By Hannah Elliott, Bloomberg News

There’s something fundamentally American about the freedom to get in your car and drive.

Driving is self-determination. The liberty to set your own course. The power to move under your own willpower, whether for duty or sheer pleasure. Despite some decline among Gen Zers, plenty of teens still eagerly anticipate getting their driver’s license. In many American towns, where public transportation and walkability are scarce, driving is what empowers you to explore.

Some motoring enthusiasts worry self-driving vehicles threaten that ideal. These robot autos, run by Google and China and Elon Musk, use AI and radars to navigate without human input; they could replace our car-centric culture with faceless communal bots controlled by opaque entities. Even worse, self-driving vehicles present safety concerns and other vulnerabilities, such as being hacked or spoofed by malicious agents at home or abroad.

I’ve covered the car industry for 20 years, and I would hate to see our sports coupes and road trips disappear. The risks associated with relinquishing control over my mobility also give me pause. Or they did. I took a Waymo for the first time recently in Los Angeles and … I haven’t stopped using it since. Rather than replace our cool cars, self-driving vehicles will, I predict, become a welcome complement to modern life, first as part of ride-sharing platforms and then as privately owned transport. Why? Because they offer an excellent solution for something nobody likes: commuting.

If driving is heaven, commuting is hell. Not even the hardest-core drivers like it. So the question isn’t whether self-driving will replace our favorite cars (I think not), but rather, will it remove the burden of our most mundane trips? And could it replace other ride-sharing platforms like Uber? I certainly hope so.

Waymo LLC, the self-driving car service subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company, was founded in 2009 with a mission to explore what self-driving technology could offer. It now has more than 2,000 electric vehicles operating across its markets, which include LA, Phoenix and San Francisco, plus Austin and Atlanta, where Waymo rides are hailed via Uber. In 2026, Dallas, Denver, Miami, Nashville and Washington, DC, will join the ranks with Waymos on their streets. New York City just granted the company permission to continue testing there until the end of the year, and Seattle is in the works too. Waymo provides more than 250,000 trips each week, and regulators are already adapting. A new California law will soon authorize police to issue “notices of autonomous vehicle noncompliance” when they see driverless cars breaking traffic rules.

Beyond Waymo, robo-taxis and -shuttles are also running in China, Singapore and the Middle East, and they’re being tested across Europe. The vehicles are expected to become commercially available in the U.S. at a large scale by 2030, according to the research firm McKinsey.

But they’re a long way from being ubiquitous. A world of self-driving cars will require billions of dollars of development, improved navigation systems, increased charging infrastructures and new regulations to amend traffic laws. Ford, General Motors and Volkswagen have all canceled autonomous taxi programs they once funded by the billions. (GM is planning to renew exploring autonomous cars for personal use, rather than as a robotaxi service. Later this year, the autonomous mobility subsidiary of Volkswagen Group of America Inc. will begin testing electric autonomous ID. Buzz AD vehicles, with plans to offer rides via Uber 2026 in LA. The vehicles will use human operators during their testing and launch phases.) Tesla’s Robotaxis aren’t open to the public. Given the company’s proclivity for extensive delays, it’s unclear when they will be.

As self-driving options develop, consumer demand shouldn’t be a problem, according to experts; most people who try it like it. Waymo reports a 98% satisfaction rating among users in LA. Proponents note that more than 1.3 million deaths occur around the world annually in traffic accidents, whereas self-driving vehicles eliminate the human errors that cause more than 90% of those deaths, according to research by Global Market Insights.

Waymo uses a proprietary AI system for autonomous driving that has been installed on a fleet of Jaguar I-PACEs equipped with dozens of cameras and sensors. The technology is more robust than the hands-free driving systems we have in our own cars, combining AI learning with LiDAR, radar, cameras and high-definition maps to read and anticipate the environment.

There are still significant limitations to Waymo vehicles’ range and their ability to adapt to real-life scenarios. But after a week of Waymo rides, which I ordered easily via an app, other ride-sharing platforms seemed woefully outdated.

My first trip was not perfect. Our house in Hollywood sits outside Waymo’s range, so my gallant husband had to drive me about a mile down the hill to a cafe on Hollywood Boulevard, where I ordered the car. It took 26 (!) minutes to arrive—precious time lost because of high rider volume on a Monday morning. An Uber would have been there within a few minutes. But the vehicle showed up at exactly the time it had promised, unlike Uber, which tends to miss arrival estimates. A spokesperson from Uber did not comment.

