Today, Medium editor at large Steve LeVine launches The Mobilist, a new blog focused entirely on the future of batteries, electric cars, and driverless vehicles.

If you’re the type of OneZero reader who cares deeply about our path to a better future—I imagine that’s most of you—I can’t recommend highly enough that you drive on over and hit that “Follow” button. LeVine’s intro piece, quoted above and linked again below, is where your journey should begin. We’ll see you there!

🚗 beep beep ⚡️

‘Tweeting, retweeting, engaging in conversation can honestly be incredibly terrifying,’ the company’s head of research said

Twitter on Tuesday launched “Fleets,” its version of the Snapchat Stories (or Instagram Stories, or Facebook Stories, or LinkedIn Stories, or… well, you get the idea). Like those others, they can come in the form of text, images, or video; they appear above the feeds of the people who follow you and they disappear after 24 hours. On Twitter, they can also include a tweet, either yours or someone else’s, along with your reaction to it. Unlike tweets, they can’t be retweeted, liked, or replied to, except via direct message.

From one perspective, this is just Twitter keeping up with the Joneses, launching a familiar feature in a characteristically belated fashion. In a call with journalists on Monday, however, Twitter executives made the case that Fleets are part of a larger push to reshape the service as something friendlier, safer, and more comfortable for novice users. Along with Fleets, the company teased an upcoming feature called Spaces, which will allow users to set up live audio chat rooms and control who can join. …

A leading expert in the emergent field of A.I. law argues it’s high time to update the three laws of robotics

Isaac Asimov’s three laws of robotics are probably the most famous and influential science fictional lines of tech policy ever written. The renowned writer speculated that as machines took on greater autonomy and a greater role in human life, we would need staunch regulations to ensure they could not put us in harm’s way. And those proposed laws hark back to 1942, when the first of Asimov’s Robot stories were published. Now, with A.I., software automation, and factory robotics ascendant, the dangers posed by machines and their makers are even more complex and urgent.

In Frank Pasquale’s provoking and well-wrought book, New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI, the Brooklyn Law School professor proposes adding four new principles to Asimov’s original three. Which, for those unfamiliar, are as…

Christian evangelists use streaming platforms to spread the gospel while playing Fortnite

Catie Dexter is a different kind of evangelist. “The gaming community is definitely a community that’s got some lost people that need Christ,” she says.

Millions of people log onto Twitch every month to broadcast live video — most of them streaming games like League of Legends or Rocket League. Some use it to organize sporting events or political discussions. But a small and growing community of creators is using Twitch to reach gamers on behalf of Jesus Christ. Dexter is the chief operating officer of God Mode Activated (GMA), a group dedicated to “activating gamers in faith.”

Initially founded in 2018, GMA’s stated goal is to create a community for both believers and nonbelievers to experience Christianity in the context of gaming. Dexter, also known by her Twitch handle Catastrophic, described the ministry’s approach to OneZero as a “network” of GMA affiliates, each of whom is offered free rein to stream whatever games they like — as long as they use their Twitch platform to share Christian content and encourage their audiences to join the GMA Discord server. Sometimes, affiliates hold Bible studies on their streams. In other instances, gamers gather impromptu on the GMA Discord server to chat about personal life while playing games together. …

On his personal Medium blog, Homebrew partner Hunter Walk shares perspective for tech workers who worry about what it means to grow older in an industry that has a certain “incorrect (and sometimes illegal when it plays a role in hiring) age bias.”

“Let me tell you what does get better as time passes: the relationships, the accrued knowledge, your own self-awareness,” Walk offers.

The post reminds me of a story we published on OneZero last year, about “the planned obsolescence of old coders.” That story, written by A. Jesse Jiryu Davis, explores a similar theme: In an industry that explicitly prizes innovation and a knowledge of the bleeding edge, how can older workers fight against the unfair assumption that they might lack an understanding of those things? …

Pattern Matching

What kind of news does the news feed feed when the news feed does feed news?

Since July, New York Times journalist Kevin Roose has been posting daily lists of the top 10 most popular link posts on Facebook in the United States, under the Twitter handle @facebookstop10. The lists, which tend to be dominated by conservative and even right-wing sources, have become a touchstone for critics of the social network’s role in shaping Americans’ news consumption and political views. They’ve also been cited as counterevidence to the notion — popular on the right — that Facebook suppresses or even censors conservative viewpoints. Roose draws the data from Facebook’s own analytics tool, CrowdTangle.

This week, Facebook pushed back. The company published a blog post sharing new types of data on its most popular sources of content, aiming to give a more nuanced picture of the news feed’s composition. And it did, albeit only in snapshots, which would be hard to interpret for anyone not already steeped in this kind of data. The broad takeaway from Facebook’s lists was that the news stories people see most on Facebook tend to come largely from established, mainstream sources, after all — not the firebrands that populate Roose’s lists. …

General Intelligence

These dangerous technologies are still in their infancy, and they’ll continue to become more accurate and convincing

OneZero’s General Intelligence is a roundup of the most important artificial intelligence and facial recognition news of the week.

Less than 10 years ago, some of the most basic artificial intelligence algorithms, like image recognition, required the sort of computing power typically found in data centers. Today, those tools are available on your smartphone, and are far more powerful and precise.

Like nuclear power or rocket propulsion, artificial intelligence is considered a “dual-use” technology, which means that its capacity for harm is equal to its potential for good.

Earlier this week Vice reported the latest example of one of these harms: Coders were using images of sexual abuse to train algorithms to make porn. The article details how nonconsensual images were compiled by an anonymous PhD student into a dataset and combined with off-the-shelf algorithms to generate custom videos. …

Big Technology

An antitrust lawsuit against Facebook is forthcoming, and Instagram is in the crosshairs

Momentum inside the Federal Trade Commission is building toward a Facebook antitrust lawsuit. The lawsuit could drop at any moment, and my biggest worry as I type this is the FTC files it before I hit send, wiping out hours of work.

With the agency all but certain to bring a case, the biggest question now is which part of Facebook’s business it will attack. And the answer is most certainly Instagram.

That’s right — Instagram. When you examine previous big tech antitrust cases, the laws the FTC has at its disposal, and the state of Facebook’s business, it becomes evident that Zuckerberg’s crown jewel is under threat. …