye Hospital at making referrals when tested on patient scans.

This was clear progress. DeepMind’s health work is what is most immediately relevant to Britons since, through a partnership with the Royal Free Hospital, it has access to the data of so many patients. The move to California has understandably raised privacy concerns at a time when big tech companies, including Facebook, are coming under growing scrutiny for the careless way they have exploited private data for commercial gain. Moreover, the transfer appears to contravene promises by DeepMind that “at no stage will patient data ever be linked or associated with Google accounts, products or services”. It is worrying that at the same time DeepMind’s independent review panel-set up to scrutinize its sensitive relationship with the NHS-is also being wound up.

DeepMind, which sees the move as a way of ensuring millions benefit from its work, claims that its contracts with the NHS are sufficient to protect patients’ data, which will remain under the strict control of Britain’s health service. Google has said nothing. There is a clear need for both companies to offer much greater assurances.

Last year, DeepMind set up an ethics and society department, whose independent advisers were selected for their integrity. They had a reputation for asking tough questions which set the company apart in the tech sector. If indeed the founders believed this culture would be unaffected by the gravitational pull of a buyer as powerful as Google, they were naive. WhatsApp and Instagram made the same mistake.

But for the sake of the NHS patients whose data are at issue, it is to be hoped that the same culture and integrity survives in California. The Silicon Valley mantra of “move fast and break things” might work for companies developing software. It has no place governing healthcare and technology.

To move visual technology into the future, sometimes it helps to make a little noise. Researchers have used sound waves to produce floating 3-D images, create a sense of touch and even supply a soundtrack.

Since the 1940s, scientists have toyed with the concept of acoustic levitation(声悬浮), the use of soundwave vibrations to trap tiny things in midair. The technology has gained greater capabilities in the past decade. Some researchers believe this improvement could lead to applications such as contributing to novel 3-D printing methods, or creating displays that would be visible from any angle without requiring a screen.

Other researchers have also worked on visual displays that use acoustic levitation. In addition to visuals, the system can also produce audible noise to give the display a soundtrack. And the ultrasound speakers can also concentrate vibrations in one spot so that a finger might feel a sense pushing back—a little like the object shown by the floating image is really there. Soundwaves create a 3-D display!

Display without a screen is remarkably useful. It means that everybody in the room can see the image—any angle, location—and that’s extremely helpful. As a communications system, such a display might one day allow users to chat with a 3-D projection(投影) of a person who can turn his or her head to follow as they move around a room.

The display will require a lot more work before you can install it in your living room, however. So far, this has been done in the research laboratory. We need to push it a little bit harder. We need to do more analysis to see if it would make sense to create a real display that people would have at home. The current system can only show simple graphics, such as a smiley face or figure eight, in real time.

Still, we are optimistic about the potential for this type of technology. If the system had only one speaker-covered surface instead of two, it could generate images that are bigger than the device itself. We can’t make a TV image that’s bigger than the TV—even a projector has to have a projection screen that’s bigger than the image itself. But with a volumetric(容积的) display, a small, portable device might produce a much larger picture. We can imagine, in the future, having volumetric displays in watches, for example, that create large images that just project out of your watch.