Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 1: I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the
Speaker 1: tech are you? So? This morning I was thinking, as
Speaker 1: I often do, about artificial intelligence and how quickly various
Speaker 1: people and companies are rushing to apply AI to just
Speaker 1: about everything. And this isn't exactly new. It would be
Speaker 1: naive and reductive to say it. We're so Researchers have
Speaker 1: been developing AI for decades, with a focus on different
Speaker 1: aspects of AI throughout the ages generative AI, while splashy
Speaker 1: is really just one of the more recent implementations that
Speaker 1: have has caught our attention. So while we can't say
Speaker 1: that AI has exactly crept up on us, the push
Speaker 1: to make use of AI, when one could argue we
Speaker 1: don't even have a full appreciation for what it can do,
Speaker 1: both in good and bad scenarios, means that we're being
Speaker 1: a little premature. And this actually reminds me of shoe stores.
Speaker 1: Now that's a pretty big leap, but I promise I'm
Speaker 1: going somewhere. I'm sure you've all heard the phrase history
Speaker 1: repeats itself, or maybe the slightly more florid version. Those
Speaker 1: who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Well,
Speaker 1: once upon a time there was an era in which
Speaker 1: people made use of a powerful technology for a trivial purpose,
Speaker 1: and many people potentially paid the price for that decision.
Speaker 1: This is just one example. Obviously, there are lots of others,
Speaker 1: some of which are famous enough to have had entire
Speaker 1: documentaries made about their stories. But I am talking about
Speaker 1: when shoe salespeople were regularly irradiated as part of their job. Okay,
Speaker 1: so let's set the scene, and it's the last decade
Speaker 1: of the nineteenth century, eighteen ninety five in fact, and
Speaker 1: a German smarty pants by the name of Wilhelm Konrad
Speaker 1: Runtgen was working as the director of the Physical Institute
Speaker 1: at the University of Fursburg. Now I don't mean he
Speaker 1: was working at a physical school and other people were,
Speaker 1: I don't know, working in some sort of philosophically hypothetical
Speaker 1: school that would be putting discartes before the horse. Rather,
Speaker 1: I mean Runtgen specialized in physics. In the eighteen nineties,
Speaker 1: he was experimenting with a fairly new technology. What essentially
Speaker 1: was a cathode ray tube or CRT. This is the
Speaker 1: technology that would later be responsible for producing images in
Speaker 1: old television sets, the big, boxy kind that you might
Speaker 1: remember from decades ago. Runtgn was studying how high voltage
Speaker 1: electricity could pass through low vacuum tubes, like essentially a
Speaker 1: cathode ray tube. Now, the story goes that one day
Speaker 1: he was shutting things down for the evening in his
Speaker 1: lab and he noticed something peculiar. So he had covered
Speaker 1: the cathode tube with a piece of black cardboard, and
Speaker 1: when he powered up the tube and turned off the light,
Speaker 1: he saw that there was something glowing in his lab.
Speaker 1: So he investigates and he discovers the glowing is coming
Speaker 1: from a piece of paper that has a coating of
Speaker 1: barium platinu cyanide on it, and that this is what
Speaker 1: was glowing in the dark, and it was several feet
Speaker 1: away from the tube, which again was covered by black cardboard.
Speaker 1: It was far enough away from the tube that Runkan
Speaker 1: thought the tube would not be able to illuminate this
Speaker 1: particular piece of paper. Moreover, there was some sort of
Speaker 1: energy outside of visible light happening here, something that could
Speaker 1: stimulate the barium platinus cyanide to fluoresce and something that
Speaker 1: could pass through this black cardboard. Now, Runkan was a
Speaker 1: methodical sort, and he repeated this somewhat accidental experiment many
Speaker 1: times to make certain that what he was seeing was
Speaker 1: actually real, that there was something to it. He further
Speaker 1: investigated the phenomena for weeks before deciding to publish any
Speaker 1: papers or even discuss the matter with anyone else. He
Speaker 1: knew that lots of other people were doing experiments with
Speaker 1: these low vacuum tubes, so he didn't want to tip
Speaker 1: his hand too early and perhaps lose out on snag
Speaker 1: a really big scientific discovery. Turns out, this was a
Speaker 1: really good idea because there were no shortage of people
Speaker 1: who were absolutely certain they had discovered something new and exciting,
Speaker 1: and then after other people looked into it, they found
Speaker 1: out that there wasn't really any discovery there at all,
Speaker 1: which could be pretty humiliating, but this was not the
Speaker 1: case with Rutgin. He had made the first documented observation
Speaker 1: of what we would call X rays, in fact, what
Speaker 1: he would call X rays X rays because X represents
Speaker 1: an unknown variable. What's more, Runkin noticed something really darn cool.
