The review is being performed by the Idaho National Laboratory, according to two people familiar with the effort, who were granted anonymity to discuss it. The lab has said the research is being funded by a company ' or a group of companies ' in the electric and autonomous vehicle industries, the sources told TechCrunch. It's not immediately clear which companies are supporting the review. Representatives for Rivian, General Motors, Ford, Kodiak, Lucid Motors, Nuro, and Uber ' companies that are reported to be considering Chinese lidar ' told TechCrunch they weren't aware of the review. Nvidia, Zoox, and Aurora didn't respond to questions about whether they are involved. Idaho National Laboratory declined to comment on the review. A spokesperson told TechCrunch in June, and again in July, that 'this isn't a project that we're at liberty to discuss with reporters.' China's leading lidar suppliers, Hesai and RoboSense, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Lidar, which stands for light detection and ranging, is a sensor technology that uses laser pulses to measure the distance to nearby objects. It has long been a popular tool for companies working on autonomous vehicles because it offers a high-resolution picture of a self-driving car's immediate surroundings....

Early this week, as I began thinking about what I might write on for my Friday post, I found myself gravitating to something on 'the common good.' My Twitter/X feed has been a bloodbath for weeks, as various figures on the right spew venom at each other, with some arguing Republicans should follow Vice President JD Vance and the so-called post-liberals in championing the common good, while other, more Reaganite conservatives angrily reject this option as a concession to collectivism and 'statism.' Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, meanwhile, has been promoting a book (Crisis of the Common Good: The Fight for Meaning and Connection in a Broken America) that makes a left-leaning case for ideas parallel to Vance's'which has inspired at least one spirited liberal to proclaim, 'No, Senator Murphy, I Don't Want to Join Your Cult.' But the very next day my editor at The New York Times reached out to see if I'd be interested in having a conversation about the topic in the form of a Q&A. Why yes, I'd be delighted to. That's how we got to today's post, which, after the paywall, provides a Gift Link to the conversation in the Times, so all of my paying subscribers can get to it whether or not they have subscriptions to the paper of record. (You really should subscribe to them, but not if it means you'll have to give up your subscription to Notes from the Middleground in order to help pay for it.) If you do subscribe to the Times and don't have a paid subscription here, you can read the Q&A here....

Natural scientists in South Africa could be imprisoned for up to a year for failing to register with a government-backed regulatory body, according to proposed legislation that is to go before South Africa's parliament. Under the terms of the proposed law, it will be mandatory for some scientists to register with an existing body called the South African Council for Natural Scientific Professions (SACNASP). SACNSP was set up in 2003 and all natural scientists in the country were meant to have registered with it, but many never did. 'Our goal is not to be gatekeepers, but to professionalize the natural sciences through registration and regulation,' SACNASP's acting chief executive Matshidiso Matabane told Nature. 'It is our obligation to not only protect the profession itself, but the public and the environment,' she added. The proposed legislation states that it aims to 'protect and promote the public interests by regulating the conduct of practising natural scientists' and 'to ensure the protection of the environment'....

Amodei's comments came in response to investor Gavin Baker, who argued ' both on the All-In podcast and on X ' that Amodei's warnings about the dangers of AI have helped to fuel a backlash in the United States, particularly against data centers. Claiming that Amodei has 'lost the argument' when it comes to AI regulation (Anthropic has advocated for some regulations, including a California bill that imposes transparency requirements on large AI companies), and given that 'he is about to be the CEO of one of the most important companies in the world,' Baker wrote, 'I respectfully think he should make an effort to be a more positive advocate for his own industry.' Baker is far from the only one arguing that AI skepticism and even government crackdowns are a natural response to the dire warnings of some AI executives. But in a series of posts, Amodei disagreed with the idea that his 'messaging has been disproportionately negative.' Instead, he said that his writing has been 'about equally balanced between risks and benefits,' and that he wrote his essay 'Machines of Loving Grace' because he 'didn't feel the AI industry was painting an inspiring enough picture of how the technology could radically transform the world for the better.'...