Clean

Tech News: The Political War Against Social Media

Published Jan 26, 2024, 8:05 PM

From New York City to the state of Florida, politicians are getting serious as they face off against social media companies like Meta TikTok. Plus, we have a bunch of news around AI, an update on Tesla that has investors upset and we say farewell to an amazing little helicopter on Mars.

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 iHeart Podcasts and how the tech are you? It is Friday, January twenty sixth, twenty twenty four, and I thought maybe we would talk about some tech news. And we've got a lot of news that we could touch on due to the fact that I was out of commission for most of the month. But I figure we're just going to focus on what's recent. So first up, this week, Tesla held an earnings call, and the results didn't fill investors with optimism. The company did not meet market expectations last quarter, and Elon Musk indicated that twenty twenty four is likely to be a slower year than what the company had hoped for. So in response, investors lost a little bit of confidence in the EV company and stock prices dropped around twelve percent. Tesla is currently working on a new vehicle, which is code named Redwood. This EV is said to be targeted for like a lower price point. It's meant to be a mass market vehicle and it's rumored to be in the compact crossover category. Musk said it'll actually be sometime in the second half of twenty twenty five when It's Texas manufacturing facility will actually begin production. He also indicated that Tesla employees should anticipate some very long work days leading up to that production. He flat out said they should expect to work long shifts and sleep at the manufacturing plant. Once again, Musk shows he has a firm grasp on how to motivate a workforce. In the meantime, investors continue to worry about their nest eggs and they shoot ugly glances at Musk whenever he gets bogged down in X slash Twitter drama, which, as you imagine, happens a lot. Next up, I've got a whole bunch of social network related news, but mercifully I've left out the stuff about X, because honestly, the recent X news is just so ugly I can't even so. First up, Meta announced that its platforms Facebook and Instagram will automatically block any direct messages sent to teenage users unless those messages come from someone who is already a friend of that user on those platforms, and this applies even if both of the users are teenagers. So if TEMA sends Team B a DM but they aren't already friends on these platforms, team B will not get that message. However, if they are friends on the platform, the message will go through. Also for Facebook Messenger, it's a little different. If Team B is in Teena's phone contacts from why, I understand, the message would then go through, but they have to already be confirmed friends or contacts with each other. The age barrier is dependent upon the country you're in, so in some countries this will only impact users who are under the age of sixteen. In a few other countries, that age is actually up to eighteen. This is not a perfect system because I don't know if you've heard about this, but there's this thing called lying, in which someone could tell a social platform that they're older when in fact they are not. I know, it's insidious, right. Meta does have some systems in place that are designed to predict a person's age to try and head that thing off, to determine, Hey, is this person actually the age that they claim to be? But I have no clue how good it is, how reliable is this tech? I don't know, And considering how some of my grown ass friends act like they're five year olds. I'm really curious how any Aisis can figure out anything at all. Meta has been under a ton of scrutiny and litigation regarding how it can impact users, particularly young users, and clearly this is a move to try and mollify some of the company's harshest critics. If you'd like to learn more, I recommend Mary Ella Moon's article Facebook and Instagram will block dms to teens unless they're from a friend and that is on the site. In Gadget Gizmotos, Thomas Jermaine has what is, in my opinion, a justifiably snarky article titled NYC mayor calls social media and environmental toxin announces it on social media. Oh the irony so. Jermaine explains that Mayor Eric Adams of the Big Apple took to the podium as well as the Internet's to declare social media a public menace, something akin to guns and tobacco, which just makes me think that like our four fathers in the US would have traded these things back in the day. You know, you ship guns and tobacco and social media across the frontier anyway. Mayor Adams was arguing that social platforms have made choices that have caused direct or indirect harm to young people. And honestly, I do think there is some truth in that. We've talked on the show about how algorithms can reinforce messaging that at the very least is unhealthy or promotes misinformation. And these social platforms use algorithms in order to drive engagement and to keep people tied to their services for as long as is possible, all to serve as many ads to them as is possible. And to the platforms, it doesn't really matter if the messages they serve are good or bad or whatever. They're kind of amorl when it comes to that. They just want the messages to be effective to keep them there and to keep them