Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio. And how the tech are you. It's time for the tech news for Thursday, March second in twenty twenty three. And AI is on the brink of changing the world for the better, with the potential to boost the world economy by nearly sixteen trillion dollars in just a few years, or it's all overblown and far less impressive than you think. My first two stories take these very different perspectives. So first up from Markets Insider is a piece that's titled Artificial intelligence is on the brink of an iPhone moment and can boost the world economy by fifteen point seven trillion dollars in seven years. Bank of America says, now, command Markets Insider, you can at least save some of the content for the actual article. It doesn't all have to go into the headline, but yeah. Bank of America sent on a message to clients outlining why the financial institution believes that AI is poised to change things forever, similar to how the iPhone helped transform the web from something most folks access through computers into a mobile experience, and honestly, that transformation was huge. Anyone who was just working in web based content at the time can tell you that and about how it was so incredibly disruptive. We still see that today, with companies offering up web page services designed to scale properly no matter what kind of device connects to the page. That doesn't even touch the rise of the app developer market, which really didn't exist in any significant way before the iPhone. Anyway, Bank of America says AI is about to do something on the same scale, and surely lots of companies are pushing AI prominently. That's something that we're coming to be revisiting throughout the early part of this episode. But I take some issue with the conclusions. For example, the Bank of America note includes this bit quote it took chat GPT just five days to reach one million users, one billion cumulative visits in three months, and an adoption rate which is three times tiktoks and ten times instagrams. The technology is developing exponentially end quote. Okay, that conclusion does not follow the premise. You know, I think you could say that the appeal of AI, the curiosity people have, the eagerness they have to try it out, the enthusiasm around it. All of that developed very quickly. Perhaps you could even argue it developed exponentially, but that is not the same thing as saying the technology itself is developing exponentially. I think conflating these two things is dangerous because it creates this heightened expectation for a technology that, depending upon its use, has often proven to be far from perfect or reliable. I do think it's undeniable that companies are going to continue to invest huge amounts of money in developing AI. That is unavoidable. It is happening and will continue to happen. But I would caution against making this assumption that it means we're going to see incredibly rapid development in the space. That might happen, but we might also just see more iterative improvements rather than these big revolutionary leaps. A huge increase in attention is not the same as an increase in a technology's capabilities. Meanwhile, Alex Shephard at New Republic has a different take from the Bank of America approach. It is far less bullish. Alex wrote an article titled artificial intelligence is dumb. Okay, So this is a much more straightforward but simple title, and Shepherd's argument is that AI is in the early stage of the Gartner hype cycle that we've talked about in recent episodes. That enthusiasm, excitement, and expectations are on the rise, but if you spend any meaningful amount of time with tools like chat GPT, you come to the realization that the actual experience doesn't quite live up to the hype surrounding it. Shepherd spends much of the article using chat GPT as the primary example, and argues that while the chat bot is remarkably more advanced than ones that preceded it, conclusions like what Bank of America has come to are largely unfounded. That the belief that we're on the precipice of disruptive transformation is really based on nothing more than conjecture and hypotheses, and that we lack any actual evidence to say that we are in fact on that precipice. Now, you could argue that these are the sort of things that we really can't assess until they've actually happened, but really it's only with hindsight that we can say that moment was when everything changed, because as you're living through the moment, you don't have enough perspective to judge whether or not it's that pivotal. It's only after the fact that you can make that assessment. I do think Shepherd makes some very good points, but I also find the arguments of the article to be a little too narrow and reductive. Shepherd says that those who claim AI is going to have transformational impact on absolutely everything are making quote unquote insane claims. But since the article almost exclusively focuses on chat GPT, I feel that leaving out all the other manifestations of AI undermines this argument, because we're already seeing how AI is transforming the world, both in good and bad ways. It can help optimize processes which might not be as world shattering as I don't know, facilitating meaningful conversations between different countries, but it does have an impact. We've seen it in stock trades, right, We've seen micro trading and ultra fast stock trades that's making economic impacts that are honestly still kind of difficult for us to get our minds wrapped around. And then we've also seen how AI can exacerbate social problems like the use of facial recognition technology among law enforcement. That kind of AI can really crank the knob on already difficult problems, like the fact that people of color are disproportionately targeted by law enforcement here in the United States. So while I think some versions of AI are undeniably dumber than what the hype suggests, we also have to remember AI does not manifest in just one way. AI is not just chat GPT. It's not just the idea of a seemingly sentient computer like how in two thousand and one. It's in all sorts of stuff, from robotics to stock trading to assisting surgeons with medical procedures. So I think we have to avoid using a specific product as the gateway to criticizing the general field. It's too reductive and it doesn't really help us get a deeper understanding of what's actually happening. Moving on to another version of AI. Earlier this week, Microsoft researchers unveiled Cosmos one. That's Kosmos one. This is a form of multimodal AI that, according to the researchers, can solve visual puzzles. It can recognize text visually, so it's not you know, reading, it's reading the text like a person would. So you could have like a picture that has text in it, and this would be able to distinguish what that text is. It can analyze pictures and be able to tell what's in those pictures and describe them. It can have natural language interactions, and that could mean we're about to have another change in how captures work. You know, captures are those tools that websites and other services use to determine whether or not you're human. And you know, you sometimes will encounter a capture that will ask you to do something like select all the images that have a fire hydrant in them, or a crosswalk or a motorcycle or whatever. Well that's because that's a task that most humans can do fairly easily, but bots additionally have a hard time doing it. Cosmos one, it seems, could potentially complete those kinds of captures. It could analyze images and determine which of them, if any, have the important feature in them. The whole history of captcha actually is a swinging pendulum between foiling AI and then creating AI that's capable of foiling the capture. So this is nothing new anyway. The Cosmos ones system was given tasks that included writing captions for images, like trying to describe what the image showed, and it even took a visual IQ test. Essentially, what the researchers did was they fed answers to a visual IQ test to the Cosmos one model and ask Cosmos whether or not the answer was correct. Now, according to the researchers, the AI scored below thirty percent on that visual i Q test. That's a pretty dang low score. Technically, I think it was between twenty two and