Synched with my iPhone, the car unlocked automatically when it pulled up, waiting until I clicked my seat belt and pushed a green button on a screen in the rear to commence the journey. Icons in the app would have let me open the trunk, had I wanted, and allowed me to adjust the sound and temperature in the car.

Any drama I expected to feel from being alone in a moving vehicle just didn’t exist. No driver? No problem. I forgot about it before I even hit Santa Monica Boulevard, and my 44-minute ride to the office proved delightfully uneventful while my productivity soared: I stretched my legs; checked email; made phone calls and wrote to-do lists—all things I cannot do when driving myself to the newsroom each morning. The trip cost $23.28, almost half the price of an Uber Black ($41.25) or UberX ($42.95) at the same hour.

There were a few hiccups. The car froze momentarily behind a truck parked illegally, causing other drivers to honk erratically. More annoyingly, it didn’t drop me at the address I requested but in a hotel valet line across an intersection and down the next block. I’ve learned that Waymos often leave passengers on side streets or one block past a chosen destination, depending on how busy the drop-off point seems. (This is because the cars are programmed to prioritize safety and efficiency rather than moving swiftly in hectic traffic.) That would have been frustrating had it been raining, or an unfamiliar neighborhood, or had I been wearing heels.

There’s room for improvement in the car’s ability to take a direct route to a destination rather than zig-zagging or circling the arrival spot before stopping, as it did one evening when trying to avoid busy corners to drop me off in Hollywood. It made for a slightly longer drive than if I had done it myself. Indeed, the logistical challenges of using Waymo are its biggest problem. One night it wouldn’t let me change my destination just 15 minutes into a 55-minute journey, even though the new destination was far closer. (It would have allowed me to cancel the ride, leaving me on the street corner.)

I’m hoping all this will improve as Waymo expands its range—and incorporates highways and Interstates, which it currently does not—because the privacy, punctuality and peace inside the cabin are delightful. I found myself scheduling Waymos to take me to dinner in West Hollywood or to try on shoes at Reformation on Melrose Avenue. It was freeing not to stress about parking or bad drivers.

If more folks used self-driving cars, it would lead to more parking; reduce road rage, drunk driving and traffic accidents; and alleviate noise pollution and congestion. Waymo is a far better driver than most of the ride-sharing and taxi drivers I’ve had. It’s certainly more courteous, gliding elegantly through yellow lights, and moving up in line at stoplights if the vehicle behind it wants to turn right. The car remained smooth and predictable even in tight traffic, navigating tiny neighborhood streets with ease. I was so relaxed I started dozing.

One morning I even walked myself 20 minutes down to the Hollywood coffee shop so I could take a Waymo again to work. I didn’t love the hike, but I wanted that solitary ride. (Mornings when I needed to be in the office at a specific time, I drove myself.)

The solitude is the top benefit I hear from everyone I speak with about the service—especially women and gay and trans friends who worry about being accosted, harassed or ogled by drivers. Self-driving cars offer a way to ride alone in safety. We just need the services to be bigger and better and more flexible.

It’s encouraging to see the industry growing, with companies like Zoox, Pony Ai and WeRide working to expand the technology. In 2024 the global market for self-driving cars was valued at $1.7 trillion, according to Global Market Insights. It’s expected to hit $3.9 trillion by 2034.

As for me, I’ll plan to hold on to my cars and use Waymo for my daily commute and mundane chores. If I’m lucky, I’ll never have to take an Uber again.

©2025 Bloomberg L.P. Visit bloomberg.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

The internet and the social platforms that exist there have been both an interesting and unsettling experiment. When we look back at how it’s changed—and changed us—one can only wonder whether we are better or worse off because of it.

The web can be a useful tool for connection and amplify some of the more unsettling parts of society.  This plays out with consumer reviews. While being a useful way to find out the quality and value of an item or service, reviews can have unintended consequences.

Some issues with review platforms stem from walking the tightrope between serving customers and businesses. It’s also hard to be truly representative when not everyone decides to leave reviews. 

Michael Luca is a professor at Johns Hopkins whose work focuses on the design of online platforms. He joined the show to provide some perspective on how platforms work and tell us why all of this matters.

