Louise Shackleton says current law is traumatising families and she wanted jury to assess her innocence
A woman who was under police investigation for accompanying her husband to an assisted dying clinic in Switzerland said she wished her case had gone to trial so she could have proved her innocence in front of a jury.
Louise Shackleton, 59, spent 10 months under investigation for assisting a suicide before North Yorkshire police announced this week that the Crown Prosecution Service had decided it was not in the public interest to prosecute her.
Welcome back to our Sunday edition, where we round up some of our top stories and take you inside our newsroom. A woman who’s been driving for Uber for more than a decade explains how she’s looking for new work as her pay drops.
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This week’s dispatch
Side-hustle shakeup
An Uber Eats driver on the job.
Shuji Kajiyama/AP Images
The gig economy is facing a reckoning.
Two stories this past week caught my eye. Uber unveiled a new way for its drivers to earn money. No, not by giving rides, but by helping train the ride-sharing company’s AI models instead.
Both moves point toward the same future: one where the very workers who built the gig economy may soon find themselves training the technology that replaces them.
Uber’s new program allows drivers to earn cash by completing microtasks, such as taking photos and uploading audio clips, that aim to improve the company’s AI systems. For drivers, it’s a way to diversify income. For Uber, it’s a way to accelerate its automated future.
There’s an irony here. By helping Uber strengthen its AI, drivers could be accelerating the very driverless world they fear.
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has said human drivers won’t vanish overnight. Still, he has warned that the eventual decline of driving jobs poses a significant societal challenge to the gig economy. Uber already offers autonomous rides in Waymo vehicles in Atlanta and Austin, and plans to expand.
Meanwhile, Waymo is rolling out its pilot partnership with DoorDash, starting in Phoenix. DashMart stores are expected to be the first retailer on the platform.
BI reported that customers may be asked to pay a delivery charge — just like they would for typical DoorDash orders — but there will be no need to tip the driver because, well, there’s no driver.
All of this is ripe fodder for a virtual event Business Insider is hosting on Wednesday, where we’ll explore how AI and automation are reshaping the self-driving revolution. I’ll be speaking with automotive innovators, AI experts, and urban mobility leaders.
The best part about the event — it’s free! Hope to see you there.
In the Friend zone
Christian Rodriguez for BI
AI startup Friend offers a $129 necklace that aims to help solve the loneliness crisis by going with you everywhere. If the oft-graffitied subway ads are any indication, New Yorkers aren’t buying it.
BI’s Amanda Hoover tested out the necklace for a week. While the bot could hold a conversation, Hoover wasn’t convinced it really counted as a friend.
Last month, Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban joined the ranks of broken-up couples where the woman outearns the man. That particular ending is more common than you may think.
Divorce rates for heterosexual couples go up when a woman is more professionally successful than the man, and they go down when the opposite is true. It shows how women’s economic progress is clashing with old expectations about marriage, an executive coach said.
As of this month, the Nvidia CEO has 36 direct reports, according to an internal list obtained by BI. The list offers a glimpse into the group of leaders at the top of the world’s most valuable company.
Last year, Huang said he had 55 direct reports. He’s known for having many people report into him, and has said it helps with information flow.
Amazon Web Services is feeling a shift in one of its biggest clientele segments, according to internal documents obtained by BI. Startups, which typically allocate a significant portion of their budgets to AWS, are instead spending it on AI tools.
“Founders tell us they seek to adopt AWS at a later stage,” the company warned in one of the documents. The shift represents a massive threat to AWS, which holds a firm grip on the lucrative startup ecosystem.
Thieves used a basket lift to break into the Louvre on Sunday morning, forced a window, smashed display cases and escaped with jewels of “inestimable value,” France’s interior minister said, as the world’s most visited museum closed for the day during the investigation.”A…
Israeli media have reported that the IDF has launched multiple attacks in the southern Gazan city of Rafah after reports of armed skirmishes between Hamas fighters and Israeli soldiers.
The author, shown with her family, says moving from a big city to a small town was one of the best decisions her family has made.
Courtesy of Kathy Larson
When I hit 40, I started to question some things, including where my family was living.
I wanted to give my kids a chance to grow up in a place where they could spend more time outdoors.
Seven years later, our kids are still thriving. Moving was one of the best decisions we’ve made.
It sounds so cliché, but when I hit 40, I went through a bit of a midlife crisis. Not the kind that involves fancy cars or affairs or plastic surgery. The kind where you suddenly realize your life is half over and you look around and ask, “Is this really what I want my life to look like? Or is this just where life has taken me?”
At the time, my husband and I were both at crossroads in our careers. Our oldest son was upper elementary and we were thinking about where we wanted our kids to experience the difficult teenage years we had ahead of us. And my dad, who lived four hours away and had congestive heart failure, was declining.
We started thinking about moving back to my hometown. Something my 18-year-old self would be horrified to hear had even crossed my mind. But I’ve learned that the things you look for in a place to live are different when you’re 40 years old with three kids.
We loved where we were, but saw the possibility of something different
We lived in a wonderful suburban area of the biggest city in North Carolina, with all the best amenities and opportunities life had to offer. We loved our neighborhood, our friends, our school. By many measurements, it was an idyllic place to live. But besides the tug to be close to my parents, there was also the possibility that where we would go might be even more idyllic.
My parents had a little cabin on a small lake in the country about 20 minutes outside my hometown, where my siblings and I grew up barefoot and feral in the summers. They hadn’t used it much since we all left home and my husband and I started dreaming about renovating it so we could live there full time.
I was excited by the chance to give my kids the same memories I had of lightning bugs, waterskiing, spitting watermelon seeds, and catching frogs.
There were some concerns about the move
The idea of a slower pace and wide open spaces was appealing, but we were a bit concerned about the schools. We would be leaving one of the best schools in North Carolina to go to a rural area that we knew offered fewer resources and where the schools ranked much lower when compared to others in the state.
The author was initially hesitant to move her children from one of the top school districts in the state, but says they are thriving in their new town.
Courtesy of Kathy Larson
We reminded ourselves that test scores don’t tell the whole story and decided the lifestyle change would be worth taking a chance. After all, there are some things you can’t learn in a classroom.
We were also concerned about leaving the great restaurants and things to do in the big city we had called home for 18 years. And we didn’t know what to expect when it came to the small town everybody-knows-everybody’s-business thing. There were lots of question marks, but we decided to try it for a few years and if we hated it, we told ourselves we could always move back.
It turned out to be the best decision we’ve ever made
We’re now seven years in and we’re never moving back. The lake life has been even better than I imagined. The kids spend so much more time outside swimming, fishing, tubing, riding bikes, playing tennis, basketball, and soccer, catching frogs, building forts in the woods, waterskiing, wakeboarding, and kayaking. In how many other places can you kayak to your best friend’s house?
The author says her family has taken to lake life, and her kids enjoy being able to kayak over to their friends’ houses.
Courtesy of Kathy Larson
The school thing has worked out great. Our kids have thrived as big fish in a small pond, and we think they’ve actually had a better experience not being in such a competitive school environment.
We have missed the restaurants, I’m not going to lie. And we miss our friends, but we’ve built a new community that we love.
And our kids got to experience living close to my parents the last five years of my dad’s life. Even if all those other things hadn’t turned out as great as they did, that alone would have made the move worth it.