twenty six percent. That's not good, but it is better than chance, so it's better than just answering yes or no randomly. So that suggests that this could be a starting point from which this model will improve over time. Microsoft has indicated that the company plans to make Cosmos one available to developers in the future, though at the time I'm recording this, there's not a timetable mentioned about when that might happen. This is a different approach than the generative pre trained transform of GPT, So again, we're looking at different ways that AI manifests. It's not always in just one single direction. There's so many different disciplines that are involved in AI, and many of them are approaching AI from a very different angle, and there's no telling which versions are going to end up being the most dominant further on, or if it will truly be a convergence of all these different disciplines that ultimately produces the AI that we're thinking of that will be truly transformational. The US Federal Trade Commission, or FTC has its own concerns about AI, and in this case, it has more to do with the way companies are marketing their services by including mentions of AI. The FTC is concerned the companies could be overpromising or misleading people by leaning on a trendy, buzzworthy term and concept. If you need to get investors to pour money and your startup, well, you know, just start using the term AI in there. Even if AI doesn't really make sense or you're not really using it, you're bound to snag a few fish with that approach because AI is such a crazy popular concept right now. That's the kind of thing that the FTC is concerned about. Folks who are trying to cash in on a popular but largely misunderstood technology. And as I've said many times, when you have excitement mixed with a lack of information or knowledge or understanding what you have is the perfect condition for scam artists, or if not outright scams, at least unethical folks who don't mind leaning a little heavily on ignorance in order to make some money. So, if there's something that sounds really exciting, like a huge investment opportunity, but you don't actually understand the underlying approach, whether it's a technology or otherwise, huge red flag, y'all, Huge red flag. I don't care if it's an NFT or if it's AI. It is something you need to take a step back from and start asking critical questions to get a better understanding. And it might turn out to be total legit, which is awesome. But if it's not total legit, it will benefit you from taking that step back. So the FTC is essentially sending a message out there, and it is saying, hey, be sure any claims y'all are making about AI in your products and services are substantive or else we're going to ask you to prove it, and if you can't prove it, you're gonna be in trouble. Mashable reports that Google layoffs have affected all sorts of employees that you wouldn't expect, like robots. I mean, I'm talking about actual robots. We usually worry about robots taking our jobs. Rarely do we think about them losing their jobs. All right, So the robots in question are one armed robots from the Everyday Robots team that was within Google. This team had been working on robots systems that could operate in consumer applications, and Google was actually making use of them in the Google HQ to do odd jobs like cleaning surfaces like counters and stuff and that kind of thing, or taking stuff to recycling bends. But it now sounds like this project has been dissolved, and in addition, the robots themselves have been shut down and packed away. So times are tough even for the machines out there. I guess Okay, we've got some more news stories we're going to be covering, but first let's take a quick break. All right, we're back. We still have another AI story, because, like I said, it has just become the big tech topic for twenty twenty three, unless something massive changes later in this year, which is entirely possible. I suspect that end of the year roundups in various tech podcasts are going to be talking about how this was the year of AI hype, but switching over to Apple. The company has a very well earned reputation for having an obtuse process for approving apps on its iOS platform. You can re countless descriptions among app developers of encountering frustration as they have submitted apps to Apple and only found them rejected and often with not enough direction for them to be able to make informed changes to the app so that it could actually pass. But recently, Apple send a communication to one app developer called blue Mail that was planning on pushing out an update to its existing email application, and this update would have incorporated an AI powered feature that could assist with language tools. Think of something kind of similar to chat GPT that could help you construct an email message. Apple has delayed this upgrade rollout, citing concerns with that the AI could end up generating inappropriate content and that the app developer needs to take that into consideration since children could be using the app. So Apple is telling blue Mail that if it wishes to incorporate this AI feature, that it also has to change the app so that the app is now going to be restricted to users who are seventeen years or older, just in case the AI starts to generate offensive messages or material that could be considered harmful for kids. Blue Mail has protested this decision. The company has argued that there are already apps on the iOS platform that are not held under the same sort of restriction, but that have some similarity in capability, and the company says that if it is forced to offer this email app with that restriction, the age restriction, that this harms visibility and discoverability, and it hurts the app's performance in the marketplace. Now, I do not doubt that there is an uneven landscape among apps on iOS. I don't think it's fair at all. I think there are far too many inconsistencies with apps that get the green light and apps that are prevented. I do not think it's a very transparent process at all. But I also think concerns about generative AI have some validity to them. If you just take the Nothing Forever show on Twitch, that's the AI generated show that creates an endless Seinfeld episode. That's proof that without careful guidelines and controls, you can run into problems So for those who don't remember, Twitch actually temporarily banned the Nothing Forever show the channel because they had temporarily reverted to an earlier version of GPT when they encountered some technical issues, and the earlier version of GPT did not have the content restrictions that the more recent version had, and the show began to generate content that was homophobic in nature. They violated twitch his policies. They got a ban. Well, that show that these AI tools can end up being problematic. I know that's a word we use to the point where people complain about it's use, but it's it's an inappropriate word in this case. So I do get the concern, but I also can sympathize with Blue Mail's argument that it's already an unfair playing ground on iOS. I don't think anyone comes out a winner in this one. Now, to talk about TikTok a bit, the American Civil Liberties Union or ACLU, has issued a statement protesting US House Bill one one five three. Now, this proposed bill would, according to the ACLU quote, effectively ban TikTok in the US end quote. This isn't about removing TikTok from government devices. But according to the ACLU, banning TikTok outright and similar platforms. So the official description of the bill is quote to provide a clarification of non applicability for regulation and prohibition relating to sensitive personal data under International Emergency Economic Powers Act and for other purposes. Quote. I wish I could tell you more about the text, but when I went online to read it, it had not yet been uploaded to the database, so I haven't been able to actually read the bill. The ACLU says that the US Congress quote must not censor entire platforms and strip Americans of their constitutional right to freedom of speech and expression. Quote and yeah, the right to free speech is one of the fundamental core values of the United States, send the First Amendment to the Constitution. But this is a complicated issue