Speaker 1: So let's say that he hung up a sheet of
Speaker 1: paper that had a coating of barium platino cyanide on it,
Speaker 1: and he put that a few feet away from the tube,
Speaker 1: and then he energizes the tube, he turns it on. Essentially,
Speaker 1: if he put his hand between the tube, which was
Speaker 1: serving as a lamp and the sheet of paper, then
Speaker 1: on the sheet of paper he would see projected the
Speaker 1: bones of his hand. It was as though he could
Speaker 1: see straight through his flesh and look at the skeleton inside. Clearly,
Speaker 1: he couldn't just keep this a secret, so he had
Speaker 1: to tell his closest friend. He brought his wife to
Speaker 1: his lab and showed her the discovery. He had her
Speaker 1: hold her hand against a sheet of this paper, and
Speaker 1: then he exposed her hand for a fifteen minute long
Speaker 1: X ray exposure, and instead of it just projecting the
Speaker 1: images of the bones on the sheet of paper, it
Speaker 1: actually made a record of it, an image like a photograph,
Speaker 1: the first radiograph known on record. She reportedly exclaimed, I
Speaker 1: have seen my own death, meaning she had seen her
Speaker 1: own skeleton. Those the Rengins really knew how to turn
Speaker 1: up the romance. It tells you anyway, after weeks of
Speaker 1: investigative work, Jen reached a point where he felt confident
Speaker 1: in coming forward to his peers to present his findings,
Speaker 1: and once he did, it caught on like a house
Speaker 1: on fire. His paper published at the end of eighteen
Speaker 1: ninety five in December of eighteen ninety five. By eighteen
Speaker 1: ninety six, people were making practical use of X rays.
Speaker 1: Mostly this was in the medical field, but not exclusively,
Speaker 1: because suddenly it was possible for physicians to gaze into
Speaker 1: the human body, you know, looking into a patient without
Speaker 1: first having to make an opening, which, as you can imagine,
Speaker 1: presents certain advantages. All right, but now it's time to
Speaker 1: jump to a different smarty pants, someone who was quite
Speaker 1: the opportunistic smarty pants. In fact, some people could argue
Speaker 1: that the true smarty pants nature of this man is
Speaker 1: that he found new ways to claim authorship over work
Speaker 1: that really just happened within him his place of business.
Speaker 1: I am talking about Thomas Edison. Now, whether you think
Speaker 1: of Edison as a truly brilliant inventor responsible for inventing
Speaker 1: countless things in his lifetime, or you think of him
Speaker 1: as someone who was more likely to employ people who
Speaker 1: did most of the actual inventing, and then he would
Speaker 1: put his names on the patents. I'll leave all that
Speaker 1: to you. The truth of the matter is probably somewhere
Speaker 1: in the middle. But the important part of our story
Speaker 1: is that Edison and his staff were working on a
Speaker 1: technology that would leverage X rays in a really interesting way.
