Today’s Big Story

The Self-Driving Revolution

How will autonomous cars change shopping, transportation, and life, more broadly?

Self-driving cars are already clocking up millions of miles on public roads, but they still face an uphill battle to convince people to climb in and enjoy the ride. A decade ago, many people were asking questions about these autonomous vehicles: What would a world of self-driven cars look like? How would it change shopping, transportation, and daily life, more broadly?

The Ringer says that, at the time, it looked like a boom in autonomous vehicles was imminent. But in the last few years, other technologies—crypto, the metaverse, AI—have stolen the spotlight. Meanwhile, self-driving cars have quietly become a huge deal in the U.S. Waymo One, a commercial ride-hailing service that spun off from Google, has been rolled out in San Francisco, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Austin.

Every week, Waymo makes 150,000 autonomous rides. And, according to the BBC, people are getting used to hopping into cars without a driver behind the wheel. “Not only were there multiple driverless vehicles on any given street at any given time, but tourists no longer had their mouths agape as one drove by. The technology has become a familiar sight.” Waymo is also continually trying to inspire a similar feeling among their passengers. The all-electric car offers a warm welcome to passengers by name and plays music as they climb inside. A screen positioned in front of the rear seats offers those along for the ride the option of seeing a follow-along map of the route, as well as settings for temperature and music. Another screen beside the steering wheel shows images of what's around the vehicle. As you’re driven around, you’ll see images of people sitting inside buses alongside you, dogs crossing the street ahead and children skipping along the sidewalk.

And Tesla is also working hard to compete—building a robo-taxi service and developing smart, self-driving capabilities. The incoming Trump administration intends to prioritize loosening federal regulations for self-driving cars, per a report by Bloomberg. The report claims policy details aren't yet confirmed, but it suggests the new rules could make it easier to get more fully autonomous vehicles on the road.

There’s still a lot of questions about the technology, but experts agree that it will soon become commonplace. And that leads back to the questions about how it will change things. As The Ringer points out, the car was arguably “the most important technology of the 20th century … it transformed personal transportation, made the suburbs possible and changed the spatial geometry of the city.” One big change in the future would no doubt be safety. Self-driving technology has the potential to save thousands of lives and prevent millions of accidents (there are roughly 40,000 vehicular deaths in America every year and 6 million accidents).

Trump’s Mass Deportation Plans

The president-elect says he will declare a national emergency and use U.S. military

President-elect Donald Trump confirmed that he is planning to declare a national emergency and use the American military to carry out mass deportations of migrants without official documentation in the United States. On Monday, he posted "TRUE!!!" in response to a conservative commentator who wrote that Trump would declare a national emergency and use military assets to lead “a mass deportation program”.

Trump, of course, made his promise to deport millions of undocumented immigrants one of the cornerstones of his 2024 campaign, and his team has already begun strategizing how to carry out this campaign promise. According to Axios, there are an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. Trump's mass deportations are expected to impact roughly 20 million families across the country.

Immigration advocates and lawyers are already preparing to counter the plan in court. And CBS News says the actions could potentially test the limits of Trump’s powers to use the military on U.S. soil to achieve his crackdown. Meanwhile, as final votes are tallied from the November 5 election, Trump’s share of the popular vote has fallen below 50% and his mandate does not appear as sweeping as was first thought.

Turkey Travel

Record number of people expected to travel for Thanksgiving

Roads, airports and even cruise terminals could be more crowded this year as nearly 80 million people are expected to travel during the Thanksgiving holiday, according to AAA. Stacey Barber, vice president of AAA Travel, on Monday said Thanksgiving is the busiest holiday for travel and new records are expected to be set in all forms of transportation, including cruising.

NBC News reports that for the first time, the AAA's annual prediction includes the Tuesday before and Monday after Thanksgiving to better reflect people's traveling habits. The majority of those trips, 71.7 million, will be by car, meaning 1.3 million more travelers will be on the road compared to last year. Gas prices are lower than the $3.26 per gallon national average during the holiday in 2023.

Of course, with more people on the road and at security checkpoints, there’s bound to be some delays, traffic jams and long lines. So make sure to plan accordingly. And be sure to check your local forecast. The National Weather Service’s Weather Prediction Center says that two strong storm systems—including the first major winter storm of the season—are forecast to bring snow, wind and rain across a large swath of the United States, starting this week.

The News, According to Influencers

Almost 40% of Americans under 30 now get their news from social media

More Americans are regularly getting their news from social media influencers, including 21% of all adults and 37% of surveyed 18 to 29-year-olds, according to a new report from the Pew Research Center. And with news on Monday that the Associated Press is laying off 8% of its workforce, the Pew report is just the latest sign that American news consumption will likely continue to skew away from traditional institutions in the coming years.

“News influencers have emerged as one of the key alternatives to traditional outlets as a news and information source for a lot of people, especially younger folks,” said the study’s co-author Galen Stocking, a senior computational social scientist at Pew Research Center. “And these influencers have really reached new levels of attention and prominence this year amid the presidential election.”

Gizmodo points out that the gender divide in the report is pretty interesting. Roughly 63% of the influencers were men, while 30% of the influencers were women, with the remainder nonbinary or gender not determined by researchers. TikTok had the highest percentage of female influencers at 45%, but men still made up a larger percentage of the biggest influencer accounts at 50%. The biggest gender gap was on YouTube, where 68% of the influencers were male and just 28% were female.

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