engaged. It doesn't matter what other impacted the messages might have. If the bad messages are more effective at keeping people there than good messages are, well, them's the breaks. So yeah, I do think these networks have engaged in activities that are harmful to users, not just young ones, old ones like me too. I mean, it's the reason why you don't find me on nearly any social media these days now. Germaine in his article makes a solid point. There does appear to be a correlation between social media use and a decline in mental health. But we all know correlation is not the same thing as causation. It's a leap to say that one is causing the other, and that is valid. It's possible that social media dependency does lead to poor mental health. That is possible. It's also possible that people who already have poor mental health find themselves drawn to using social media more so it doesn't become causal in one direction, maybe it's in the other. Maybe the situation is far more complicated than any of that. So Jermaine goes on to point out how social platforms can and do exacerbate real problems in our real world, like the spread of hate speech or misinformation. So there are valid reasons to be concerned about social media, though honestly, we have to remember these platforms they're facilitators. It's not like they're magically generating this material, right, The materials not originating out of the platforms. Regular old humans are doing this, sometimes with the help of AI. So sometimes it's AI boosted human efforts to spread misery. But the platforms just make it really easy to deliver and spread the messaging, and Jermaine rightly points out that even Mayor Adams points out, we don't know to what extent or what in what way social media actually interacts with mental health. It just appears to have a negative relationship, but we don't really know very much about that. But Mayor Adams is convinced that it's bad and it should be addressed, So I recommend reading the article. I don't one hundred percent agree with Jermaine's point of view, but I feel like we're more in agreement than otherwise. I just think we differ a tiny bit toward the tail end of the matter. But I'm also quick to say Jermaine may be more right than I am. But go check out that article to learn more. Katie Kinderln of Good Morning America on ABC News wrote an article titled Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids under sixteen. So here we see another example of lawmakers taking a stand against these companies and their networks. The bill will actually need to go to the state's Senate for approval, and then, if approved, it would then go to the governor's desk to be signed into law or vetoed, whichever the governor decides, although I think DeSantis would probably uphold this one. Kendalyn points out that the bill passed with an overwhelming majority in the House one hundred and six one hundred and six to thirteen, and that the bill received a good deal of bipartisan support, and that's understandable. Again, there's this perception that social networks are hurting users, particularly young ones. So the bill would make it illegal for these platforms to grant accounts to any Floridian user under the age of sixteen, something that I suspect will be difficult to enforce. I mean, a kid in Florida could either lie about their age or maybe where they live in order to get around this block. Sure, a network like Facebook could take note of a person's physical location while they attempt to make an account, But who's to say you couldn't make an account while you happen to be on vacation. Like if I happened to be a fifteen year old kid from Georgia and I'm decided that I want to make a Facebook account while I'm vacationing in Florida, maybe because I'm surrounded by old people and it's rubbing off on me. I should be able to do that, right because I'm not a citizen of Florida. But maybe that Florida law would argue that it covers everyone under the age of sixteen who's in the state, whether they happen to be a citizen of the state or not. Anyway, I don't think it's really enforceable. I also don't think it addresses the root problem. Like I said, these networks, they exacerbate things that are already out there, and cutting off the networks doesn't stop the harm at best, it just slows it down. Anyway, we'll follow up on this story once we know where it goes, when it passes through the state Senate, or if it doesn't pass we'll check back then. One story that passed me by while I was recovering from my little adventure through the American healthcare system was that a media company called Doodzy released a v on YouTube that ruffled a lot of feathers because of how it used AI to quote unquote resurrect a beloved comedian who passed away years ago. That comedian was George Carlin, a man known for making shrewd satirical and often hilarious observations about culture, politics, media, and everything else. He had a reputation for pointing out hypocrisy and holding it up for public scrutiny. While the media company created an hour long comedy special featuring what they claimed to be was an AI generated impression of Carlin. So, according to the video, the voice, the content, the cadence, the delivery, all of it came courtesy of AI attempting to copy Carlin's style while generating new material. Now, Carlin's estate has filed a lawsuit against this media