Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
Speaker 1: and a lot of all things tech. And this is
Speaker 1: the tech news for Tuesday, December twenty one, twenty twenty one.
Speaker 1: Before we get into it, the rest of the episodes
Speaker 1: this week will be classic episodes in order for us
Speaker 1: to take some time off for the holidays. I hope
Speaker 1: you guys enjoy that we will have a couple of
Speaker 1: new episodes next week. My hope is to have some
Speaker 1: episodes that are the wrap up for the year in
Speaker 1: tech one. Those are gonna be some doozies. I'm sure
Speaker 1: it's gonna be more than one episode, but I have
Speaker 1: not actually written them yet, so we'll see. But let's
Speaker 1: get to the news for today. The trial of Elizabeth Holmes,
Speaker 1: the founder of the company Theronos, is now in the
Speaker 1: hands of the jury. They will meet for a second
Speaker 1: day of deliberations today to determine a verdict for Holmes,
Speaker 1: who is facing eleven charges of wire fraud and conspiracy
Speaker 1: to commit wire fraud. Now, in case you managed to
Speaker 1: miss out on the Tharonis story. Over the last decade,
Speaker 1: Holmes founded a medical startup company with the goal of
Speaker 1: producing a device that could run a battery of tests
Speaker 1: on a single micro drop of blood. Holmes has said
Speaker 1: that her fear of needles and a desire to democratize
Speaker 1: medicine drove her to found Theoris, and if the deck
Speaker 1: had worked, it could have truly revolutionized medicine, potentially to
Speaker 1: the point where a household would have its own Theoris device,
Speaker 1: almost like a desktop printer, and they could use it
Speaker 1: to run tests and share that information with a physician.
Speaker 1: But unfortunately, as was slowly revealed in a series of
Speaker 1: expose s and documentaries and testimonials, the tech just could
Speaker 1: not live up to that promise. But didn't stop sarin
Speaker 1: Us from raising nearly one billion dollars in investments over
Speaker 1: the years. And that's kind of the nub of the case.
Speaker 1: Did Holmes knowingly misrepresent what her technology could do and
Speaker 1: how it performed in order to get investors and partnerships
Speaker 1: with healthcare companies? Did she intend to mislead them? That's
Speaker 1: what the jury has to determine. She certainly adopted a
Speaker 1: lavish and eccentric lifestyle and there are records of her
Speaker 1: interactions with employees who brought up concerns with her. It
Speaker 1: seemed to indicate that she was not keen on accepting
Speaker 1: the possibility that the whole endeavor was fruitless. But her
Speaker 1: lawyers have argued, essentially that she was just as bought
Speaker 1: in to the hype as her investors were, which would
Speaker 1: mean she did not purposefully lie to anyone. Honestly, it's
Speaker 1: a pretty tough call from a legal standpoint, though, I
Speaker 1: think it goes without saying that what the company did
Speaker 1: was wrong and an enormous amount of money was wasted
Speaker 1: on this. Not only that, but for people who are
Speaker 1: depending upon blood tests to come back from Tharaos, that's
Speaker 1: another matter entirely, right, Like, that's the level of criminality
Speaker 1: that goes beyond just fraud. There are people who you know,
Speaker 1: whose health is at stake here. Anyway, We may have
Speaker 1: a verdict later this week, but as I record this episode,
Speaker 1: we're still in the deliberation phase. And now to transition
Speaker 1: into the cyber crime part of this episode, buckledown, folks,
Speaker 1: there's a lot to cover first up, According to a
Speaker 1: company called Group or eighty Group a I T e.
