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Ford Motor Co. has stepped up technology in its popular F-150 pickup to combat the ever-evolving techniques car thieves have at their disposal.It is the latest cat-and-mouse move that the automaker hopes will help customers avoid the costly and frustrating process that occurs when vehicles are swiped and includes a feature that won’t allow an engine to start even if a key fob is in the pickup.Motor vehicle thefts recently have been on the decline in the U.S. after several years of increases. Still, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said that more than 850,000 vehicles were stolen in the U.S. in 2024, pegging losses at $8 billion.But thefts dropped 23% during the first six months of 2025 compared with the same period in 2024, according to an analysis by the National Insurance Crime Bureau.Ford’s F-150 was in the top 10 of most stolen models.“F-150s have been the bestselling vehicle for decades, so there are a lot of them on the road,” said Christian Moran, Ford Secure general manager. “Thieves do like to go after pickup trucks. They also like to go after the contents that are often in pickup trucks. Oftentimes, there are people who have thousands of dollars worth of tools and products in the back that are valuable above and beyond what the vehicle is worth.”Ford’s Stolen Vehicle Services, which was launched with the 2024 F-150 model year, added a “Start Inhibit” feature that allows owners to disable an F-150’s engine from a smartphone by using the FordPass app. This makes it impossible for a thief to start the pickup.That was expanded in the 2025 model year to include the F-250 Super Duty pickup. Ford plans to extend it to other vehicles in the 2026 model year.The security package comes with the purchase of a pickup and is included for one year once activated. The cost after the first year is $7.99 per month. Technology matching wits with thieves F-150 owners can receive alerts to their smartphones of potential thefts that include an unauthorized person entering their pickup, whether doors are ajar and if the vehicle is moved or towed.One of the strongest features of the security package is the coordination with police agencies, Moran said.It works this way. Once an owner realizes or is notified that their pickup has been stolen, the owner is encouraged to call police and file a report. The owner then contacts a Ford call center, which confirms with police that a theft report was completed. The call center coordinates efforts with police to use “Start Inhibit” to shut down the engine and to pinpoint where the pickup stopped.“Usually, within an hour is when we try to work as hard as we can to get those vehicles,” said Officer Ibrahim Kakish, a member of the Detroit police commercial auto theft section. “The sooner we get the vehicle, the better. The vehicle is more likely to be intact.” Security measures up, thefts trending down Auto theft is lucrative as some vehicles, especially high-end and luxury models, are targeted for resale. Other stolen vehicles are used to commit crimes like carjackings and smash-and-grab robberies at jewelry, liquor and other retail stores.“We used to say most of the people stealing cars were joyriders,” said Thomas Burke, a retired New York City police detective and a current director with the Chesapeake, Virginia-based International Association of Auto Theft Investigators.“There are very few joyriders, now,” Burke added. “It’s all professional. They steal them, change the (vehicle identification) numbers and sell them.”Thieves seek out easy targets like key fobs left in vehicles. They also break into a vehicle to reprogram its computer to accept another key, Burke said.But it appears security measures are working.“In New York in 1990, we had 196,000 cars stolen in one year,” Burke said. “This year, so far, a little over 10,000 have been stolen, and that’s out of more than 3.5 million cars registered.”Motor vehicle theft in Detroit decreased from 9,260 in 2023 to 8,408 last year, according to the city’s police department. So far this year, there have been 1,837 fewer thefts than in 2024.“We’re finding out ways that they’re stealing vehicles, and we work with companies to try to get that stopped,” Kakish said. Corey Williams, Associated Press
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In the past decade, AIs success has led to uncurbed enthusiasm and bold claimseven though users frequently experience errors that AI makes. An AI-powered digital assistant can misunderstand someones speech in embarrassing ways, a chatbot could hallucinate facts, or, as I experienced, an AI-based navigation tool might even guide drivers through a corn fieldall without registering the errors. People tolerate these mistakes because the technology makes certain tasks more efficient. Increasingly, however, proponents are advocating the use of AIsometimes with limited human supervisionin fields where mistakes have high cost, such as health care. For example, a bill introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives in early 2025 would allow AI systems to prescribe medications autonomously. Health researchers as well as lawmakers since then have debated whether such prescribing would be feasible or advisable. How exactly such prescribing would work if this or similar legislation