because TikTok critics worry that the app is on the back end, essentially performing as a data siphon and pulling in information that the Chinese government can then use as intelligence. And this information includes personal information about users, things like employer information, government information, and more like. People are using TikTok all over the place, so potentially, if you are gathering intelligence, you could comb through TikTok and look for stuff that could give you an advantage in that arena. So generally speaking, I tend to side with the ACLU on most topics, but this one is a little tricky, and I'm not sure where I land on this. I do have concerns about data security with TikTok, but then again, as a lot of people have pointed out, TikTok's practices are really not all that different from other platforms like Meta, YouTube, etc. It's just that those companies aren't owned by a Chinese company, right, But they are gathering the same kinds of information and more, and they're definitely exploiting it. So you can make a strong argument that we've already decided that handing over information to platforms is fine, and therefore it would be unfair to single out TikTok just because its parent company happens to be based in China. Plus, obviously, freedom of speech is critically important. I'm not really sure if banning a platform falls into the bucket of restricting free speech, but then I'm no constitutional expert either. Also, there's nothing stopping someone else from making a similar app. In fact, we've seen that right Instagram YouTube, Snapchat, and others have all introduced features that are extremely similar to what TikTok does. I think it's fair to say some of these have outright tried to copy what TikTok does, to varying degrees of success. So I don't know that eliminating a platform amounts to the same thing as eliminating Americans free speech. But again, I am not an expert on the subject matter, so I don't I am genuinely conflicted. I do not know what to think about this particular topic. TikTok itself is introducing features that are meant to limit screen time for younger users. So all TikTok users who are under eighteen will get a message when they hit sixteen minutes of screen time in a day. Once this rolls out, and at that point, the user will see a prompt asking for a passcode before they can continue watching content on TikTok. However, they can also disable the feature entirely, but after one hundred minutes of screen time in a day, they will receive a prompt that requires them to create a new daily limit. Now I'm not sure how effective this will actually be on limiting screen time, because to me. It sounds mostly like something that the average user would just kind of roll their eyes at and then disable and then continue on unless parents set the passcode and they don't tell their kids what the pass code is. But then if the user can actually just disable the feature, I find it hard to believe that most folks will say, ah, thank you, TikTok, where did the time go? I shall now go outside to take in the fresh air and play at sport or something. I guess you could say. I'm skeptical that this is going to make much of a difference. Some of the other features potentially could help parents keep an eye on how much time their kids are spending on the app that at least allows for intervention if usage spirals out of control. I'm glad I don't have kids, because I don't know how I would approach this one either. I'm also glad that TikTok was not a thing when I was a kid, because I have a feeling I would have been a hardcore addict of TikTok if I had had the opportunity to access it back when I was a kid. In the UK, a man named Duncan McCann has lodged a formal complaint with the country's Information Commissioner's Office or ICO, accusing YouTube of collecting information about the videos that children are watching within the UK and this is against an ICO children's code. YouTube responded by saying that the platform has never been intended for children under the age of thirteen, that accounts that are registered to young users follow protocol. They don't collect data on young users if that's the account that's connected to YouTube, and that for the younger kids. There's also the YouTube Kids platform, which also does not track activity and collect personal information. But McCann's argument is that a lot of kids are accessing YouTube on family accounts or on family devices that are under a parent's account, and that these kids, as they use the app, have their data and activity tracked. And you might be thinking, well, yeah, if YouTube is being told an adult is in charge of the account, then YouTube is going to treat the activity on that account as if it were any adult using it. So obviously it's going to track all the information. That's the YouTube business model. And you might wonder what McCann's solution to this problem is, And essentially he says the ideal solution would be to create an opt in system in which only accounts that are registered to adults would have the option to agree to having their activity tracked, kind of similar to how Apple approaches app tracking. So it becomes an opt in system, and the can believes that only a minority of users would ever opt into such a system, and I'm pretty sure he's right. But I also bet that if you forced that change on YouTube, it would result in such a drastic impact to the company's revenue that they would have to make drastic changes to operations or else it would become too expensive to run the business. Keep in mind, they are hosting hundreds of new hours of content every single minute. So as it stands, this matter is going to test the ICO Children's Code. The UK only put that code into operation in twenty twenty, so it's a pretty young set of rules. And this, to me starts to raise larger questions because if you start with the premise that a child could possibly access a particular device or account that belongs to an adult, does that mean that all online services from here on out have to be designed in such a way to assume by default that a child could be accessing it, Like, do you have to start thinking, well, a child might have gotten hold of their parents' iPhone, and because of that, we need to design this so it's child friendly, because obviously that would end up impacting everything. There are tons of apps that are not appropriate for children, whether because it's content or of the use. I mean, like banking apps would not be appropriate for children. Right, So if you start from that premise that you have to assume that a child could be using this, therefore you can't be tracking data or usage. It would mean that tons of things would have to change. So I'm very curious to see how this develops, because I don't see it as being sustainable. All Right, I've got four more stories to cover, so we're going to take another quick break. When we come back, we will wrap up tech news for this week. Okay, we're back, and here is a quick Airbnb story. I sometimes resist including Airbnb stories and tech stuff because the company kind of is a tech company, and kind of isn't. I mean, ultimately it is a tech company. It's just that our experience with Airbnb is more on the actual like either hosting a property or staying at a property, and not so much thinking about the back end that's making all this happen. However, in the case of this particular story, I think it really qualifies as a tech company. So sometimes Airbnb will issue a ban on a user and prevent that person from ever being able to make a reservation and an Airbnb property. There are a few reasons why airbb would do this. They might do it if someone has been reported as violating the rules, like if a host says, hey, you know, I opened up my home to this renter and they ended up causing an enormous amount of damage that I'm now going to have to address, that might be a reason. In some cases, it might be a background check. Airbnb does partner with a company that does rapid background checks. If that background check reveals that person has a criminal history, that could be a reason to get a ban. In fact, even in a few cases, the quote unquote criminal history has been one where someone was guilty or found guilty on a misdemeanor charge that wasn't remotely related to rental of