Speaker 1: I don't know how you say the name, but nearly
Speaker 1: half of all Americans were victims of some form of
Speaker 1: financial identity theft in twenty That is a really crazy statistic. Now,
Speaker 1: if I were being flippant, I would suggest that it's
Speaker 1: the other half of all Americans who stole the identities
Speaker 1: of the first half. So if you're not in one group,
Speaker 1: you're in the other. But that's obviously not true. That's
Speaker 1: just a bad joke. Losses from those incidents amounted to
Speaker 1: more than seven hundred billion dollars, according to this research firm,
Speaker 1: which published its findings in a paper titled US Identity
Speaker 1: Theft The Stark Reality. A big slice of that crime
Speaker 1: pie goes to folks who committed some form of unemployment
Speaker 1: identity theft, using false information to claim unemployment benefits. So,
Speaker 1: just to be clear, the folks who were abusing unemployment
Speaker 1: weren't necessarily people who didn't want to work. That was
Speaker 1: like the common narrative you would hear from certain circles, right, like,
Speaker 1: you can't you can't boost unemployment, it will just encourage
Speaker 1: people not to work. No, it turns out the people
Speaker 1: who were really abusing the system were thieves who are
Speaker 1: victimizing other people and stealing from the system in order
Speaker 1: to fund themselves. They weren't like layabouts, they were actually
Speaker 1: actively victimizing oaks who deserved unemployment benefits. By the way,
Speaker 1: if you're between the ages of thirty five and forty four, well, congratulations,
Speaker 1: you are in the prime target zone for those kinds
Speaker 1: of attacks, because that age group represented the highest percentage
Speaker 1: of consumers who found themselves victimized in twenty twenty. The
Speaker 1: report also found that Kansas, Rhode Island, Illinois, Nevada, and
Speaker 1: Washington were the states with the highest number of identity
Speaker 1: theft reports. Now, when it comes to fraud, the states
Speaker 1: the top that list were Nevada again, Delaware, Florida, Maryland,
Speaker 1: and my home state of Georgia. The number one state,
Speaker 1: as in the state with the highest number of reported
Speaker 1: cyber crimes was Kansas, with one thousand, four hundred eighty
Speaker 1: three reports per one hundred thousand people. The safest state
Speaker 1: was South Dakota, which had just seventy two reports per
Speaker 1: one hundred thousand people. However, we take territories into account,
Speaker 1: the real prize goes to Puerto Rico, which only had
Speaker 1: fifty two reports per one thousand people. But wait, it
Speaker 1: keeps getting worse. The report points out that there have
Speaker 1: been some big data breaches and cases of companies failing
Speaker 1: to secure data over the last year, from a case
Speaker 1: where more than two million records from Microsoft customers was
Speaker 1: found on the web unprotected to the ransomware attack on
Speaker 1: Colonial pipeline that interfered with fuel transportation and distribution earlier
Speaker 1: this year. So yeah, bad news. Meanwhile, there are the
Speaker 1: robo calls, another branch of scams and crimes. T Mobile
Speaker 1: released an end of the year report on scam calls
Speaker 1: and robo calls, saying that the number of calls more
Speaker 1: than doubled over the course of so that in January
Speaker 1: there were around one point one billion scam call attempts
Speaker 1: and in November there were two point five billion, and
Speaker 1: people wonder why I never pick up my phone anymore?
Speaker 1: And way. T Mobile says it already blocked more than
Speaker 1: twenty one billion scam calls this year through its scam
Speaker 1: Shield service. Even so, scammers were able to siphon away
Speaker 1: nearly thirty billion dollars from targets. Now. According to T Mobile,
Speaker 1: more than half of those calls came in the form
Speaker 1: of a scam vehicle warranty message, and I could say
Speaker 1: I've actually received some of those. Uh, the few times
Speaker 1: that a scammer actually bothered to leave a voicemail that
Speaker 1: is because I don't pick up the phone. And you know,
Speaker 1: that's actually pretty rich, because there's no car in my name.
Speaker 1: I don't have a car in my name, so I
Speaker 1: didn't know what I'd be warranteeing in the first place.
Speaker 1: But following up on that are calls that claim to
Speaker 1: be from the Social Security Office, which suggests a focus
Speaker 1: on older targets, and the Federal Communications Commission or FCC,
Speaker 1: has really been going after robocall operations in the United States,
Speaker 1: levying hefty fines for companies found to engage in the
Speaker 1: practice and pushing for tell calm companies to institute systems
Speaker 1: that would eliminate stuff like spoofing. Spoofing is when a
Speaker 1: scammer uses a bit of software to make it seem
Speaker 1: as though the call is coming from a different phone number,
Speaker 1: often one that appears to be local to whatever the
Speaker 1: targets phone number is, in an effort to commence them
Speaker 1: to pick up. Like you're more likely to pick up
Speaker 1: a phone if the phone number looks somewhat familiar. That's
Speaker 1: the thought process. The UK's National Crime Agency and National
Speaker 1: Cyber Crime Unit found a database containing two hundred twenty
Speaker 1: five million stolen login credentials for various services and websites.