company, arguing that Dudezi has infringed upon copyright and has effectively stolen personality. The estate seeks damages and also the immediate removal of this video. So Carlin's estate also argues that the special harms the comedian's reputation and that it does represent theft. It's one of the most high profile examples of creatives criticizing AI content generation and arguing that the whole enterprise depends upon plagiarism and that stands as a threat to anyone who's actually in a creative field. This is one of the big concerns that both the Writer's Guild of America and sag Aftra had in their recent strikes against producers in Hollywood that studios could use AI to bypass real human creatives entirely while making something that lacks the sole sincerity and creativity of human endeavor. If you'd like to learn more, I recommend checking out J. Kim Murphy's article George Carlin Estate files lawsuit against group behind AI generated stand up Special, a casual theft of a great American artist's work that's in variety. Wired's Paresh Dave has an article titled open Ai Quietly Scrapped a promise to disclose key documents to the public, and I think it's well worth reading. It's another illustration of how the Open Ai of today appears to be quite different from the original concept of the organization. So back in the idealistic days, the company's founders, which at the time included Elon Musk, intended open ai to be a research center committed to advancing AI technologies in a responsible, safe and helpful way, and to share its findings with the world to best ensure that we all enter a future in which AI provides the most benefit and the fewest terminators, and that requires a certain level of transparency. However, it seems that open ai has now drifted a bit from those ideals, which reminds me a lot of Google. Once upon a time, Google famously had a motto that read don't be Evil as part of its corporate conduct. In fact, it was in the preface for its corporate conduct and was up on the walls of certain Google buildings. But Google took that motto off the preface and the walls and then just sort of buried it at the end of the corporate conduct statement. So it's still there, but it's just now it's at the end of it, not prominently at the very beginning, and it kind of was an indicator that Google had changed its approach. Well. Anyway, Wired sent a request for documents from open ai back in December of last year, and they received a response saying that open AI's policy of sharing governing documents has changed. That changed back in twenty twenty two, and now the company only sends financial statements. As Wired points out, this could be one of several changes that prompted the former board of directors of open ai to suddenly co founder and CEO Sam Altman last year. Of course, that decision didn't last very long, and soon afterward the entire board of directors almost had changed and Sam Altman was back in the saddle. But my point is, it looks like open Ai has changed, perhaps gradually, to a point that it's at odds with the original founding mission of the company, and that the board was uncomfortable with how things were going. It seems a bit like a boiling frog situation. You know that idea that you got a frog in water and you just gradually increase the temperature of the water until the frog is done dead from being boiled, and it never hopped out because you know you were increasing that temperature so gradually you SICKO. Anyway, I recommend the article to learn more about how things have changed, as well as what this could possibly mean for open AI and the way that companies tackle AI development in general. Okay, we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we got a lot more tech news to go through. We're back and still have a couple of AI things to chat about. So Scott Foster of Asia Times has a short article titled Samsung to build all AI no human chip factories, So yes, the future of an all robot. All automated manufacturing facility is around the corner. They would seem. It's still gonna take some time right now. The projected launch date would be sometime around twenty thirty. If it works, then the manufacturing plant won't rely on human labor at all. AI will design and build and package products all by itself. Oh brave new world to have no people in it. The Washington Post reported this week that the Securities in Exchange Commission the SEC and the Department of Justice DOJ here in the United States, the US are investigating GM's Cruise division. That is, the division that's in charge of developing, deploying, and operating driverless vehicles, which have been used as a ride hailing service. Last year, one of the Cruise vehicles was involved in an accident, and it included an incident in which the cruise vehicle struck a pedestrian and dragged her for twenty feet at approximately seven miles per hour. While the vehicle should have immediately come to a stop after striking the pedestrian, in fact, it shouldn't have struck the pedestrian at all, but once doing so, it should have stopped. Instead, it mistakenly interpreted the accident as one that impacted the car's side and so it was attempting to pull over and get out of traffic. The pedestrians suffered additional injuries due to this error, as you can imagine. I mean, if you're being dragged behind a car at seven miles per hour, that's like twice the