property. There was one story about how someone had a misdemeanor of having their dog off a leash in an area that required dogs to be leashed, and that alone prevented them from being able to stay at Airbnb, and that does seem like that might be an overreach. And on the one hand, you can understand how a company like Airbnb would air on the side of draconian caution because Airbnb ultimately is matching prospective customers with hosts, and Airbnb does not own this property. In most cases, a host owns the property. So if Airbnb allows some I don't know, TV tossing rock Star to totally trash a host's home, there would be some pretty major problems. And Vice reports that Airbnb's policies now extend to folks who haven't broken any rules or have a criminal past, but they have been found to associate with someone who has already received a ban on Airbnb. So let's just say, for example, that you happen to be friends with somebody who occasionally makes bad life choices, this person goes and does something that gets them banned by Airbnb. Well, then you might find the next time you try to book a place that you've been banned by association because Airbnb did a little quick background check and saw through Instagram that you and this friend of yours had been on multiple trips together. And they're like, oh, well, they travel with this person who we've already banned, so now we're going to ban them too, even though they haven't been found to have done anything wrong themselves. Now there is an appeals process, but it's not very transparent. If you would like to learn more about this, I recommend the Vice Slash motherboard article. It's called Airbnb is banning people who are closely associated with already banned users. Over in Texas, Tesla has announced during an investor call that it will offer Texas Tesla owners an overnight home charging package that costs thirty dollars a month for unlimited overnight charging of their Tesla. This is to encourage Tesla owners to recharge their vehicles at night, and further will depend heavily on electricity generated by wind farms, so it comes from a sustainable source. Tesla executive Drew Baglino pointed out that quote Texas has a ton of wind, and in Texas, the wind blows at night end quote. According to Insider, the average monthly cost to charge a Tesla would typically amount to around fifty six dollars a month, so thirty dollars a month would be a bargain. Now there are restrictions. Only people who happen to live in an area of Texas that allows homeowners retail choice in electricity providers would be able to qualify, and they will already have to have a Tesla Powerwall battery installed inside their home. So they have to meet these these qualifiers first before they can be part of this particular incentive package. Now, on that same investor day call where we got this incentive announced, Elon Musk himself said that Tesla's humanoid robot program called Optimus, is one that he believes will lead to a future in which humanoid robots could potentially outnumber humans in a greater than one to one ratio, he said. He also said, quote you could sort of see a home use for robots. Certainly industrial uses for robots humanoid robots quote, I respectfully disagree. I think we've seen tons of examples of how humanoid robots are not always the best approach. In fact, they rarely are the best approach. Now, hear me out. The reason industrial processes are the way they are is in large part because we humans have certain abilities and certain limitations. For example, before we got to industrial robots, the way we build a car is not necessarily the best way to build it, full stop. It's the best way to build it based upon what we humans can do. But then we could also design robots to do stuff that humans can't do, which means we can actually make those processes better and more efficient and safer and less expensive. Because we can start from scratch and design an idealized industrial process that isn't limited by the capabilities or lack thereof, that human beings possess. Robots don't have to be humanoid at all, And in fact, making robots humanoid means the machines end up having but not identical limitations to human beings. So why would we limit ourselves to this? Why would we choose the humanoid robot approach if it means that we have to make all these other considerations just to make them work. Plus it turns out creating a really good humanoid robot is exceedingly difficult. Then you have to take into account how humans and robots will interact in social settings. You might spend a ton of time making a robot that works great in a laboratory setting and then find that once you put it into the same environment with humans, there are tons of problems that crop up that you didn't anticipate because you didn't take into account how humans would react to this machine. I guess what I'm saying is that I'm far more skeptical about humanoid robots being super useful, at least in the near term, because I'm not convinced they fix many problems and in fact might make some stuff a whole lot harder. Finally, DARPA, which is the US Department of Defenses agency that funds technology intended to advance the US's defense capabilities, has announced an initiative called the Speed and Runway Independent Technologies Program or SPRINT. According to the agency's director, Stephanie Tompkins, the goal is to develop aircraft that can take off and land without a runway, but also still have excellent speed and mobility. How the aircraft achieves these goals is not part of the brief, and that makes sense. DARPA's method is to propose an engineering challenge, like this is the goal we want to achieve. It comes down to various companies and research institutions to attempt to meet that goal, often taking very different pathways to try and achieve it. DARPA is really more about awarding contracts for these jobs. The agency itself is not some sort of skunk where its labor tory. Instead, it's more of an administrator that evaluates proposals from various sources and then chooses which ones to fund. As for why the Department of Defense would want runway independent aircraft, it's likely to make certain that the US would be capable of fielding aircraft even if an enemy were to target, say, military runways, because as it stands, no satellite information has pretty much blown the cover off of military runways and air fields. Once upon a time, there were secret air fields and secret runways on military installations that people just weren't aware of, at least not widely aware of. But satellite imagery has really changed that pretty dramatically, and even the fabled Area fifty one was not immune to this. You can easily imagine scenarios in which you might want to, say, evacuate people from a region. Maybe there's a natural disaster, maybe there's a military threat, and you want to send rescue operations to help evacuate the area, but you might not have access to a runway to land and then take off with your evacuation aircraft. So having a way to land in those kinds of conditions would be absolutely critical. It will be interesting to see how respondents will propose different solutions to this problem, because again DARPA did not specify anything. There was no mention of vertical takeoff and landing or any related technology. So we might end up seeing some really innovative solutions to this issue, and that's fascinating. In fact, I would argue that a lot of the technological advances we've seen from DARPA projects came as a result of DARPA defining the problem but giving all the different parties involved the freedom to craft their own solution to that problem. Really interesting stuff. All right, that's it for the news. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of Texts Stuff, feel free to reach out to me. One way to do that is to go over onto Twitter and tweet to the handle tech stuff HSW. Another way is to download the iHeartRadio app. It's free to download, free to use. Type tech Stuff in the little search field. He'll take you over to the tech Stuff page. You'll see a little microphone icon there. If you click on that, you can leave a voice message up to thirty seconds in length. I'll look forward to hearing from that, and I'll talk to you again really soon. 