Speaker 1: The agencies handed this cash of data over to a
Speaker 1: service called Have I Been Poned? That's a have I
Speaker 1: Been pw in e ed. That service gives folks the
Speaker 1: chance to search their own email information to see if
Speaker 1: any of the accounts that email is part of have
Speaker 1: been compromised in the past, and if their passwords have
Speaker 1: been exposed. And so it's really a way for people
Speaker 1: to to kind of take action and see if their
Speaker 1: loggin credentials are still safe. This is also a good
Speaker 1: time to remind you all that it is important to
Speaker 1: set strong passwords. Do not use the same password for
Speaker 1: multiple accounts. I know you all know this, but I'm
Speaker 1: gonna say it anyway. Also, I find that password vault
Speaker 1: programs really help with this because that way you don't
Speaker 1: have to remember two hundred unique strong passwords. I totally
Speaker 1: get that that's not really feasible. So password vault's a
Speaker 1: good password vault is invaluable. And finally, if a service
Speaker 1: that you subscribe to offers two factor authentication, Definitely activate that,
Speaker 1: choose that option. It will really cut back on the
Speaker 1: chance that someone will compromise one of your accounts. We
Speaker 1: have some more stories to cover in this episode, but
Speaker 1: before we get to that, let's tay a quick break. Okay,
Speaker 1: we're back and we're still talking about cybersecurity. You might
Speaker 1: remember that I did a recent episode in which I
Speaker 1: talked about a zero day vulnerability in apaches logging library
Speaker 1: service log for J. Tons of companies, tons of systems
Speaker 1: and services all rely on log for J, and as
Speaker 1: the name suggests, log for J logs data. It essentially
Speaker 1: is about keeping a record of what's going on within
Speaker 1: a system anyway. This particular vulnerability would allow someone like
Speaker 1: a hacker to gain access to a system running log
Speaker 1: for J and potentially get control where they can execute
Speaker 1: whatever code they want and thus execute code that would
Speaker 1: give them full control of that remote server just by
Speaker 1: you know, using this vulnerability in this logging service. Apache
Speaker 1: issued a patch to fix the vulnerability, but you have
Speaker 1: to install patches right Just because the patches there doesn't
Speaker 1: magically solve the issue and cure all these systems that
Speaker 1: have logged for J on them, you have to actually
Speaker 1: install that patch, and the problem is that not everyone
Speaker 1: is super responsive. Not everyone jumps on that right away.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it's not necessarily the fault of the company, maybe
Speaker 1: that their system is so huge and diverse that rolling
Speaker 1: out a patch actually takes a lot of time. That
Speaker 1: means that while there are technically fixes to this problem,
Speaker 1: not everyone is actually incorporating them, not to the same
Speaker 1: degree in the same speed. So some systems, perhaps tens
Speaker 1: of thousands of them, remain vulnerable, and likely some of
Speaker 1: them will remain vulnerable for years to come. Meanwhile, a
Speaker 1: hacker group called CONTI, known primarily for in someware attacks,
Speaker 1: has developed an attack chain that leverages the log for
Speaker 1: J vulnerability. CONTI is a prolific ransomware hacker gang. They're
Speaker 1: based out of Russia. They're potentially state sponsored or at
Speaker 1: least state sanctioned, meaning the Russian authorities have shown very
Speaker 1: little interest in shutting down this hacker group, and security
Speaker 1: experts at at a dv INTEL say Conte's scale is
Speaker 1: really large, it's a big operation, and that their methods
Speaker 1: are very sophisticated, which makes them particularly dangerous and it
Speaker 1: sounds to me like two, where's is going to be
Speaker 1: another big year of of big ransomware attacks. It really
Speaker 1: drives home that organizations will need to spend a lot
Speaker 1: of time and resources to patch vulnerable systems, which again
Speaker 1: is a process that's laborious and time consuming. So you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's a big mess. It's absolutely critical, and it's
Speaker 1: also not easy to do a fun combination. Over in Belgium,
Speaker 1: the Ministry of Defense recently announced that the department was
Speaker 1: the target of cyber attacks and that yes, the attackers
Speaker 1: exploited that log for J vulnerability I was just talking about.
Speaker 1: According to the department quote, some of the Ministry's activities
Speaker 1: were paralyzed for several days end quote. Now, it sounds
Speaker 1: as though staff detected the attack fairly early on, and
Speaker 1: they were able to sequester the infected systems and thus
Speaker 1: compartmentalize their computer systems so that the ministry could mostly
Speaker 1: continue doing what it does while simultaneously containing the threat
Speaker 1: to the affected systems. Now, as I record this, no
Speaker 1: one has yet to identify the attackers, so we don't
Speaker 1: know who was responsible. It is a pretty scary story, right,
Speaker 1: and countries defense ministry being effectively targeted by hackers. It's
Speaker 1: not out of the ordinary. I mean, we know that
Speaker 1: cyber warfare is raging all the time, we just don't
Speaker 1: necessarily know about it most of the time. But to
Speaker 1: see something like that UH is incredibly sobering because obviously
Speaker 1: you could have hostile countries really disabling the functionality of
Speaker 1: massive and critical infrastructure in other countries. Very scary stuff.