speed of walking. That's going to hurt. So the next day, government officials met with the company to investigate the incident, which makes sense, and at that meeting, Cruise employees failed to, you know, mention that their car had dragged a person twenty feet down the road at seven miles per hour. So instead their narrative largely focused on another vehicle, a Nissan that was under human control, that was also involved in this accident, and the implication appeared to be that Cruz was saying it was really the driver of the Nissan, it was their fault for the pedestrians injuries, and that the Cruise vehicle really wasn't to blame. Now, according to Cruise, their intention was to show a video of the incident to officials, and this video presumably would have included the fact that the pedestrian had been dragged behind the Cruise vehicle, but a problem with their internet meant they couldn't get the video to play. And then CRU's employees just sort of, you know, didn't mention it. They didn't say, hey, you know, the video would have shown this, and we probably should tell you that our card dragged her for twenty feet. They didn't. They didn't cover the gap that was left by this lack of video, which seems pretty darn horrifying not to mention stupid. I mean, you'd have to assume that the truth would come out, and it did so not being forthcoming and bringing it up yourself makes you look even worse, which it has, at least in my opinion it has. Anyway, since that incident, the division of Cruz has changed quite a bit. Co founder Daniel Khan resigned from Cruz, Kyle Vote, the CEO, left the company, and GM also downsized nearly a quarter of the staff working at cru So just another example of what can happen when AI goes wrong, not to mention when people fail to acknowledge when AI has gone wrong. Next up, Apple is loosening its grip on iOS a little bit, but only if you happen to live in the European Union. This is, of course, so that Apple will be in compliance with regulations that passed in the EU just last year, and Apple is not happy about it. So it's not like the company had some sort of massive change of heart or anything. In fact, Apple representatives have indicated in plain English that the company feels this is a terrible, terrible mistake. But the changes mean that for the first time, EU iPhone users will be able to install fully featured browsers other than Safari on their iPhones. So you have to understand that these browsers run on of browser engines, kind of like how game engines provide a foundation for certain types of video games, and that's why certain video games feel very different from others, is that they might be built on top of a different game engine. Well, browsers are built on top of browser engines, and on iPhones, at least up until now, all browsers needed to run on top of the WebKit browser engine. However, several competing browsers typically would use a totally different browser engine to underlie their functionality. So in order to comply with Apple's requirements and to be able to run on Apple devices, these other browsers had to make a version of their browser that could run on top of WebKit, and sometimes that meant they had to shed features that would work on their browser in order to be compatible with WebKit. But now EU iPhone users can have other browser engines on them, which means these alternatives like Google Chrome will be able to exist fully featured on iOS devices for the first time. Now that's just one change that's happening with iPhones and other iOS devices in the EU. Another is that Apple is going to allow users to sideload apps onto their devices for the first time. Sideloading is when you go to some third party source for apps, so you're not going to the official iOS app store. In the past, Apple only let you download apps from the official store unless you went to some sort of extreme like if you did a jail break on your iPhone, which was not easy to do and sometimes could break your phone, then you had to get all of your apps from the iOS store. However, now EU users will be able to access third party apps or third party stores in order to get apps, and Apple says this is dangerous for the Apple's longest running statement on this is that the reason why they have this draconian control over where you can get your apps on your phone is in order to protect you. It's because you, as a user are far too vulnerable and you're just a naive little fond dancing through the woods, and meanwhile there are predators all around you. So Apple says that allowing people to sideload apps is a compromise to privacy and security, but they have to do it. They have to comply with these EU rules. So regulators have said the reason why they've got to comply is because the policy Apple had in place gave it a monopolistic hold on its app system, and that this would open up the app environment. And it'll be interesting to see what it all looks like a year from now. So will the EU show how an open environment benefits customers or will the entire Higher Continent be reduced to sinders because regulators allowed chaos to rain unchecked. We'll just have to wait and see. Recently, Netflix revealed that one place you will not be able to access its content is on the upcoming mixed reality headset from Apple called the Vision Pro. You won't even be able to launch the iPad version of the Netflix app on the