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Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio. And how the tech are you. It's time for the tech news for Thursday, March second in twenty twenty three. And AI is on the brink of changing the world for the better, with the potential to boost the world economy by nearly sixteen trillion dollars in just a few years, or it's all overblown and far less impressive than you think. My first two stories take these very different perspectives. So first up from Markets Insider is a piece that's titled Artificial intelligence is on the brink of an iPhone moment and can boost the world economy by fifteen point seven trillion dollars in seven years. Bank of America says, now, command Markets Insider, you can at least save some of the content for the actual article. It doesn't all have to go into the headline, but yeah. Bank of America sent on a message to clients outlining why the financial institution believes that AI is poised to change things forever, similar to how the iPhone helped transform the web from something most folks access through computers into a mobile experience, and honestly, that transformation was huge. Anyone who was just working in web based content at the time can tell you that and about how it was so incredibly disruptive. We still see that today, with companies offering up web page services designed to scale properly no matter what kind of device connects to the page. That doesn't even touch the rise of the app developer market, which really didn't exist in any significant way before the iPhone. Anyway, Bank of America says AI is about to do something on the same scale, and surely lots of companies are pushing AI prominently. That's something that we're coming to be revisiting throughout the early part of this episode. But I take some issue with the conclusions. For example, the Bank of America note includes this bit quote it took chat GPT just five days to reach one million users, one billion cumulative visits in three months, and an adoption rate which is three times tiktoks and ten times instagrams. The technology is developing exponentially end quote. Okay, that conclusion does not follow the premise. You know, I think you could say that the appeal of AI, the curiosity people have, the eagerness they have to try it out, the enthusiasm around it. All of that developed very quickly. Perhaps you could even argue it developed exponentially, but that is not the same thing as saying the technology itself is developing exponentially. I think conflating these two things is dangerous because it creates this heightened expectation for a technology that, depending upon its use, has often proven to be far from perfect or reliable. I do think it's undeniable that companies are going to continue to invest huge amounts of money in developing AI. That is unavoidable. It is happening and will continue to happen. But I would caution against making this assumption that it means we're going to see incredibly rapid development in the space. That might happen, but we might also just see more iterative improvements rather than these big revolutionary leaps. A huge increase in attention is not the same as an increase in a technology's capabilities. Meanwhile, Alex Shephard at New Republic has a different take from the Bank of America approach. It is far less bullish. Alex wrote an article titled artificial intelligence is dumb. Okay, So this is a much more straightforward but simple title, and Shepherd's argument is that AI is in the early stage of the Gartner hype cycle that we've talked about in recent episodes. That enthusiasm, excitement, and expectations are on the rise, but if you spend any meaningful amount of time with tools like chat GPT, you come to the realization that the actual experience doesn't quite live up to the hype surrounding it. Shepherd spends much of the article using chat GPT as the primary example, and argues that while the chat bot is remarkably more advanced than ones that preceded it, conclusions like what Bank of America has come to are largely unfounded. That the belief that we're on the precipice of disruptive transformation is really based on nothing more than conjecture and hypotheses, and that we lack any actual evidence to say that we are in fact on that precipice. Now, you could argue that these are the sort of things that we really can't assess until they've actually happened, but really it's only with hindsight that we can say that moment was when everything changed, because as you're living through the moment, you don't have enough perspective to judge whether or not it's that pivotal. It's only after the fact that you can make that assessment. I do think Shepherd makes some very good points, but I also find the arguments of the article to be a little too narrow and reductive. Shepherd says that those who claim AI is going to have transformational impact on absolutely everything are making quote unquote insane claims. But since the article almost exclusively focuses on chat GPT, I feel that leaving out all the other manifestations of AI undermines this argument, because we're already seeing how AI is transforming the world, both in good and bad ways. It can help optimize processes which might not be as world shattering as I don't know, facilitating meaningful conversations between different countries, but it does have an impact. We've seen it in stock trades, right, We've seen micro trading and ultra fast stock trades that's making economic impacts that are honestly still kind of difficult for us to get our minds wrapped around. And then we've also seen how AI can exacerbate social problems like the use of facial recognition technology among law enforcement. That kind of AI can really crank the knob on already difficult problems, like the fact that people of color are disproportionately targeted by law enforcement here in the United States. So while I think some versions of AI are undeniably dumber than what the hype suggests, we also have to remember AI does not manifest in just one way. AI is not just chat GPT. It's not just the idea of a seemingly sentient computer like how in two thousand and one. It's in all sorts of stuff, from robotics to stock trading to assisting surgeons with medical procedures. So I think we have to avoid using a specific product as the gateway to criticizing the general field. It's too reductive and it doesn't really help us get a deeper understanding of what's actually happening. Moving on to another version of AI. Earlier this week, Microsoft researchers unveiled Cosmos one. That's Kosmos one. This is a form of multimodal AI that, according to the researchers, can solve visual puzzles. It can recognize text visually, so it's not you know, reading, it's reading the text like a person would. So you could have like a picture that has text in it, and this would be able to distinguish what that text is. It can analyze pictures and be able to tell what's in those pictures and describe them. It can have natural language interactions, and that could mean we're about to have another change in how captures work. You know, captures are those tools that websites and other services use to determine whether or not you're human. And you know, you sometimes will encounter a capture that will ask you to do something like select all the images that have a fire hydrant in them, or a crosswalk or a motorcycle or whatever. Well that's because that's a task that most humans can do fairly easily, but bots additionally have a hard time doing it. Cosmos one, it seems, could potentially complete those kinds of captures. It could analyze images and determine which of them, if any, have the important feature in them. The whole history of captcha actually is a swinging pendulum between foiling AI and then creating AI that's capable of foiling the capture. So this is nothing new anyway. The Cosmos ones system was given tasks that included writing captions for images, like trying to describe what the image showed, and it even took a visual IQ test. Essentially, what the researchers did was they fed answers to a visual IQ test to the Cosmos one model and ask Cosmos whether or not the answer was correct. Now, according to the researchers, the AI scored below thirty percent on that visual i Q test. That's a pretty dang low score. Technically, I think it was between twenty two and