Listen to The Metro weekdays from 10 a.m. to noon ET on 101.9 FM and streaming on demand.

Subscribe to The Metro on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, NPR.org or wherever you get your podcasts.

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WDET strives to make our journalism accessible to everyone. As a public media institution, we maintain our journalistic integrity through independent support from readers like you. If you value WDET as your source of news, music and conversation, please make a gift today.

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By KELVIN CHAN, Associated Press

LONDON (AP) — iPhone users have a new tool to combat the scourge of nuisance phone calls: a virtual gatekeeper that can screen incoming calls from unknown numbers.

It’s among the bevy of new features that Apple rolled out with last month’s release of iOS 26. The screening feature has been getting attention because of the ever-increasing amount of robocalls and spam calls that leave many phone users feeling harassed.

Here’s a run-through of the new function:

How to activate call screening

First, you’ll need to update your iPhone’s operating system to iOS 26, which is available to the iPhone 11 and newer models.

To switch call screening on, go into Settings–Apps—Phone. Scroll down and you’ll find a new option: Screen Unknown Callers.

You’ll be presented with three choices. The Never option lets any unknown call ring through, while Silence sends all unidentified numbers directly to voicemail. What you want to tap is the middle option: Ask Reason for Calling.

If the option isn’t there, try restarting your phone.

I still couldn’t find it after updating to iOS 26, but, after some online sleuthing, I checked my region and language settings because I saw some online commenters reporting they had to match. It turns out my region was still set to Hong Kong, where I lived years ago. I switched it to the United Kingdom, which seemed to do the trick and gave me the updated menu.

How it works

Call screening introduces a layer between you and new callers.

When someone who’s not in your contacts list dials your number, a Siri-style voice will ask them to give their name and the purpose of their call.

At the same time, you’ll get a notification that the call is being screened. When the caller responds, the answers will be transcribed and the conversation will pop up in speech bubbles.

You can then answer the call.

Don’t want to answer? Send a reply by tapping one of the pre-written messages, such as “I’ll call you later” or “Send more information,” which the AI voice will read out to the caller.

Or you can type out your own message for the computer-generated voice to read out.

If you don’t respond right away, the phone will continue to ring while you decide what to do.

Teething troubles

In theory, call screening is a handy third way between the nuclear option of silencing all unknown callers — including legitimate ones — or letting them all through.

But it doesn’t always work perfectly, according to Associated Press colleagues and anecdotal reports from social media users.

One AP colleague said she was impressed with how seamlessly it worked. Another said it’s handy for screening out cold callers who found his number from marketing databases.

“However, it’s not great when delivery drivers try to call me and then just hang up,” he added.

Some internet users have similar complaints, complaining that important calls that they were expecting from their auto mechanic or plumber didn’t make it through. Perhaps the callers assumed it was an answering machine and didn’t seem to realize they had to stay on the line and interact with it.

I encountered a different issue the first time it kicked in for me, when an unknown caller — whether mistakenly or not — threw me off by giving my name instead of theirs. So I answered because I assumed it was someone I knew, forgetting that I could tap out a reply asking them again for their name.

The caller turned out to be someone who had obtained my name and number and was trying to get me to do a survey. I had to make my excuses and hang up.

If you don’t like call screening, you can turn it off at any time.

As for Android

Apple is catching up with Google, which introduced a similar automatic call screening feature years ago for Pixel users in the United States.

Last month, the company announced the feature is rolling out to users in three more countries: Australia, Canada and Ireland.

If it’s not already on, go to your Phone app’s Settings and look for Call Screen.

Google’s version is even more automated. When someone you don’t know calls, the phone will ask who it is and why they’re calling. It will hang up if it determines that it’s a junk call, but let calls it deems to be legit ring through.

Google warns that not all spam calls and robocalls can be detected, nor will it always fully understand and transcribe what a caller says.

Samsung, too, lets users of its Galaxy Android phones screen calls by using its AI assistant Bixby’s text call function, which works in a similar way.

Is there a tech topic that you think needs explaining? Write to us at onetechtip@ap.org with your suggestions for future editions of One Tech Tip.