Vision Pro when it launches next week. At least not as it stands right now. You will be able to access Netflix if you use the vision Pro and you go through Safari. So if you actually do the web browser version, but you won't have a native app for the headset, nor will you be able to use the iPad version. So according to nine to five Mac, Netflix's CEO actually just one of Netflix's CEO, there are co CEOs, Greg Peters. He said that the vision pro is quote unquote subscale. By that, he means there wouldn't be enough un in circulation and enough interest among the owners of those units to justify building out an experiencement just for that platform. It would cost more than what they would make back from the people who actually owned these devices. Sick Burn. I mean, it's interesting to me because for a very long time I would joke that Netflix's strategy was to get on every single screen it could, whether that screen was on a smartphone or a tablet, or it was part of a video game console, or maybe a smart refrigerator or perhaps your washing machine. So for Netflix to say, yeah, we figure that this is not a good return on investment. When it comes to the Vision Pro, it seems at least initially to be a pretty big slap to Apple's face, but then we figure that Apple isn't producing a huge number of these things. It's probably in the tens of thousands, and the fact that they'd cost more than three grand a pop means it is going to be a niche product for the most part. There are always Apple fanatics, there are developers who are interested in the platform, there are companies that are interested in a platform. But still it's kind of phenomenal in a world where we worry about inflation and there's been so much talk about inflation and making sure that you're spending money wisely, that people are still willing to spend thousands of dollars on an unproven mixed reality headset that appears to be a huge compromise from Apple's original quote unquote vision. It just it blows my mind. I guess I shouldn't be surprised. There are people who have way more money than they have since, and I guess that's always going to be the case anyway. If you bought a Vision pro, by the way, no shade on you, like you probably have legit reasons why you did. I'm just still flabbergasted that they sold all of the pre production units, or at least all the ones that they plan on manufacturing in the near future. Anyway, it's still pretty fair to say that it would be a difficult sell to make something specific for the Vision Pro just because the user base is going to be small. In fact, that's probably going to be a big challenge for Apple moving forward, convincing developers to spend the time and money it takes to create new apps for the Vision Pro knowing that there's a limited reach, like there's just a limited user base, and are these developers willing to perhaps take a loss on that initial launch group in the hopes that it will establish a foundation for a larger customer base moving forward. I don't know the answer to that. I know that if I were developing apps, I would be thinking twice before creating something for the Vision Pro, just because I could spend that same amount of time. I'm an effort developing for established platforms and actually know that I have a good chance of making a return on my investment rather than doing something that might work out. But then it's Apple. Apple's got such a long track record of making technology work when nobody else could make it work. Before them. It's hard for me to say anyway, it's it's going to be interesting to see how things unfold once the product launches next week, and I'm very curious to hear people's honest reviews of it. I have a suspicion that the actual experience of using the device is pretty darn impressive, but I'm not sure it will be enough to convince someone like me to start setting money aside to buy it. I just don't think it's enough for me yet. Anyway, that's enough about that. We're going to take another quick break and when we come back, I've got a little bit more news to finish off with, so we'll be back right after these messages. Okay, we're back, and we've got a little bit of a inspiring but sort of sad story, and that is the Ingenuity helicopter has flown its final mission on Mars. This was the little drone copter that could, and it last flew on January eighteenth. It briefly lost contact with the Perseverance land Rover that's the vehicle that it launched with way back in the day, but the two regained connectivity a little bit later, and at that point NASA engineers discovered that at least one of Ingenuity's rotors had broken during its final flight, so it will go flying no more. But this little sucker had already achieved far more than what NASA initially hoped. Now, let's set aside the fact that NASA occasionally sets modest goals with the hopes of exceeding them, kind of following in the footsteps of engineer Scotty on Star Trek, who would always say he would underpromise and over deliver. That way, it always seemed like he was a genius. Right If he says, oh, I have it to you in three hours, and then like in an hour later he gets it done, it looks like he just really busted his button got it done. NASA kind of follows the same thing, like they're careful with setting mission parameters because space is hard y'all. Like, I don't want to take anything away from NASA. Being able to do