Speaker 1: So the basic concept wasn't that different from what Reunjin
Speaker 1: had been experimenting with in his lab. The invention would
Speaker 1: have a screen that would be coded with some sort
Speaker 1: of fluorescent material on it and would thus fluoresce when
Speaker 1: exposed to X rays. There would also be a lamp
Speaker 1: capable of generating those X rays, and if you were
Speaker 1: to place something between the lamp and the screen, you
Speaker 1: would be able to see the stuff that blocked X
Speaker 1: rays from hitting the screen. Now, your flesh would let
Speaker 1: X rays pass right through it, so you would see
Speaker 1: your bones on the fluorescent screen behind, and you can
Speaker 1: have the lamp on, you can move your hand back
Speaker 1: and forth, and you can watch the bones in your
Speaker 1: hands move in real time. Edison called his invention the vitascope,
Speaker 1: and I'm pretty sure later on he thought that was
Speaker 1: a really ironic name, a poor name for him to
Speaker 1: pick for this invention because vita means life, you can
Speaker 1: see that in words like vitality. But the vitoscope would
Speaker 1: actually lead to the death of one of Edison's most
Speaker 1: loyal members of staff. That person was Clarence Madison Dally. He,
Speaker 1: like his father and his brothers, would work as a
Speaker 1: glassblower for T. Thomas Edison. Dally worked closely with Edison
Speaker 1: while trying to design a practical incandescent lamp. Again, Essen
Speaker 1: didn't really invent the light bulb, but in his lab
Speaker 1: the light bulb was turned into something that was actually
Speaker 1: of practical use. Now, upon runk Jen's discovery of X rays,
Speaker 1: Dali would actually shift his own work to focus on
Speaker 1: creating X ray lamps as well as a fluorescent sheet
Speaker 1: that actually used calcium tungue state as the fluorescing material
Speaker 1: instead of the barium platinum cyanide. This was seen to
Speaker 1: produce sharper images and thus a higher fidelity kind of image.
Speaker 1: For years, Dali worked in the lab developing this technology,
Speaker 1: perfecting it, and over time he began to experience some
Speaker 1: pretty not just pretty, some truly serious health problems. His
Speaker 1: hands showed signs of radiation burns, particularly his left hand,
Speaker 1: which he used to demonstrate the X rays by waving
Speaker 1: it in the path of the X rays. He began
Speaker 1: to develop skin lesions, which are part of you know,
Speaker 1: radiation burns. His problems progressed to the point that he
Speaker 1: actually had to have his left hand amputated, but that
Speaker 1: was only the beginning. Later on he had to have
Speaker 1: more of his left arm amputated, then several of the
Speaker 1: fingers on his right hand, and then ultimately he had
Speaker 1: one arm amputated to the elbow and the other arm
Speaker 1: amputated to the shoulder. But the damage was even more severe,
Speaker 1: and in nineteen oh four, when he was not even
Speaker 1: forty years old, Dally passed away from terminal cancer. This
Speaker 1: experience hit Edison very, very hard. He truly liked Dali,
Speaker 1: and it also convinced him that X ray technology was
Speaker 1: far more dangerous than beneficial, and he was quoted to say,
Speaker 1: don't talk to me about x I am afraid of them.
Speaker 1: But Edison's team had already invented the fluoroscope at that point,
Speaker 1: and there were all sorts of potential applications for that technology.
Speaker 1: When we come back, I'll talk about some of those,
Speaker 1: but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor.
Speaker 1: All Right, before the break, I mentioned that Edison's fluoroscope
Speaker 1: would end up having various applications, So the most obvious
Speaker 1: ones were in medicine, right, and there was a darn
Speaker 1: good reason to lean heavily on medicine in the early
Speaker 1: twentieth century. You had a real provocative reason why you
Speaker 1: wanted to advance the science of medicine. Several million reasons,
Speaker 1: as it turned out, because in July nineteen fourteen, World
Speaker 1: War One began. Of course, back then we didn't call
Speaker 1: it World War one because being optimistic anyway. One of
Speaker 1: the big challenges presented by the World War involved making
Speaker 1: sure soldiers had the right equipment, and that included a
Speaker 1: good pair of boots. Soldiers could end up having terrible injuries.
Speaker 1: If they weren't wearing the right boots. They wouldn't be
Speaker 1: able to march as far. They could suffer from things
Speaker 1: like trench foot, So they needed to make sure the
Speaker 1: boots were as well made and as good a fit
Speaker 1: as was practical for the purposes of mass producing them
Speaker 1: for soldiers. This is a delicate thing to balance, so
Speaker 1: the thought was we should make sure that soldiers had
Speaker 1: boots that would give them the support they needed and
Speaker 1: not create a source of distraction or injury. And so
Speaker 1: a guy named Frank Keefer created a book that he
Speaker 1: titled a Textbook of Military Hygiene and Sanitation. This was
Speaker 1: all with the goal of trying to keep soldiers as
Speaker 1: healthy as possible before they were forced to march out
Speaker 1: in front of a German machine gun in this time.