passes remains to be seen. But it raises the stakes for how many errors AI developers can allow their tools to make and what the consequences would be if those tools led to negative outcomeseven patient deaths. As a researcher studying complex systems, I investigate how different components of a system interact to produce unpredictable outcomes. Part of my work focuses on exploring the limits of scienceand, more specifically, of AI. Over the past 25 years, I have worked on projects including traffic light coordination, improving bureaucracies, and tax evasion detection. Even when these systems can be highly effective, they are never perfect. For AI in particular, errors might be an inescapable consequence of how the systems work. My labs research suggests that particular properties of the data used to train AI models play a role. This is unlikely to change, regardless of how much time, effort, and funding researchers direct at improving AI models. Nobodyand nothing, not even AIis perfect As Alan Turing, considered the father of computer science, once said: If a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent. This is because learning is an essential part of intelligence, and people usually learn from mistakes. I see this tug-of-war between intelligence and infallibility at play in my research. In a study published in July 2025, my colleagues and I showed that perfectly organizing certain datasets into clear categories may be impossible. In other words, there may be a minimum amount of errors that a given dataset produces, simply because of the fact that elements of many categories overlap. For some datasetsthe core underpinning of many AI systemsAI will not perform better than chance. For example, a model trained on a dataset of millions of dogs that logs only their age, weight, and height will probably distinguish Chihuahuas from Great Danes with perfect accuracy. But it may make mistakes in telling apart an Alaskan malamute and a Doberman pinscher, since different individuals of different species might fall within the same age, weight and height ranges. This categorizing is called classifiability, and my students and I started studying it in 2021. Using data from more than half a million students who attended the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México between 2008 and 2020, we wanted to solve a seemingly simple problem. Could we use an AI algorithm to predict which students would finish their university degrees on timethat is, within three, four or five years of starting their studies, depending on the major? We tested several popular algorithms that are used for classification in AI and also developed our own. No algorithm was perfect; the best oneseven one we developed specifically for this taskachieved an accuracy rate of about 80%, meaning that at least 1 in 5 students were misclassified. We realized that many students were identical in terms of grades, age, gender, socioeconomic status, and other featuresyet some would finish on time, and some would not. Under these circumstances, no algorithm would be able to make perfect predictions. You might think that more data would improve predictability, but this usually comes with diminishing returns. This means that, for example, for each increase in accuracy of 1%, you might need 100 times the data. Thus, we would never have enough students to significantly improve our models performance. Additionally, many unpredictable turns in the lives of students and their familiesunemployment, death, pregnancymight occur after their first year at university, likely affecting whether they finish on time. So even with an infinite number of students, our predictions would still give errors. The limits of prediction To put it more generally, what limits prediction is complexity. The word complexity comes from the Latin plexus, which means intertwined. The components that make up a complex system are intertwined, and its the interactions between them that determine what happens to them and how they behave. Thus, studying elements of the system in isolation would probably yield misleading insights about themas well as about the system as a whole. Take, for example, a car traveling in a city. Knowing the speed at which it drives, its theoretically possible to predict where it will end up at a particular time. But in real traffic, its speed will depend on interactions with other vehicles on the road. Since the details of these interactions emerge in the moment and cannot be known in advance, precisely predicting what happens to the car is possible only a few minutes into the future. AI is already playing an enormous role in health care. Not with my health These same principles apply to prescribing medications. Different conditions and diseaes can have the same symptoms, and people with the same condition or disease may exhibit different symptoms. For example, fever can be caused by a respiratory illness or a digestive one. And a cold might cause a cough, but not always. This means that health care datasets have significant overlaps that would prevent AI from being error-free. Certainly, humans also make errors. But when AI misdiagnoses a patient, as it surely will, the situation falls into a legal limbo. Its not clear who or what would be responsible if a patient were hurt. Pharmaceutical companies? Software