anything successfully in a space oriented mission is a huge achievement, So being careful with your goals is a good thing. So NASA's mission parameters for Ingenuity were for it to do five test flights over the course of thirty days. That was it. They thought, if we can do five, like, we don't even know if we can take off once because Mars's atmosphere is really thin, so you have to you know, being able to provide enough lift to get even a light drone off the ground is challenging. You just you don't have the thickness of atmosphere that you would have in a place like Earth. But by the end of Ingenuity's time on Mars, it had flown seventy two times phenomenal. It had even survived Martian Winter like there was concern that the cold of Mars's winter would really shut down all of Ingenuity systems, and it did, but NASA was able to reheat those systems and to reboot Ingenuities computer systems and have it still be operational. They even sent updates to Ingenuities capabilities, like they gave it firmware updates, and it suddenly was able to do more autonomous activities like identifying safe landing zones. It even did a couple of emergency landings and did so successfully. It's just fantastic, and it means that there was this huge amount of information and practical experience that NASA was able to gather that they can then use to build into future missions. And when you start to think about how far drone technology has come over the last decade because Ingenuities planning started like back in twenty twelve, when you think about how far we've come with those advancements, it really makes you get excited about the future of space exploration and space travel because we can apply what we know as well as the advances in that technology to create even better, more capable drones in the future and use them to conduct science that in the past would have been impossible for us. So honestly, my head is off for Ingenuity and the team behind it. Y'all did good. This was an incredible achievement, one that I don't think I would have imagined I would have seen in my lifetime, so I'm so pleased that I'm wrong about that. Now, that wraps up the main news items, but before I go, I do have a couple of article recommendations for you on top of the ones I've mentioned already in this episode. Both of these recommendations involve upsetting stories, so these are not happy stories. And first up is a piece by Janie Rose of Motherboard, and it's an article that's titled Taylor Swift is Living every Woman's AI Nightmare. And as the title suggests, this is about deep fake technology and how it enables people to dehumanize victims. And let's face it, most of these victims are women or they are female presenting, and they use these to create all sorts of AI generated pornographic images and then they spread them online and lots of platforms have served as kind of distribution centers. X is a big one. Reddit used to be. They've gotten better at cutting back on that, but yeah, there are places online where this just sort of runs rampant. You're not surprised that it does so on X because Elon Musk famously cut way back on content moderation when he acquired that company and has shown very little interest in addressing these things, so it becomes an ongoing issue over there. I think the article is a really important read, and it does tie in with some of the threads that I mentioned in the George Carlin story in this episode, right, this idea of using AI to victimize people in various ways. The deep fake stuff is really disturbing. It's been really troubling to me for a couple of years. Now and it's only getting worse. And obviously the sexualization is one element of deep fake technology, but there are other facets too, right, Like there's the potential of using deep fakes to spread misinformation. It's a really troubling topic, but I think it's an important article to read. Again. That's called Taylor Swift is Living every Woman's AI porn Nightmare. It's on Motherboard or Vice if you prefer. It's by Jenis Rose. The other article I want to recommend is from our old buddy Thomas Jermaine, and by old buddy. Don't know Thomas Jermaine at all. We just mentioned one of his articles earlier in this episode. This is on Gizmoto. The article is titled iPhone apps secretly harvest data when they send you notifications. Researchers find so yeah, not happy, right, like to find out that just by receiving a notification, an app may be gathering information about you. In fact, is gathering information about you and the implications that has on your own privacy and security. It's it's not fun to read about, but I think it is important to know about, particularly if you have any concern at all about privacy and security. Now, as always, I have no connection to these reporters, to the writers, journalists, to the outlets. I just find their work to be interesting and worth reading. So go check that out. And that wraps up this tech news episode for this week on January twenty sixth, twenty twenty four. I hope all of you are well. I'm getting better every day, which is nice. It's a nice change of pace, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

In 1 playlist(s)

  1. TechStuff

    2,435 clip(s)

TechStuff

TechStuff is getting a system update. Everything you love about TechStuff now twice the bandwidth wi 
Social links
Follow podcast
Recent clips
Browse 2,432 clip(s)