Speaker 1: Next book, Kiefer included X ray images also known as radiographs,
Speaker 1: in order to show how a soldier's foot should fit
Speaker 1: inside a boot and what it would look like if
Speaker 1: the soldier were wearing the wrong size boot. So this
Speaker 1: was really just to illustrate the importance of matching the
Speaker 1: size to the soldier. Keifer was not suggesting that the
Speaker 1: army invest in thousands of fluoroscopes and check each recruit individually.
Speaker 1: This was just to demonstrate the importance of a good fit,
Speaker 1: but his idea sparked other ideas. A doctor named Jacob J.
Speaker 1: Lowe used a fluoroscope to examine wounded soldier's feet without
Speaker 1: having to first take off their boots. And you can
Speaker 1: definitely understand how that could be a really useful thing
Speaker 1: to do. You know why, would you potentially make an
Speaker 1: injury worse or perhaps even create a new injury if
Speaker 1: you can get a look in a non invasive kind
Speaker 1: of way, and it works so well that Low thought
Speaker 1: it would make sense to bring the technology to pediatrists
Speaker 1: and to shoe stores in general. Why just use this
Speaker 1: on soldiers when you could have a fluoroscope in your
Speaker 1: local shoe shop, Customers could try on a pair of
Speaker 1: new shoes. They could step up to the fluoroscope, the
Speaker 1: staff could check to make sure that the shoes were
Speaker 1: actually a really good fit. Maybe they could even employ
Speaker 1: someone who could take a look at those images and say, oh,
Speaker 1: you know what, you need special shoes because otherwise you're
Speaker 1: not going to get the support you need and your
Speaker 1: feet are going to hurt. Right, You could actually employ
Speaker 1: people who could be experts in this. They could be
Speaker 1: like the equivalent of a foot doctor working in a
Speaker 1: shoe store and practice preventive medicine. It would be incredible.
Speaker 1: So Low files for a patent in nineteen nineteen for
Speaker 1: a shoe store version of this technology. However, it would
Speaker 1: take nearly a decade for the patent off to grant
Speaker 1: a patent. He called it the foot of scope, and
Speaker 1: I am not making a joke about that. That is
Speaker 1: actually what it would be called. And yeah, the idea
Speaker 1: is that the customer would stick their feet into this
Speaker 1: machine I'll describe it in a second, and the shoe
Speaker 1: store salesperson would be able to look through a visor
Speaker 1: and determine if the shoe was a good fit or not.
Speaker 1: Low was not the only person pursuing this dream, believe
Speaker 1: it or not. There were others around the world who
Speaker 1: were filing similar patents. And while they filed their patents
Speaker 1: after Low had already submitted his to the US Patent Office,
Speaker 1: and at least a couple of cases, they got their
Speaker 1: patents first. So kind of shows the great injustice of
Speaker 1: global commerce, right, But eventually it all shook out that
Speaker 1: really there were two major companies that would use this
Speaker 1: technology to create machines for shoe shops. So in England
Speaker 1: you had a company called the Petoscope Company, and here
Speaker 1: in the United States you had the X Ray Shoe
Speaker 1: Fitter Incorporated. Now, these fluoroscopes looked a lot like a
Speaker 1: tall wooden cabinet, maybe like a little bit higher than
Speaker 1: waist tall. So the customer would approach the cabinet on
Speaker 1: one side, and the customer would be standing up and
Speaker 1: they would step up onto a step at the base
Speaker 1: of the cabinet, and at that point in the cabinet's
Speaker 1: wall there was kind of a little alcove where they
Speaker 1: could slide their feet into this thing, so it's inside
Speaker 1: the cabinet, So you're standing on the step, your feet
Speaker 1: are now inside the cabinet. On the inside of the cabinet,
Speaker 1: the X ray lamp would actually be below the customer's feet,
Speaker 1: pointing up at a fluorescent screen, and the fluorescent screen
Speaker 1: would be above the customer's feet, so the lamp would
Speaker 1: blast X rays up through the shoes, through the flesh
Speaker 1: of the customer's feet, and would leave a moving image
Speaker 1: of dim bones on the fluorescent screen, which staff could
Speaker 1: view from above. So on the opposite side of the
Speaker 1: cabinet were the controls that the staff would use, so
Speaker 1: pretty simple stuff. They would have, you know, like a
Speaker 1: switch to turn the fluoroscope on, and at that point
Speaker 1: they would start powering up the cathode ray tube and
Speaker 1: start beaming X rays toward the fluorescent screen. There would
