New Electric Mini to be made in Britain, Roblox comes to PlayStation
BMW has announced plans to build its next-generation electric Mini in Oxford after securing a Government funding package. The German-based manufacturer’s multimillion-pound investment to transform its existing plant will secure 4,000 high-quality jobs, according to ministers. Government sources declined to set out the level of taxpayer support being offered to BMW, but did not dispute the previously reported figure of £75 million.Rishi Sunak said the Government is securing jobs and growing the economy “by backing our car manufacturing industry”. Independent
Social media firms must remove animal cruelty content from their platforms or face the threat of substantial fines under the latest change to the online safety bill. Ministers said causing unnecessary suffering to an animal will become a priority offence in the bill, which means tech firms will have to proactively prevent such material from reaching users. Failure to do so could result in a fine of £18m, or up to 10% of a company’s global revenue. The technology secretary, Michelle Donelan, said animal cruelty was something an animal-friendly country like the UK should not tolerate. The Guardian
One of Rupert Murdoch’s top lieutenants has warned that AI threatens a “tsunami” of job losses and could crush readers under a weight of “maggot-ridden mind mould.” News Corporation chief executive Robert Thomson this week told a conference in San Francisco that the rapid rise of artificial intelligence was “epochal”. Thomson said that AI will lead to a “tsunami” of job losses. “From 2008 to 2020, 57pc of newsroom jobs in the United States have been lost,” he said. “We’re facing another wave, in this case, a tsunami potentially of job losses because of the impact of AI.” Telegraph
The massively popular children’s gaming platform Roblox has announced plans to launch on Sony’s PlayStation consoles. Roblox has more than 60 million players a day, according to the firm, but it has come under criticism over concerns about poor moderation of its content. Other announcements include a new way to make characters, a communication tool called Roblox Connect, and a full release on Meta’s VR platform Quest. It will be available on PlayStation 4 and PS5 in October 2023. BBC
As the UK prepares to ban the sales of petrol and diesel vehicles by 2030, concerns are emerging about the country’s readiness for the electric vehicle (EV) revolution. Recent data analysed by MakeMyHouseGreen suggests that the UK government is falling drastically behind its infrastructure targets. In January 2023, there were just 37,055 public EV chargers according to figures from the Department for Transport. By July 2023, this number had increased to 44,020. However, to meet the government’s ambitious target of 300,000 chargers by 2030, an additional 255,980 chargers must be installed over the next 6.5 years. Tech Digest
A new member of Volkswagen’s sporty, all-electric GTX stable is about to be unveiled in the shape of the incoming ID.7 GTX, but before that happens VW has released an even more performance-focused concept – the ID.X Performance. Volkswagen calls the car its “vision of an all-electric sports limousine” – which is what we assumed the ID.7 GTX would be, but the ID.X Performance turns up the wick, both visually and technically…This ID.X Performance features plenty of aggressive exterior tweaks over the ID.7 however. There’s a new splitter up front and a large rear diffuser – both made from carbon fibre. Autoexpress
NASA has produced enough oxygen on Mars to sustain an astronaut for a few hours in a world-first experiment. The Perseverance rover, which landed on the red planet in February 2021, has been periodically burning through the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide to generate small amounts of oxygen for more than two years. Using a device no larger than a microwave, they were able to extract 122g of oxygen in total – which can support an astronaut for about three hours. Sky News