developers? Insurance agencies? Pharmacies? In many contexts, neither humans nor machines are the best option for a given task. Centaurs, or hybrid intelligencethat is, a combination of humans and machinestend to be better than each on their own. A doctor could certainly use AI to decide potential drugs to use for different patients, depending on their medical history, physiological details, and genetic makeup. Researchers are already exploring this approach in precision medicine. But common sense and the precautionary principlesuggest that it is too early for AI to prescribe drugs without human oversight. And the fact that mistakes may be baked into the technology could mean that where human health is at stake, human supervision will always be necessary. Carlos Gershenson is a professor of innovation at Binghamton University, State University of New York. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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The U.S. Mint unveiled the designs for coins commemorating the 250th anniversary of American independence next year. They depict the founding documents and the Revolutionary War, but so far, not President Donald Trump, despite a push among some of his allies to get his face on a coin.The Mint abandoned designs developed during Joe Biden’s presidency that highlighted women’s suffrage and civil rights advancements, favoring classical depictions of America over progress toward a more inclusive society.A series of celebrations are planned next year under the banner America 250, marking the anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. All U.S. coins show the year they were minted, but those made next year will also display 1776. Trump, at least for now, isn’t getting a coin No design was released for a $1 coin, though U.S. Treasurer Brandon Beach, whose duties include oversight of the U.S. Mint, serving as a liaison with the Federal Reserve and overseeing Treasury’s Office of Consumer Policy, confirmed in October that one showcasing Trump was in the works. A draft design showed Trump’s profile on the “heads” side, known as the obverse, and on the reverse, a depiction of Trump raising his fist after his attempted assassination, The words “FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT” appear along the top.By law, presidents typically can’t appear on coins until two years after their death, but some advocates for a Trump coin think there may be a loophole in the law authorizing the treasury to mint special coins for the nation’s 250th birthday.Neither the Mint nor the Treasury Department responded when asked whether a Trump coin is still planned. The new designs depict classical Americana New designs will appear only on coins minted in 2026, with the current images returning the following year.The nickel, dime and five versions of the quarter will circulate, while a penny and half dollar will be sold as collectibles.Five versions of the quarter are planned depicting the Mayflower Compact, Revolutionary War, Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution and Gettysburg Address.The dime will show a depiction of Liberty, a symbolic woman facing down the tyranny of the British monarchy, and an eagle carrying arrows in its talons representing America’s fight for independence.The commemorative nickel is essentially the same as the most recent nickel redesign, in 2006, but it includes two dates on the head’s side instead of one, 1776 and 2026. Two collectible coins are planned A half dollar coin shows the face of the Statue of Liberty on one side. The other shows her passing her torch to what appears to be the hand of a child, symbolizing a handoff to the next generation.The penny is essentially the same as the one in circulation, which was discontinued earlier this year and will be produced only as a collectible with two dates.Prices for collectible coins were not released. The Mint sells a variety of noncirculating coins on its website, with a vast range of prices reflecting their rarity.In honor of the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Marine Corps founding, for example, a commemorative half dollar coin is available for $61, while a commemorative $5 gold coin goes for $1,262. Up to 750,000 copies of the former will be minted, but no more than 50,000 of the latter. The abandoned designs Congress authorized commemorative coins in 2021. During the Biden administration, the Mint worked with a citizens advisory committee to propose designs depicting the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, abolitionism, suffrage and civil rights.Those designs included depictions of abolitionist Frederick Douglass and Ruby Bridges, who was escorted to school by the National Guard at age 6 years amid opposition to racial integration at public schools.Those designs represented “continued progress toward ‘a more perfect union,'” said Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nevada, quoting a phrase from the preamble to the Constitution.“The American story didn’t stop at the pilgrims and founding fathers, and ignoring anything that has happened in this country in the last 162 years is just another attempt by President Trump to rewrite our history,” Cortez Masto said in a statement. Jonathan J. Cooper, Associated Press
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