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"At Amazon, some warehouse and delivery drivers complain that AI-driven bots have fired them without any human intervention whatsoever. At some companies, surveillance apps track how much time workers spend in trips to the bathroom, with some workers protesting that the time limits are too strict."

"Tesla denied liability, saying Lee consumed alcohol before getting behind the wheel. The electric-vehicle maker also claims it was unclear whether the autopilot feature was engaged at the time of the crash. Tesla has been testing and rolling out its autopilot and more advanced full self-driving (FSD) system, which its chief executive, Elon Musk, has touted as crucial to his company's future but has drawn regulatory and legal scrutiny. Tesla won an earlier trial in Los Angeles in April with a strategy of saying that it tells drivers that its technology requires human monitoring, despite the "autopilot" and "full self-driving" names."

"Every year, Amazon ships hundreds of millions of parcels in Germany. Just a few clicks and a little later the delivery driver is at your door. An investigation by CORRECTIV.Lokal takes a look behind the scenes of the logistics chain and shows a system built on pressure, surveillance, and extreme stress. An insight into the gears of a machine where no idling is allowed."

"A new online study in Scientific Reports finds that drivers of these vehicles are assigned most of the blame for crashes which, the team argues, they can't reasonably avoid. This work is important because, as Niek Beckers at Delft University of Technology and colleagues point out, public opinion on this matter could shape future vehicle design and also legislation."

"Nor are car owners the only consumers learning that software can be tricksy in a way hardware cannot. In 2017, Apple admitted that its software was slowing down the performance of older iPhones. It said that the design was aimed at saving battery life, but critics said it was an example of "planned obsolescence" - artificially shortening the life of a device to make buyers upgrade sooner. In 2009, Amazon provided a perfect metaphor for the potentially dystopian implications of the subscription economy when, without warning, it revoked copies of George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four from all its Kindle e-readers."

"It was a trick as audacious as it was ingenious. When police or regulators opened the Uber app, they would see exactly what the public saw: dozens of cars crawling around the city, waiting to be summoned. But there was one crucial difference: these cars were fake. Uber had built a dummy version of its own app, a secret tool known as Greyball, designed to throw regulators off the scent and help its unlicensed cab drivers evade the law."

"BEIJING: Handing over a piping hot meal at exactly the time promised, Chinese food delivery driver Zhuang Zhenhua triumphantly tapped his job as complete through the Meituan app -- and was immediately fined half of his earnings. A glitch meant it inaccurately registered him as being late and he incurred an automatic penalty -- one of many ways, he said, delivery firms exploit millions of workers even as the sector booms. Authorities have launched a crackdown demanding firms including Meituan and Alibaba's Ele.me ensure basic labour protections such as proper compensation, insurance, as well as tackling algorithms that effectively encourage dangerous driving."

"Mentor is made by eDriving, which describes the app on its website as a "smartphone-based solution that collects and analyzes driver behaviors most predictive of crash risk and helps remediate risky behavior by providing engaging, interactive micro-training modules delivered directly to the driver in the smartphone app." But CNBC talked to drivers who said the app mostly invades their privacy or miscalculates dangerous driving behavior. One driver said even though he didn't answer a ringing phone, the app docked points for using a phone while driving. Another worker was flagged for distracted driving at every delivery stop she made. The incorrect tracking has real consequences. ranging from restricted payouts and bonuses to job loss. "

""Although manufacturers of new vehicles have built-in safeguards to prevent drivers from taking advantage of the new safety systems in vehicles, those systems are just that - supplemental safety systems," RCMP superintendent Gary Graham said in the statement. "They are not self-driving systems. They still come with the responsibility of driving.""

"Game players-like drivers-often have to reach conclusions without full understanding of what the other players-or drivers-are doing. So more researchers are applying game theory to train self-driving cars how to act in uncertain situations."

"Teslas are incredibly data-hungry, storing massive troves of data about their owners, including videos of crashes, location history, contacts and calendar entries from paired phones, photos of the driver and passengers taken with interior cameras, and other data; this data is stored without encryption, and it is not always clear when Teslas are gathering data, and the only way to comprehensively switch off data-gathering also de-activates over-the-air software updates for the cars, "

"Affectiva is running a program that pays drivers to help train its emotion-recognition system. The company sends drivers a kit including cameras and other sensors to place within their vehicles. These record a person's facial expressions, gestures, and tone of voice on the road. That data is then labeled by trained specialists for a range of emotions, and fed into deep neural networks."

"The algorithmic manager seems to watch everything you do. Ride-hailing platforms track a variety of personalized statistics, including ride acceptance rates, cancellation rates, hours spent logged in to the app and trips completed. And they display selected statistics to individual drivers as motivating tools, like "You're in the top 10 percent of partners!" Uber uses the accelerometer in drivers' phones along with GPS and gyroscope to give them safe driving reports, tracking their performance in granular detail. One driver posted to a forum that a grade of 210 out of 247 "smooth accelerations" earned a "Great work!" from the boss."

"MIT researcher's at CSAIL have developed a lane-changing algorithm for self-driving cars. the algorithm allows for aggressive lane changes much like the kind only real drivers would be capable of.   it works by computing 'buffer zones' around autonomous vehicles and reassessing them on the fly. MIT uses a mathematically efficient approach which calculates new buffer zones if the default buffer zones lead to performance that's far worse than a human's driver."

"Maybe so, but guess what? You're next. When automation starts displacing lawyers, accountants and bankers, then we might see some push-back about the social costs of technology. So long as it's only truckers and factory workers getting sacked, well, there's always Walmart, McDonald's, or food stamps."

"All of Mercedes-Benz's future Level 4 and Level 5 autonomous cars will prioritize saving the people they carry, according to Christoph von Hugo, the automaker's manager of driver assistance systems and active safety. "If you know you can save at least one person, at least save that one. Save the one in the car," Hugo said in an interview at the Paris auto show. "If all you know for sure is that one death can be prevented, then that's your first priority.""

"Ingram, a 60-year-old Uber driver in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, had just learned that Uber would be deploying autonomous cars to accept fares in her city within weeks. The announcement on Thursday morning sent shockwaves through the community of about 4,000 drivers that serve Pennsylvania's second largest city. "

"The first known death caused by a self-driving car was disclosed by Tesla Motors on Thursday evening, a development that is sure to cause consumers to second-guess the trust they put in the booming autonomous vehicle industry. "

"Researchers at the University of California-Santa Barbara recently discovered a Waze vulnerability that allowed them to create thousands of "ghost drivers" that can monitor the drivers around them-an exploit that could be used to track Waze users in real-time. They proved it to me by tracking my own movements around San Francisco and Las Vegas over a three-day period."

"Lyft announced Monday that it has partnered with automotive giant General Motors to create a network of self-driving cars that will one day in the distant (or not-too-distant future) be able to pick up and drop off passengers at the touch of a button on our phones - and likely put many of its drivers out of work."