Speaker 1: be at least one, but usually several viewing ports that
Speaker 1: would look down from the top of the cabinet into
Speaker 1: the cabinet itself. Now, these ports remind me a little
Speaker 1: bit of like a submarine periscope, you know, has kind
Speaker 1: of like a visor kind of of attachment that fits
Speaker 1: around the eyes, which of course obviously blocks out the
Speaker 1: ambient light of the shop while you're looking at the
Speaker 1: tootsis inside the cabinet. And the multiple visors meant more
Speaker 1: than one per and could look at a time. So
Speaker 1: maybe it's the shoe salesperson, maybe they have an assistant,
Speaker 1: and there's probably some curious lookilu who wants to take
Speaker 1: a look that skeleton bones. In fact, I'm sure there
Speaker 1: was no shortage of variations of the phrase oh honey,
Speaker 1: I can see your skeleton feet and these shoe shops
Speaker 1: at the time. Anyway, the idea was the shoe salesperson
Speaker 1: would be able to study the feet inside the shoe
Speaker 1: and determine if the shoe really was a good fit.
Speaker 1: Though I'm sure in many, perhaps most cases, the real
Speaker 1: use of the technology was that it attracted customers and
Speaker 1: it helped move sales. Sure, I bet in some cases
Speaker 1: the clerk might say, this pair of shoes looks like
Speaker 1: it's on the small side. For you or maybe you
Speaker 1: need a wider pair of shoes or something along those lines.
Speaker 1: But most of the time, I bet it was really
Speaker 1: just a way to get folks into the door. Now,
Speaker 1: as I'm sure you've all gathered, this practice was also
Speaker 1: extremely dangerous. Customers might get a large dose of X rays,
Speaker 1: a larger one than they would in a normal year,
Speaker 1: especially these days. But the real risk was for the
Speaker 1: staff who were using these machines over and over on
Speaker 1: multiple customers a day. The first of these machines hit
Speaker 1: the market in nineteen twenty seven, we wouldn't even settle
Speaker 1: on a standard unit of measurement for radiation, the run Gin,
Speaker 1: named after the guy who discovered X rays. We wouldn't
Speaker 1: decide on that till nineteen twenty eight the following year,
Speaker 1: and we still didn't have that much data to draw
Speaker 1: conclusions as to how much or how little radiation exposure
Speaker 1: was really safe or harmful. Now you had some scientists
Speaker 1: who were arguing that it would be a really bad
Speaker 1: idea to make use of radiation technology in an environment
Speaker 1: like a shoe store, that it represented a true risk
Speaker 1: to employees, that radiation really was no joke. Then you had,
Speaker 1: on the other side the owners of the stores, who
Speaker 1: essentially said shut up. The stores were claiming that the
Speaker 1: X rays would let them create real like osteopathic solutions
Speaker 1: to foot problems, but in reality, almost no one had
Speaker 1: that kind of expertise or knowledge or experience. They had
Speaker 1: no way of making any real meaningful decisions based on
Speaker 1: what they were seeing. It was just a gimmick and
Speaker 1: a gravy train. And by golly, they didn't need some
Speaker 1: boffin telling them that their killer sales pitch was going
Speaker 1: to give them cancer. And so the machines prospered for
Speaker 1: a couple of decades. In fact, by the nineteen forties,
Speaker 1: there was something like ten thousand fluoroscopes in the United
Speaker 1: States alone, There were another say, three thousand in the UK,
Speaker 1: and there were a few thousand more in a couple
Speaker 1: of other countries. So just imagine for a moment all
Speaker 1: those store employees who absorbed way more X rays than
Speaker 1: any person is supposed to in a day. Just most
Speaker 1: people wouldn't even absorb that much in a full year,
Speaker 1: And day after day, these folks were getting blasted by
Speaker 1: X rays. When in the mid nineteen forties, the American
Speaker 1: Standards Association made a determination about X rays. They concluded
Speaker 1: that at max, a person should encounter less than zero
Speaker 1: point one rent gens worth of radiation per day. Now,
Speaker 1: in nineteen forty eight, there was a survey done of
Speaker 1: around forty something machines that were being used in Detroit,
Speaker 1: these fluoroscope machines, and in that study they found that
Speaker 1: the machines emitted radiation at a level between sixteen to
Speaker 1: seventy five rent gens per minute. You were not supposed
Speaker 1: to absorb more than point one per day. Now, keep
Speaker 1: in mind the standards those are for, like super protective,
Speaker 1: let's be extra careful, let's limit liability as much as possible.