twenty six percent. That's not good, but it is better than chance, so it's better than just answering yes or no randomly. So that suggests that this could be a starting point from which this model will improve over time. Microsoft has indicated that the company plans to make Cosmos one available to developers in the future, though at the time I'm recording this, there's not a timetable mentioned about when that might happen. This is a different approach than the generative pre trained transform of GPT, So again, we're looking at different ways that AI manifests. It's not always in just one single direction. There's so many different disciplines that are involved in AI, and many of them are approaching AI from a very different angle, and there's no telling which versions are going to end up being the most dominant further on, or if it will truly be a convergence of all these different disciplines that ultimately produces the AI that we're thinking of that will be truly transformational. The US Federal Trade Commission, or FTC has its own concerns about AI, and in this case, it has more to do with the way companies are marketing their services by including mentions of AI. The FTC is concerned the companies could be overpromising or misleading people by leaning on a trendy, buzzworthy term and concept. If you need to get investors to pour money and your startup, well, you know, just start using the term AI in there. Even if AI doesn't really make sense or you're not really using it, you're bound to snag a few fish with that approach because AI is such a crazy popular concept right now. That's the kind of thing that the FTC is concerned about. Folks who are trying to cash in on a popular but largely misunderstood technology. And as I've said many times, when you have excitement mixed with a lack of information or knowledge or understanding what you have is the perfect condition for scam artists, or if not outright scams, at least unethical folks who don't mind leaning a little heavily on ignorance in order to make some money. So, if there's something that sounds really exciting, like a huge investment opportunity, but you don't actually understand the underlying approach, whether it's a technology or otherwise, huge red flag, y'all, Huge red flag. I don't care if it's an NFT or if it's AI. It is something you need to take a step back from and start asking critical questions to get a better understanding. And it might turn out to be total legit, which is awesome. But if it's not total legit, it will benefit you from taking that step back. So the FTC is essentially sending a message out there, and it is saying, hey, be sure any claims y'all are making about AI in your products and services are substantive or else we're going to ask you to prove it, and if you can't prove it, you're gonna be in trouble. Mashable reports that Google layoffs have affected all sorts of employees that you wouldn't expect, like robots. I mean, I'm talking about actual robots. We usually worry about robots taking our jobs. Rarely do we think about them losing their jobs. All right, So the robots in question are one armed robots from the Everyday Robots team that was within Google. This team had been working on robots systems that could operate in consumer applications, and Google was actually making use of them in the Google HQ to do odd jobs like cleaning surfaces like counters and stuff and that kind of thing, or taking stuff to recycling bends. But it now sounds like this project has been dissolved, and in addition, the robots themselves have been shut down and packed away. So times are tough even for the machines out there. I guess Okay, we've got some more news stories we're going to be covering, but first let's take a quick break. All right, we're back. We still have another AI story, because, like I said, it has just become the big tech topic for twenty twenty three, unless something massive changes later in this year, which is entirely possible. I suspect that end of the year roundups in various tech podcasts are going to be talking about how this was the year of AI hype, but switching over to Apple. The company has a very well earned reputation for having an obtuse process for approving apps on its iOS platform. You can re countless descriptions among app developers of encountering frustration as they have submitted apps to Apple and only found them rejected and often with not enough direction for them to be able to make informed changes to the app so that it could actually pass. But recently, Apple send a communication to one app developer called blue Mail that was planning on pushing out an update to its existing email application, and this update would have incorporated an AI powered feature that could assist with language tools. Think of something kind of similar to chat GPT that could help you construct an email message. Apple has delayed this upgrade rollout, citing concerns with that the AI could end up generating inappropriate content and that the app developer needs to take that into consideration since children could be using the app. So Apple is telling blue Mail that if it wishes to incorporate this AI feature, that it also has to change the app so that the app is now going to be restricted to users who are seventeen years or older, just in case the AI starts to generate offensive messages or material that could be considered harmful for kids. Blue Mail has protested this decision. The company has argued that there are already apps on the iOS platform that are not held under the same sort of restriction, but that have some similarity in capability, and the company says that if it is forced to offer this email app with that restriction, the age restriction, that this harms visibility and discoverability, and it hurts the app's performance in the marketplace. Now, I do not doubt that there is an uneven landscape among apps on iOS. I don't think it's fair at all. I think there are far too many inconsistencies with apps that get the green light and apps that are prevented. I do not think it's a very transparent process at all. But I also think concerns about generative AI have some validity to them. If you just take the Nothing Forever show on Twitch, that's the AI generated show that creates an endless Seinfeld episode. That's proof that without careful guidelines and controls, you can run into problems So for those who don't remember, Twitch actually temporarily banned the Nothing Forever show the channel because they had temporarily reverted to an earlier version of GPT when they encountered some technical issues, and the earlier version of GPT did not have the content restrictions that the more recent version had, and the show began to generate content that was homophobic in nature. They violated twitch his policies. They got a ban. Well, that show that these AI tools can end up being problematic. I know that's a word we use to the point where people complain about it's use, but it's it's an inappropriate word in this case. So I do get the concern, but I also can sympathize with Blue Mail's argument that it's already an unfair playing ground on iOS. I don't think anyone comes out a winner in this one. Now, to talk about TikTok a bit, the American Civil Liberties Union or ACLU, has issued a statement protesting US House Bill one one five three. Now, this proposed bill would, according to the ACLU quote, effectively ban TikTok in the US end quote. This isn't about removing TikTok from government devices. But according to the ACLU, banning TikTok outright and similar platforms. So the official description of the bill is quote to provide a clarification of non applicability for regulation and prohibition relating to sensitive personal data under International Emergency Economic Powers Act and for other purposes. Quote. I wish I could tell you more about the text, but when I went online to read it, it had not yet been uploaded to the database, so I haven't been able to actually read the bill. The ACLU says that the US Congress quote must not censor entire platforms and strip Americans of their constitutional right to freedom of speech and expression. Quote and yeah, the right to free speech is one of the fundamental core values of the United States, send the First Amendment to the Constitution. But this is a complicated issue