Speaker 1: But while I'm talking about Belgium, I should also mention
Speaker 1: that back in June, the government of Belgium proposed a
Speaker 1: law that would require companies that run encrypted messaging services
Speaker 1: like WhatsApp and Signal to include a tool that would
Speaker 1: decrypt communications upon request by authorities in the course of
Speaker 1: criminal investigations. Of course, doing that would completely invalidate encryption
Speaker 1: in the first place. I mean, the whole point of
Speaker 1: the system is that no one other than the parties
Speaker 1: involved in that communication are able to decrypt the messages,
Speaker 1: not not even the service provider. Like that's that's got
Speaker 1: to be key to an encrypted messaging service, that the
Speaker 1: service itself cannot decrypt the messages. To incorporate a work
Speaker 1: around would negate all of that. It would also require
Speaker 1: an entirely different approach to providing the service, but that's
Speaker 1: another matter anyway. Once the public learned of this this
Speaker 1: part of the law, criticism followed. Many rightly pointed out
Speaker 1: that creating a back door in a secure system means
Speaker 1: that you've just removed any security from that system. A backdoor,
Speaker 1: when you really break it down, is a vulnerability, and
Speaker 1: people can learn about and exploit vulnerabilities. So generally speaking,
Speaker 1: you want to identify and eliminate vulnerabilities, not introduce new ones.
Speaker 1: What analogy I was used is that you can have
Speaker 1: like a bank vault and you have like one of
Speaker 1: those big, massive vault doors that totally locks in place
Speaker 1: and has time locks and all this stuff, and it's
Speaker 1: really hard to break through. But if you install a
Speaker 1: screen door in the back of the vault so that
Speaker 1: you could just you know, come in and out more easily,
Speaker 1: then you've just invalidated that that giant door. Right, it
Speaker 1: doesn't matter, same sort of thing when we talk about
Speaker 1: back doors and secure systems. It is a terrible idea. Fortunately,
Speaker 1: the Belgian government listened to the criticism and has subsequently
Speaker 1: removed the decryption requirement from that law. Now it's time
Speaker 1: for a couple of Bitcoin stories. Bitcoin the choice for
Speaker 1: money launderers around the world. So an employee of Sony's
Speaker 1: life insurance company allegedly embezzled around a hundred fifty four
Speaker 1: million dollars during a financial transfer transaction between two Sony
Speaker 1: company accounts. So essentially the job was to move money
Speaker 1: from one Sony account to another Sony account. It's just
Speaker 1: that along the way, a measly hundred fifty four million
Speaker 1: dollars worth of Sony's resources found their way into the
Speaker 1: personal account of this particular Sony employee. That is a
Speaker 1: heck of a dip into the corporate piggy bank. Then
Speaker 1: that employee allegedly converted all of that money into bitcoin,
Speaker 1: around three thousand, eight hundred seventy nine bitcoin, and the
Speaker 1: FBI got on the case and seized the bitcoin in question.
Speaker 1: And today that bitcoin amount is worth around a hundred
Speaker 1: eighty million dollars. That's not not bad amount of interest,
Speaker 1: right It started off with a hundred fifty four million,
Speaker 1: Now you're at a hundred eighty million, like cow. So
Speaker 1: the Sony employee, now former employee, is under arrest in Japan.
Speaker 1: No big surprise there. I'm not sure if this means
Speaker 1: Sony will actually end up with more money than what
Speaker 1: was stolen from it, thanks to the appreciation and value
Speaker 1: of bitcoin between May, when the theft happened and when
Speaker 1: the FBI was able to seize the bitcoin. That's a
Speaker 1: question I can't answer. Pretty curious stuff, But yeah, bitcoin
Speaker 1: continues to be associated with people who are doing some
Speaker 1: pretty shady stuff. Again, like I've said, with a lot
Speaker 1: of other technologies, there's nothing about bitcoin that inherently makes
Speaker 1: it bad. It's just that a lot of bitcoins features
Speaker 1: are ones that also become really useful if you want
Speaker 1: to do shady things, So the tool itself not necessarily bad,
Speaker 1: although I have other very obvious feelings about bitcoin. But yeah,
Speaker 1: you see a lot of folks running some unethical operations
Speaker 1: relying on bitcoin. Speaking of bitcoin, and a report that
Speaker 1: probably didn't surprise that many people, the Wall Street Journal
Speaker 1: says that the top ten thousand bitcoin accounts hold five
Speaker 1: million bitcoins. That's equal to more than two hundred thirty
Speaker 1: billion dollars. That would be about ten thousand out of
Speaker 1: around a hundred fourteen million people, and the Wall Street
Speaker 1: Journal points out this means the top point zero one
Speaker 1: percent of bitcoin holders control nearly of all bitcoin in circulation,
Speaker 1: so this would be the tippy tippy top of a
Speaker 1: pyramid if you were to compare bitcoin to a pyramid scheme.