Speaker 1: So you could argue that it's overly cautious, if you
Speaker 1: want to take that point of view. But the point
Speaker 1: being that these machines were putting out way more radiation
Speaker 1: than what people were supposed to be encountering in a
Speaker 1: work environment. They were dangerous, and they were largely unregulated.
Speaker 1: In the United States, laws about these devices were on
Speaker 1: a state by state basis. In fact, it wouldn't be
Speaker 1: until the nineteen seventies that you would start to see
Speaker 1: laws across the country limiting their use and requiring the
Speaker 1: machines to adhere to strict rules for manufacturing and operation.
Speaker 1: Pennsylvania was the first US state to ban them outright,
Speaker 1: That was in nineteen fifty seven. Even by nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: only thirty three states had a ban in place. The
Speaker 1: federal government couldn't take action until the early nineteen seventies
Speaker 1: because there was no legal basis. The FDA, which was
Speaker 1: the most likely organization to be able to step in,
Speaker 1: had no authority for anything that had to do with
Speaker 1: radiation that was not part of their responsibilities, so there
Speaker 1: was nothing they could do. There was no legal basis
Speaker 1: to make any kind of action on a federal level.
Speaker 1: This was a case where technology and science had far
Speaker 1: outpaced our laws and our capacity to do anything from
Speaker 1: a legal standpoint, which sounds familiar to me as I
Speaker 1: talk about this, and as I talk about things like AI. Now.
Speaker 1: One thing that may have somewhat taken the wind out
Speaker 1: of the fluoroscopes sales was the Second World War. Before
Speaker 1: the introduction of the atom bomb, radiation was thought of
Speaker 1: as more like this amazing kind of energy that could
Speaker 1: do phenomenal stuff, like like you could use radiation for
Speaker 1: anything to in science fiction, it was to blast around
Speaker 1: in space, or fly at incredible speeds over the land,
Speaker 1: or all sorts of things, and you'd be able to
Speaker 1: use is it for industry? Radiation was wonderful, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe you'd even power a superhero. But then you get
Speaker 1: to the end of World War Two, when Fat Man
Speaker 1: and Little Boy demonstrated the dreadful power of the atom,
Speaker 1: and the stories of radiation poisoning and terrible things of
Speaker 1: that nature really changed the picture. Pretty quickly. People saw
Speaker 1: the destructive nature of radiation, or the destructive capability I
Speaker 1: guess I should say of radiation. And so now the
Speaker 1: perception shifted dramatically. They went from space age energy to
Speaker 1: this is something we should be scared of. It's an
Speaker 1: invisible killer. Be afraid. You know, you get into the
Speaker 1: Cold War, the threat of nuclear war, all this perception
Speaker 1: of radiation changes. It was a massive cultural shift. Keep
Speaker 1: in mind, the radiation itself never changed. It was the
Speaker 1: same from beginning to end. It was that way before
Speaker 1: we got here, it'll be that way after we leave.
Speaker 1: It's just our perception that changed. And it's interesting because
Speaker 1: we would embrace our fear along with ignorance about radiation
Speaker 1: in the exact same way that we embraced exuberance and
Speaker 1: ignorance about radiation earlier, you know, a few decades earlier.
Speaker 1: But now instead of thinking, hey, I can use this
Speaker 1: invisible ray to see my bones and make my feet
Speaker 1: fit better in these shoes, now people are thinking radiation
Speaker 1: will create bloodthirsty monsters that will hunt us all down.