because TikTok critics worry that the app is on the back end, essentially performing as a data siphon and pulling in information that the Chinese government can then use as intelligence. And this information includes personal information about users, things like employer information, government information, and more like. People are using TikTok all over the place, so potentially, if you are gathering intelligence, you could comb through TikTok and look for stuff that could give you an advantage in that arena. So generally speaking, I tend to side with the ACLU on most topics, but this one is a little tricky, and I'm not sure where I land on this. I do have concerns about data security with TikTok, but then again, as a lot of people have pointed out, TikTok's practices are really not all that different from other platforms like Meta, YouTube, etc. It's just that those companies aren't owned by a Chinese company, right, But they are gathering the same kinds of information and more, and they're definitely exploiting it. So you can make a strong argument that we've already decided that handing over information to platforms is fine, and therefore it would be unfair to single out TikTok just because its parent company happens to be based in China. Plus, obviously, freedom of speech is critically important. I'm not really sure if banning a platform falls into the bucket of restricting free speech, but then I'm no constitutional expert either. Also, there's nothing stopping someone else from making a similar app. In fact, we've seen that right Instagram YouTube, Snapchat, and others have all introduced features that are extremely similar to what TikTok does. I think it's fair to say some of these have outright tried to copy what TikTok does, to varying degrees of success. So I don't know that eliminating a platform amounts to the same thing as eliminating Americans free speech. But again, I am not an expert on the subject matter, so I don't I am genuinely conflicted. I do not know what to think about this particular topic. TikTok itself is introducing features that are meant to limit screen time for younger users. So all TikTok users who are under eighteen will get a message when they hit sixteen minutes of screen time in a day. Once this rolls out, and at that point, the user will see a prompt asking for a passcode before they can continue watching content on TikTok. However, they can also disable the feature entirely, but after one hundred minutes of screen time in a day, they will receive a prompt that requires them to create a new daily limit. Now I'm not sure how effective this will actually be on limiting screen time, because to me. It sounds mostly like something that the average user would just kind of roll their eyes at and then disable and then continue on unless parents set the passcode and they don't tell their kids what the pass code is. But then if the user can actually just disable the feature, I find it hard to believe that most folks will say, ah, thank you, TikTok, where did the time go? I shall now go outside to take in the fresh air and play at sport or something. I guess you could say. I'm skeptical that this is going to make much of a difference. Some of the other features potentially could help parents keep an eye on how much time their kids are spending on the app that at least allows for intervention if usage spirals out of control. I'm glad I don't have kids, because I don't know how I would approach this one either. I'm also glad that TikTok was not a thing when I was a kid, because I have a feeling I would have been a hardcore addict of TikTok if I had had the opportunity to access it back when I was a kid. In the UK, a man named Duncan McCann has lodged a formal complaint with the country's Information Commissioner's Office or ICO, accusing YouTube of collecting information about the videos that children are watching within the UK and this is against an ICO children's code. YouTube responded by saying that the platform has never been intended for children under the age of thirteen, that accounts that are registered to young users follow protocol. They don't collect data on young users if that's the account that's connected to YouTube, and that for the younger kids. There's also the YouTube Kids platform, which also does not track activity and collect personal information. But McCann's argument is that a lot of kids are accessing YouTube on family accounts or on family devices that are under a parent's account, and that these kids, as they use the app, have their data and activity tracked. And you might be thinking, well, yeah, if YouTube is being told an adult is in charge of the account, then YouTube is going to treat the activity on that account as if it were any adult using it. So obviously it's going to track all the information. That's the YouTube business model. And you might wonder what McCann's solution to this problem is, And essentially he says the ideal solution would be to create an opt in system in which only accounts that are registered to adults would have the option to agree to having their activity tracked, kind of similar to how Apple approaches app tracking. So it becomes an opt in system, and the can believes that only a minority of users would ever opt into such a system, and I'm pretty sure he's right. But I also bet that if you forced that change on YouTube, it would result in such a drastic impact to the company's revenue that they would have to make drastic changes to operations or else it would become too expensive to run the business. Keep in mind, they are hosting hundreds of new hours of content every single minute. So as it stands, this matter is going to test the ICO Children's Code. The UK only put that code into operation in twenty twenty, so it's a pretty young set of rules. And this, to me starts to raise larger questions because if you start with the premise that a child could possibly access a particular device or account that belongs to an adult, does that mean that all online services from here on out have to be designed in such a way to assume by default that a child could be accessing it, Like, do you have to start thinking, well, a child might have gotten hold of their parents' iPhone, and because of that, we need to design this so it's child friendly, because obviously that would end up impacting everything. There are tons of apps that are not appropriate for children, whether because it's content or of the use. I mean, like banking apps would not be appropriate for children. Right, So if you start from that premise that you have to assume that a child could be using this, therefore you can't be tracking data or usage. It would mean that tons of things would have to change. So I'm very curious to see how this develops, because I don't see it as being sustainable. All Right, I've got four more stories to cover, so we're going to take another quick break. When we come back, we will wrap up tech news for this week. Okay, we're back, and here is a quick Airbnb story. I sometimes resist including Airbnb stories and tech stuff because the company kind of is a tech company, and kind of isn't. I mean, ultimately it is a tech company. It's just that our experience with Airbnb is more on the actual like either hosting a property or staying at a property, and not so much thinking about the back end that's making all this happen. However, in the case of this particular story, I think it really qualifies as a tech company. So sometimes Airbnb will issue a ban on a user and prevent that person from ever being able to make a reservation and an Airbnb property. There are a few reasons why airbb would do this. They might do it if someone has been reported as violating the rules, like if a host says, hey, you know, I opened up my home to this renter and they ended up causing an enormous amount of damage that I'm now going to have to address, that might be a reason. In some cases, it might be a background check. Airbnb does partner with a company that does rapid background checks. If that background check reveals that person has a criminal history, that could be a reason to get a ban. In fact, even in a few cases, the quote unquote criminal history has been one where someone was guilty or found guilty on a misdemeanor charge that wasn't remotely related to rental of