No slowing down on the smart stuff, ok?

And Happy Holidays 🎄

Welcome to Cautious Optimism, a newsletter on tech, business and power.

Tuesday! Christmas is just around the corner, which means that news is slowing. We’re running brief today, but will return at full-force on Friday. May you get a little time in the next few days to breathe, rest, hug your loved ones, and eat something delicious. Hugs! — Alex

Things That Matter

We’re not ready for kids and AI: News that folks have found out how to trick popular image models to create sexualized images of other people does not shock; news that sexual deepfakes are causing great harm amongst the young is also not a surprise.

This story of a 13-year-old girl being harassed with AI-generated nude images featuring her face, her school failing her, and her eventual expulsion is infuriating. But what are we going to do about the problem of it being trivial today to create sexualized images of anyone, anytime, in an era of zero-cost distribution?

Ethical actors in the AI space — your OpenAIs and Googles, which have hard rules against the use of their technology for such activity — are just one piece of the AI puzzle. You can download a host of image-generating AI models (here’s a list of 90,360 from Hugging Face), many of which won’t prove fit for purpose. But some will, and if there’s one thing kids always seem to figure out, it’s how to use technology in a manner that adults do not want them to.

• As open-source AI models become more powerful, the ability of major American tech companies to use internal policy as a check against kids using AI to harm their peers will collapse, if it hasn’t already.

There’s no putting the AI back in the toothpaste tube. So what are we going to do? I don’t want to read one more story like the one linked above. But I think the only way to manage that would be to avoid reading the news until I’m dead.

Speaking of unstoppable forces: Over in Europe, electric cars are gaining share. From 13.4% in 2024 to 16.9% in 2025, to be precise (January-November, European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association data). Over the same time frame, hybrids grew from 30.6% to 34.6% market share. That’s more than half of cars sold in Europe featuring a battery at present. In countries like Norway, electric cars (BEVs, in industry parlance) have gained near complete market dominance.

I view the transition from ICE-powered vehicles to electric cars as inevitable. Why? Because I’ve owned and driven both, the lower maintenance profile of electric cars is glorious. Fuck your spark plugs, I just want to go. (They are also quite zippy.)

Speaking of which, I learned to drive in manual-transmission, internal-combustion engine trucks and cars. When I was young and stupid, I held a little pride that I could drive stick. Unlike most of my friends who had only seen automatically shifting vehicles, I could actually drive.

What a silly view. Who cares how you shift, or what makes your car go? You just want to get to where you are going!

Thus, more and more electric cars, and, in time, more and more self-driving electric cars. Again, who cares about the process when what you want is the result of the means of conveyance?

Hence my surprise that China is hitting the brakes on self-driving cars on its roads. Here’s Semafor:

A fatal accident led China to slow its plans for self-driving cars.

News of the high-speed crash in March, unlike previous incidents, evaded Beijing’s censors and spread widely.

Automakers had been expecting widespread approvals of “level 3” self-driving, in which drivers can take their eyes off the road — some even started mass-producing cars — but the crash, and testing revealing only US-made Teslas met safety requirements, made regulators cautious.

This makes as much sense as arguing for only manual-transmission cars, or only petrol-based engines. We often cling to the past longer than we should. Buying the truck I first learned to drive — a massive F-250 with a gearshift erupting out of the floorboards like the Detroit Leaning Tower of Torque — today would be, to me, insanity.

Dan Smedley

That’s precisely how I feel about human-driven cars. They are more dangerous, and I hold life precious. Thus all-electric Waymos and Tesla Robotaxis and Zoox boxes spark much joy. Please put me in the wheeled toaster that handles the work and keeps myself, my kids, and my community safe.

The transition to self-driving cars, like the swap to electric cars, makes good sense. And we’re slow-walking it as a species. You can’t logically fret about self-driving cars at their current level of sophistication if you are content to allow texting youth to drive Suburbans. And I do not begrudge the youth their mobility; I recall the power of the moment I first drove away from my parents’ house with no one else in the car and myself astride the wheel.

No slowing down on the smart stuff, ok?