Speaker 1: So the pendulum ever swings. All right, We're gonna take
Speaker 1: another quick break, but when we come back, I'll talk
Speaker 1: a little bit more about fluoroscopes and what happened with those,
Speaker 1: as well as kind of related back to what I
Speaker 1: think it has to do with artificial intelligence. But first
Speaker 1: let's thank our sponsors. Okay, so we're back to talk
Speaker 1: more about fluoroscopes and the use of X rays and
Speaker 1: shoe stores. There was something of a decline and interest
Speaker 1: in fluoroscopes after World War Two, but as I mentioned,
Speaker 1: the technology actually stuck around for decades. Right. I saw
Speaker 1: articles that said as late as the nineteen seventies there
Speaker 1: were a few places that were still using them. And
Speaker 1: these days you can sometimes find an example of a
Speaker 1: fluoroscope in a place like a museum, but otherwise you're
Speaker 1: not likely to run into one and that's for the best, because,
Speaker 1: as I have said, these devices were dangerous. Now, I
Speaker 1: am unaware of any kind of comprehensive study that looked
Speaker 1: into how many people in shoe stores were injured by
Speaker 1: these devices. There are certainly incidents, isolated incidents that we
Speaker 1: can point to. For example, Harold Baveley reported in a
Speaker 1: paper for National Safety News back in nineteen fifty that
Speaker 1: a woman who had been serving as a shoe model
Speaker 1: in a store ended up having radiation burns on one
Speaker 1: leg just from the fact that she was going into
Speaker 1: the store every day and they were operating this fluoroscope,
Speaker 1: and the leakage from these cabinets could go as far
Speaker 1: as ten feet away. These stores were not necessarily huge,
Speaker 1: so this woman had suffered a severe radiation burn on
Speaker 1: one leg, and ultimately doctors chose to amputate the leg
Speaker 1: because that's how serious it had become. That's a terrible story.
Speaker 1: That's just one, though. There are a couple of others
Speaker 1: at least that are fairly well documented and seem to
Speaker 1: link back to the use of these fluoroscopes in shoe stores.
Speaker 1: But part of the challenge of actually assessing the impact
Speaker 1: these machines could have had on store employees. Is that,
Speaker 1: apart from acute injuries like radiation burns, it could be
Speaker 1: hard to ascribe radiation as the reason for a problem.
Speaker 1: We really think of radiation as increasing risk for certain
Speaker 1: things like cancer. But that's increasing risk, like you might
Speaker 1: have cancer. But then can you actually track that back
Speaker 1: and say, the reason I have cancer is because of
Speaker 1: the increased risk that I endured due to exposure to
Speaker 1: X rays. That's harder to determine, right, Like you might
Speaker 1: not be able to track down the actual source the
Speaker 1: reason for the cancer. If you have a large enough
Speaker 1: sample size, then you might be able to draw some
Speaker 1: general conclusions. But there's just not been any kind of
Speaker 1: study like that, so it's not always an open and
Speaker 1: shut case. You cannot just definitively say X number of
Speaker 1: people ended up encountering massive health problems due to their
Speaker 1: exposure to fluoroscopes. That's just not a metric that we
Speaker 1: can confidently point at. We can certainly say the likelihood
Speaker 1: is very high that lots of people ended up having
Speaker 1: health problems due to those fluoroscopes, but that's about as
Speaker 1: far as we can go. It gets very vague. One
Speaker 1: important thing to remember though, is that shoe fluoroscopes were
Speaker 1: categorically a bad idea. They had no justification. It was
Speaker 1: a bad way to use a new technology. It's not
Speaker 1: that the technology itself was bad, it was just a
Speaker 1: bad implementation, right. Obviously, X rays have their use. We
Speaker 1: use X rays today for lots of stuff, just not
Speaker 1: to fit shoes on people. It's a technology that posed
Speaker 1: dangers that we did not fully understand or appreciate when
Speaker 1: we developed the technology. It put people at risk unnecessarily,
Speaker 1: and you can make the argument that they didn't really
Speaker 1: do anything useful at all, right, It just served as
Speaker 1: a sales gimmick because the people who were actually running
Speaker 1: the tech didn't have the training or knowledge to do
Speaker 1: anything useful with the information other than sell some shoes.