property. There was one story about how someone had a misdemeanor of having their dog off a leash in an area that required dogs to be leashed, and that alone prevented them from being able to stay at Airbnb, and that does seem like that might be an overreach. And on the one hand, you can understand how a company like Airbnb would air on the side of draconian caution because Airbnb ultimately is matching prospective customers with hosts, and Airbnb does not own this property. In most cases, a host owns the property. So if Airbnb allows some I don't know, TV tossing rock Star to totally trash a host's home, there would be some pretty major problems. And Vice reports that Airbnb's policies now extend to folks who haven't broken any rules or have a criminal past, but they have been found to associate with someone who has already received a ban on Airbnb. So let's just say, for example, that you happen to be friends with somebody who occasionally makes bad life choices, this person goes and does something that gets them banned by Airbnb. Well, then you might find the next time you try to book a place that you've been banned by association because Airbnb did a little quick background check and saw through Instagram that you and this friend of yours had been on multiple trips together. And they're like, oh, well, they travel with this person who we've already banned, so now we're going to ban them too, even though they haven't been found to have done anything wrong themselves. Now there is an appeals process, but it's not very transparent. If you would like to learn more about this, I recommend the Vice Slash motherboard article. It's called Airbnb is banning people who are closely associated with already banned users. Over in Texas, Tesla has announced during an investor call that it will offer Texas Tesla owners an overnight home charging package that costs thirty dollars a month for unlimited overnight charging of their Tesla. This is to encourage Tesla owners to recharge their vehicles at night, and further will depend heavily on electricity generated by wind farms, so it comes from a sustainable source. Tesla executive Drew Baglino pointed out that quote Texas has a ton of wind, and in Texas, the wind blows at night end quote. According to Insider, the average monthly cost to charge a Tesla would typically amount to around fifty six dollars a month, so thirty dollars a month would be a bargain. Now there are restrictions. Only people who happen to live in an area of Texas that allows homeowners retail choice in electricity providers would be able to qualify, and they will already have to have a Tesla Powerwall battery installed inside their home. So they have to meet these these qualifiers first before they can be part of this particular incentive package. Now, on that same investor day call where we got this incentive announced, Elon Musk himself said that Tesla's humanoid robot program called Optimus, is one that he believes will lead to a future in which humanoid robots could potentially outnumber humans in a greater than one to one ratio, he said. He also said, quote you could sort of see a home use for robots. Certainly industrial uses for robots humanoid robots quote, I respectfully disagree. I think we've seen tons of examples of how humanoid robots are not always the best approach. In fact, they rarely are the best approach. Now, hear me out. The reason industrial processes are the way they are is in large part because we humans have certain abilities and certain limitations. For example, before we got to industrial robots, the way we build a car is not necessarily the best way to build it, full stop. It's the best way to build it based upon what we humans can do. But then we could also design robots to do stuff that humans can't do, which means we can actually make those processes better and more efficient and safer and less expensive. Because we can start from scratch and design an idealized industrial process that isn't limited by the capabilities or lack thereof, that human beings possess. Robots don't have to be humanoid at all, And in fact, making robots humanoid means the machines end up having but not identical limitations to human beings. So why would we limit ourselves to this? Why would we choose the humanoid robot approach if it means that we have to make all these other considerations just to make them work. Plus it turns out creating a really good humanoid robot is exceedingly difficult. Then you have to take into account how humans and robots will interact in social settings. You might spend a ton of time making a robot that works great in a laboratory setting and then find that once you put it into the same environment with humans, there are tons of problems that crop up that you didn't anticipate because you didn't take into account how humans would react to this machine. I guess what I'm saying is that I'm far more skeptical about humanoid robots being super useful, at least in the near term, because I'm not convinced they fix many problems and in fact might make some stuff a whole lot harder. Finally, DARPA, which is the US Department of Defenses agency that funds technology intended to advance the US's defense capabilities, has announced an initiative called the Speed and Runway Independent Technologies Program or SPRINT. According to the agency's director, Stephanie Tompkins, the goal is to develop aircraft that can take off and land without a runway, but also still have excellent speed and mobility. How the aircraft achieves these goals is not part of the brief, and that makes sense. DARPA's method is to propose an engineering challenge, like this is the goal we want to achieve. It comes down to various companies and research institutions to attempt to meet that goal, often taking very different pathways to try and achieve it. DARPA is really more about awarding contracts for these jobs. The agency itself is not some sort of skunk where its labor tory. Instead, it's more of an administrator that evaluates proposals from various sources and then chooses which ones to fund. As for why the Department of Defense would want runway independent aircraft, it's likely to make certain that the US would be capable of fielding aircraft even if an enemy were to target, say, military runways, because as it stands, no satellite information has pretty much blown the cover off of military runways and air fields. Once upon a time, there were secret air fields and secret runways on military installations that people just weren't aware of, at least not widely aware of. But satellite imagery has really changed that pretty dramatically, and even the fabled Area fifty one was not immune to this. You can easily imagine scenarios in which you might want to, say, evacuate people from a region. Maybe there's a natural disaster, maybe there's a military threat, and you want to send rescue operations to help evacuate the area, but you might not have access to a runway to land and then take off with your evacuation aircraft. So having a way to land in those kinds of conditions would be absolutely critical. It will be interesting to see how respondents will propose different solutions to this problem, because again DARPA did not specify anything. There was no mention of vertical takeoff and landing or any related technology. So we might end up seeing some really innovative solutions to this issue, and that's fascinating. In fact, I would argue that a lot of the technological advances we've seen from DARPA projects came as a result of DARPA defining the problem but giving all the different parties involved the freedom to craft their own solution to that problem. Really interesting stuff. All right, that's it for the news. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of Texts Stuff, feel free to reach out to me. One way to do that is to go over onto Twitter and tweet to the handle tech stuff HSW. Another way is to download the iHeartRadio app. It's free to download, free to use. Type tech Stuff in the little search field. He'll take you over to the tech Stuff page. You'll see a little microphone icon there. If you click on that, you can leave a voice message up to thirty seconds in length. I'll look forward to hearing from that, and I'll talk to you again really soon. 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