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By BARBARA ORTUTAY and MICHAEL LIEDTKE, AP Technology Writers

Google’s YouTube has agreed to pay $24.5 million to settle a lawsuit President Donald Trump brought after the video site suspended his account following the Jan. 6, 2021 attacks on the Capitol following the election that resulted in him leaving the White House for four years.

The settlement of the more than four-year-old case earmarks $22 million for Trump to contribute to the Trust for the National Mall and a construction of a White House ballroom, according to court documents filed Monday. The remaining $2.5 million will be paid to other parties involved in the case, including the writer Naomi Wolf and the American Conservative Union.

Alphabet, the parent of Google, is the third major technology company to settle a volley of lawsuits that Trump brought for what he alleged had unfairly muzzled him after his first term as president ended in January 2021. He filed similar cases Facebook parent Meta Platforms and Twitter before it was bought by billionaire Elon Musk in 2022 and rebranded as X.

Meta agreed to pay $25 million to settle Trumps’ lawsuit over his 2021 suspension from Facebook and X agreed to settle the lawsuit that Trump brought against Twitter for $10 million. When the lawsuits against Meta. Twitter and YouTube were filed, legal experts predicted Trump had little chance of prevailing.

After buying Twitter for $44.5 billion, Musk later became major contributor to Trump’s successful 2024 campaign that resulted in his re-election and then spent several months leading a cost-cutting effort that purged thousands of workers from the federal government payroll before the two had a bitter falling out. Both Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg were among the tech leaders who lined up behind Trump during his second inauguration in January in a show of solidarity that was widely interpreted as a sign of the industry’s intention to work more closely with the president than during his first administration.

ABC News, meanwhile, agreed to pay $15 million in December toward Trump’s presidential library to settle a defamation lawsuit over anchor George Stephanopoulos’ inaccurate on-air assertion that the president-elect had been found civilly liable for raping writer E. Jean Carroll. And in July, Paramount decided to pay Trump $16 million to settle a lawsuit regarding editing at CBS’ storied “60 Minutes” news program.

The settlement does not constitute an admission of liability, the filing says. Google confirmed the settlement but declined to comment beyond it.

Google declined to comment on the reasons for the settlement., but Trump’s YouTube account has been restored since 2023. The settlement is will barely dent Alphabet, which has a market value of nearly $3 trillion — an increase of about $600 billion, or 25%, since Trump’s return to the White House.

The disclosure of the settlement came a week before a scheduled Oct. 6 court hearing to discuss the case with U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez-Rogers in Oakland, California.

By Paula Span, KFF Health News

It started with a high school typing course.

Wanda Woods enrolled because her father advised that typing proficiency would lead to jobs. Sure enough, the federal Environmental Protection Agency hired her as an after-school worker while she was still a junior.

Her supervisor “sat me down and put me on a machine called a word processor,” Woods, now 67, recalled. “It was big and bulky and used magnetic cards to store information. I thought, ‘I kinda like this.’”

Decades later, she was still liking it. In 2012 — the first year that more than half of Americans 65 and older were internet users — she started a computer training business.

Now she is an instructor with Senior Planet in Denver, an AARP-supported effort to help older people learn and stay abreast of technology. Woods has no plans to retire. Staying involved with tech “keeps me in the know, too,” she said.

Some neuroscientists researching the effects of technology on older adults are inclined to agree. The first cohort of seniors to have contended — not always enthusiastically — with a digital society has reached the age when cognitive impairment becomes more common.

Given decades of alarms about technology’s threats to our brains and well-being — sometimes called “digital dementia” — one might expect to start seeing negative effects.

The opposite appears true. “Among the digital pioneer generation, use of everyday digital technology has been associated with reduced risk of cognitive impairment and dementia,” said Michael Scullin, a cognitive neuroscientist at Baylor University.

It’s almost akin to hearing from a nutritionist that bacon is good for you.

“It flips the script that technology is always bad,” said Murali Doraiswamy, director of the Neurocognitive Disorders Program at Duke University, who was not involved with the study. “It’s refreshing and provocative and poses a hypothesis that deserves further research.”

Scullin and Jared Benge, a neuropsychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, were co-authors of a recent analysis investigating the effects of technology use on people over 50 (average age: 69).

They found that those who used computers, smartphones, the internet, or a mix did better on cognitive tests, with lower rates of cognitive impairment or dementia diagnoses, than those who avoided technology or used it less often.

