Good Morning and Happy Tuesday. Welcome to issue 56 of The Tech Stop.

Waymo recalls AI vehicles, boosting employees with AI raises wages, hardware prices soar, and AI tools increase human workloads.

1. Waymo recalled 4,000 autonomous vehicles after failures to recognise road works. Current AI systems cannot handle dynamic conditions, which could be catastrophic. More.

   
   POV: Audit sites for autonomous or semi-autonomous vehicles, and confirm that geofencing, exclusion zones, and signage meet a higher standard.
   

2. Companies using AI to augment employees are seeing headcount and wage growth, outperforming firms pursuing automation-led headcount reduction. Evidence points toward a tightening market for technical staff. More.
   
   POV: Pause workforce reduction plans linked to AI automation, and present findings to the board for a revised AI investment framework.
   

3. DRAM and storage prices up, with Apple, Samsung, Dell, and others already raising hardware prices. More.
   
   POV: Accelerate purchases of approved devices before further price increases.
   

4. AI automation tools are generating more work requiring human oversight, not less, with developers managing multiple simultaneous AI agents reporting rising cognitive load, no recovery time, and growing burnout risk. More.

   
   POV: Do not approve deployments on the assumption that AI saves time without that overhead being explicitly accounted for in project plans.
   
   Something to keep an eye on: The rapid advancement of high-performance AI chips has created a severe energy crisis for data centers, which require massive amounts of electricity both to power intensive computations and to cool down the resulting heat.
   
   That’s all for this week folks, see you same time, same place, next week 🙌