Even before Republicans took Congress this year, the betting odds on any major federal AI legislation in the near future haven’t looked particularly favorable.

But Rep. Jay Obernolte, co-chair of Congress’s bipartisan AI task force, said the House is by no means throwing in the towel, though new proposals might look different than some previous pushes. The California Republican, speaking on stage at the HumanX AI conference in Las Vegas this week, said his task force work convinced him bipartisan consensus on AI “is something that Congress is capable of.”

Former Vice President Kamala Harris also stopped by the event to reflect on her work as the Biden administration’s unofficial AI czar and weigh in on the future of governmental guardrails around the technology.

Last month, Harris’s successor, Vice President JD Vance, went to the AI Action Summit in Paris to lay out a vision for AI innovation that was intentionally light on “hand-wringing about safety,” as he put it. Harris gave a much different address at the same conference in London in 2023.

The time is now: At HumanX this week, Harris pushed back on the notion that innovation and safety are at odds. “It is an absolute false choice…We can and we must have both,” Harris said.

“If we don’t figure this out, I think we are losing this very specific moment in time that will or will not be about America’s leadership, not only on the piece that is about innovation, but the piece that is about global stability and safety. And so let’s deal with that.”

Keep reading here.—PK

Eye contact, hand gestures, nods––these are some of the unspoken signals drivers often exchange with pedestrians.

But what if there’s no driver?

That’s the question at the heart of ongoing research at Kean University in New Jersey, where researchers are using virtual reality technology to better understand how pedestrians behave when they cross the street––with the goal of identifying ways for autonomous vehicles to communicate with people and therefore improve safety.

“That’s how in the real world we operate. We don’t just rely on the traffic signals. We also communicate with the driver,” Lakshmi Subramanian, an assistant professor in Kean’s department of computer science and technology and the research’s leader, told Tech Brew. “So I think the research that is happening here in academia will definitely be very useful for manufacturers as well as policymakers.”

The problem: How pedestrians interact with AVs is becoming increasingly relevant as the number of driverless cars on the road increases. Robotaxi companies are scaling up their operations and expanding to new cities. Self-driving trucks are running delivery routes. And as the number of self-driving cars has grown, so too has the number of crashes involving AVs.

Still, AV sector leaders have made bold promises about the tech being safer than human drivers, and there are many efforts underway to use technology to tackle a traffic safety problem in the US that kills tens of thousands of people every year. Pedestrians and cyclists tend to make up a disproportionate number of road deaths.

“This is an important issue, especially with the pedestrian fatality rate,” Subramanian said. “We have to make sure pedestrians are safe, especially when self-driving cars are deployed on a large scale in the future.”

Keep reading here.—JG

Under the Paris Climate Agreement—which President Trump abandoned early in his second term, just as he did in his first—the US and other participating countries agreed to work to keep the average global temperature “well below” 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. A new analysis of global emissions as a result of policies enacted so far in President Trump’s second term says that meeting that goal is “increasingly improbable.”

The report, from energy consulting firm Baringa, also stated that if the Trump administration continues down its current “drill, baby, drill” path, there will be a “5% increase in cumulative global emissions from 2020 to 2100.” And according to David Shepheard, a partner at Baringa who specializes in energy, such an increase isn’t just the result of Trump energy policies, it’s also the result of a perfect storm of three intertwined energy dilemmas.

“Not only are we chasing a decarbonization objective, we’re now simultaneously chasing an unprecedented increase in electric demand,” Shepheard told Tech Brew. “[We’re] having to balance the objectives of reliability, decarbonization, and customer affordability, and it is a tough equation to square right now.”

Keep reading here.—TC

Mobile is transforming the way surveys are taken, and SurveyMonkey’s exclusive research reveals key insights from 20m+ daily responses. Join its March 27 webinar to explore how mobile impacts survey results, which questions drive the best responses, and strategies to engage today’s mobile-first audiences.

How will the second Trump presidency affect the transition to electric vehicles? We examine how changes to emissions standards might shape automakers’ plans for electrification.