“Normally, you see a lot of variability across studies,” Scullin said. But in this analysis of 57 studies involving more than 411,000 seniors, published in Nature Human Behavior, almost 90% of the studies found that technology had a protective cognitive effect.

Much of the apprehension about technology and cognition arose from research on children, sometimes focused on adolescents, whose brains are still developing.

“There’s pretty compelling data that difficulties can emerge with attention or mental health or behavioral problems” when young people are overexposed to screens and digital devices, Scullin said.

Older adults’ brains are also malleable, but less so. And those who began grappling with technology in midlife had already learned “foundational abilities and skills,” Scullin said.

Then, to participate in a swiftly evolving society, they had to learn a whole lot more.

Years of online brain-training experiments lasting a few weeks or months have produced varying results. Often, they improve a person’s ability to perform the task in question without enhancing other skills.

“I tend to be pretty skeptical” of their benefit, said Walter Boot, a psychologist at the Center on Aging and Behavioral Research at Weill Cornell Medicine. “Cognition is really hard to change.”

The new analysis, however, reflects “technology use in the wild,” he said, with adults “having to adapt to a rapidly changing technological environment” over several decades. He found the study’s conclusions “plausible.”

Analyses like this can’t determine causality. Does technology improve older people’s cognition, or do people with low cognitive ability avoid technology? Is tech adoption just a proxy for enough wealth to buy a laptop?

“We still don’t know if it’s chicken or egg,” Doraiswamy said.

Yet when Scullin and Benge accounted for health, education, socioeconomic status, and other demographic variables, they still found significantly higher cognitive ability among older digital technology users.

What might explain the apparent connection?

“These devices represent complex new challenges,” Scullin said. “If you don’t give up on them, if you push through the frustration, you’re engaging in the same challenges that studies have shown to be cognitively beneficial.”

Even handling the constant updates, the troubleshooting, and the sometimes maddening new operating systems might prove advantageous. “Having to relearn something is another positive mental challenge,” he said.

Still, digital technology may also protect brain health by fostering social connections, known to help stave off cognitive decline. Or its reminders and prompts could partially compensate for memory loss, as Scullin and Benge found in a smartphone study, while apps help preserve functional abilities like shopping and banking.

Numerous studies have shown that while the number of people with dementia is increasing as the population ages, the proportion of older adults who develop dementia has been falling in the United States and several European countries.

Researchers have attributed the decline to a variety of factors, including reduced smoking, higher education levels, and better blood pressure treatments. Possibly, Doraiswamy said, engaging with technology has been part of the pattern.

Of course, digital technologies present risks, too. Online fraud and scams often target older adults, and while they are less apt to report fraud losses than younger people, the amounts they lose are much higher, according to the Federal Trade Commission. Disinformation poses its own hazards.

And as with users of any age, more is not necessarily better.

“If you’re bingeing Netflix 10 hours a day, you may lose social connections,” Doraiswamy pointed out. Technology, he noted, cannot “substitute for other brain-healthy activities” like exercising and eating sensibly.

An unanswered question: Will this supposed benefit extend to subsequent generations, digital natives more comfortable with the technology their grandparents often labored over? “The technology is not static — it still changes,” Boot said. “So maybe it’s not a one-time effect.”

Still, the change tech has wrought “follows a pattern,” he added. “A new technology gets introduced, and there’s a kind of panic.”

From television and video games to the latest and perhaps scariest development, artificial intelligence, “a lot of it is an overblown initial reaction,” he said. “Then, over time, we see it’s not so bad and may actually have benefits.”

Like most people her age, Woods grew up in an analog world of paper checks and paper maps. But as she moved from one employer to another through the ’80s and ’90s, she progressed to IBM desktops and mastered Lotus 1-2-3 and Windows 3.1.

Along the way, her personal life turned digital, too: a home desktop when her sons needed one for school, a cellphone after she and her husband couldn’t summon help for a roadside flat, a smartwatch to track her steps.

These days, Woods pays bills and shops online, uses a digital calendar, and group-texts her relatives. And she seems unafraid of AI, the most earthshaking new tech.

Last year, Woods turned to AI chatbots like Google Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT to plan an RV excursion to South Carolina. Now, she’s using them to arrange a family cruise celebrating her 50th wedding anniversary.

The New Old Age is produced through a partnership with The New York Times.

©2025 KFF Health News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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