Speaker 1: And that really does bring me back to artificial intelligence.
Speaker 1: I see the rush to integrate AI into business solutions
Speaker 1: as being somewhat similar to how these shoe stores were
Speaker 1: doing this with X ray machines. I am convinced that
Speaker 1: many of the business leaders who are making these choices
Speaker 1: do not yet have a real firm grasp on what
Speaker 1: they actually intend to accomplish with AI. It's not that
Speaker 1: artificial intelligence is useless. It's not that it's bad, but
Speaker 1: artificial intelligence can also end up being risky depending on
Speaker 1: how you implement it. It could even be dangerous, and
Speaker 1: unless you are implementing it the right way and for
Speaker 1: the right reasons, then you're far more likely to do
Speaker 1: more harm than you are to do good. Now, that
Speaker 1: harm could just be in the of business results. Maybe
Speaker 1: it just means that in the short term you don't
Speaker 1: perform as well as you had hoped, or you have
Speaker 1: demoralized your employee base, and now you have to rebuild
Speaker 1: because it turns out the AI couldn't do what you
Speaker 1: needed it to do, or it was doing it in
Speaker 1: a way that wasn't helpful, or that harm could be
Speaker 1: something far more tangible. Ultimately, it could even be tragic. Now,
Speaker 1: am I off base? Is there no parallel here? I'm
Speaker 1: not convinced. To me. It feels like we're walking down
Speaker 1: a path that we've walked down many times before, or
Speaker 1: maybe even we're not walking down a path. We're barreling
Speaker 1: through the woods in the same general direction as one
Speaker 1: we've taken before, and it was a direction that ended
Speaker 1: up getting us scraped up, bumped up, We lost people
Speaker 1: along the way, and I think we're doing it again.
Speaker 1: I do not necessarily think AI is going to spell
Speaker 1: the end of everything. I'm not a doomsayer. I'm not
Speaker 1: saying AI is going to end us. All I do
Speaker 1: think what we're seeing right now is kind of an
Speaker 1: undirected scramble that's largely fed by the fear of being
Speaker 1: left behind. That you have business leaders who are saying,
Speaker 1: we can't sleep on this because if we do, our
Speaker 1: competitors are going to get ahead of us and we'll
Speaker 1: never catch up. I think that's what's feeding a lot
Speaker 1: of this discourse, and often that can mean that you
Speaker 1: actually end up pushing yourself backward because you make a
Speaker 1: bad implementation. Then if you had just stayed the course.
Speaker 1: Not that I'm saying anyone has to just do things
Speaker 1: the way they've always done them, because that's how they've
Speaker 1: always done them, but they do need to have a
Speaker 1: greater understanding of the technology and its consequences before putting
Speaker 1: it in action. That to me just as common sense,
Speaker 1: And again we just look back at the fluoroscopes in
Speaker 1: these shoe stores to say, here's an example of what
Speaker 1: can go wrong if we don't take those steps. People
Speaker 1: get sick, they could even die. It's something that we
Speaker 1: need to keep in mind. Okay, that's it for this
Speaker 1: episode of tech stuff. I thought it was really interesting
Speaker 1: to dive back into that part of the tech. This
Speaker 1: does obviously have parallels elsewhere in the tech space. I mean,
Speaker 1: there were the so called radium girls, the women who
Speaker 1: would use little paint brushes to paint thin lines of
Speaker 1: radium on watch hands and watch numbers so that you
Speaker 1: could have glow in the dark watches. Often they would
Speaker 1: end up licking their paint brushes in order to be
Speaker 1: able to keep it at a fine point, and a
Speaker 1: lot of those women ended up having terrible problems later
Speaker 1: on in life because of radiation. So again, it's not
Speaker 1: the only case where we embraced a technology and a
Speaker 1: phenomenon that we didn't really understand fully and we did
Speaker 1: so without any hesitation, and people ultimately paid the price
Speaker 1: for that. So again, just words of caution out there
Speaker 1: for us to consider on occasion while we're hearing all
Speaker 1: the evangelists push really hard for companies to jump on
Speaker 1: board and adopt this stuff. That's it. I hope you
Speaker 1: are all well, and I'll talk to you again really soon.
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