Speaker 1: Some folks have tried to do that, although I think
Speaker 1: it's more of a speculation engine than a pyramid scheme.
Speaker 1: This is a greater disparity than we see in the
Speaker 1: United States in general, where the top one percent of
Speaker 1: the wealthiest people control around a third of all wealth
Speaker 1: in the US. But one percent is a whole lot
Speaker 1: more than point zero one. Anyway, in the crypto community,
Speaker 1: the accounts that control a lot of bitcoin are referred
Speaker 1: to as whales, and I'm not sure if the researchers
Speaker 1: who looked into this differentiated between accounts that belong to, say,
Speaker 1: a single individual, and those that belong to crypto pools
Speaker 1: or exchanges and that kind of thing. Moving on, let's
Speaker 1: talk about Amazon on because there are a couple of
Speaker 1: big stories. They're One is that Reuter's reports that Amazon
Speaker 1: scrubbed negative reviews of Chi Jinping's book The Governance of China.
Speaker 1: Chi Jinping is the president of China. Now, apparently Amazon
Speaker 1: was told to strike any review that wasn't five stars
Speaker 1: from its Chinese operated sites like the sites that operate
Speaker 1: within China, and the company subsequently removed and disabled reviews
Speaker 1: for that book. This happened about two years ago, and
Speaker 1: the report drives home how big tech companies will often
Speaker 1: enable authoritarian regimes if it means getting access to their
Speaker 1: very huge markets. China has more than one point four
Speaker 1: billion people in it, and so big companies naturally really
Speaker 1: want access to the money those people may or may
Speaker 1: not have. And if that means the company has to
Speaker 1: engage in a little censorship or perhaps enable a propaganda
Speaker 1: arm of authoritarian regime, well in many cases that's kind
Speaker 1: of waved away as the price of doing business. It's
Speaker 1: never framed that way, by the way, no one would
Speaker 1: ever frame it that way, because that would just be
Speaker 1: a pr nightmare to it to say the quiet part
Speaker 1: out loud. They always frame it in a way where
Speaker 1: they claim that they're giving access to more information. But
Speaker 1: if it's information that only goes through a government filter
Speaker 1: before it gets to people, I don't really buy that
Speaker 1: argument anyway. Considering China's record on stuff like human rights violations,
Speaker 1: this is pretty darn insidious, but it's also not surprising,
Speaker 1: which is incredibly sad. All Right, we have several more
Speaker 1: stories that we need to finish out before we close
Speaker 1: this episode. But before we do that, let's take another
Speaker 1: quick break. Boeing and Airbus have issued warnings that five
Speaker 1: G technology rollouts could create problems for the aviation industry.
Speaker 1: The warning says that five G radio waves could interfere
Speaker 1: with aircraft electronics like radio altimeters. This follows awarding from
Speaker 1: the Federal Aviation Ministration or f a A that also
Speaker 1: said five G interference could cause flight diversions, which obviously
Speaker 1: is a pretty serious problem. Companies like A, T and
Speaker 1: T and Verizon have delayed their activation of five G
Speaker 1: networks while working on this issue, looking to adopt precautionary
Speaker 1: measures to limit five G interference, but Boeing and Airbus
Speaker 1: claim that these proposals don't go far enough, and they
Speaker 1: want to see a commitment to limiting five G so
Speaker 1: that it doesn't operate within range of like forty of
Speaker 1: the world's major airports. The US wireless industry is pushing
Speaker 1: back against this, saying that the aviation industry is distorting
Speaker 1: the truth that they are essentially saying that this problem
Speaker 1: is way worse than any actual problem that might exist,
Speaker 1: and they argue that delays in five G rollouts cause
Speaker 1: harm to the companies and consumers alike. I may have
Speaker 1: to do a full episode about this in the future
Speaker 1: and really look into what's going on at a technical level,
Speaker 1: because I honestly don't know what argument here is. The
Speaker 1: most realistic musician Brian Eno has a pretty skeptical perspective
Speaker 1: on n f T s, which means he and I
Speaker 1: share that in common. Also, I used to record in
Speaker 1: a podcasting studio named after him. All our podcasting studios
Speaker 1: at the office are named after musicians like Eno, Bowie, Prince,
Speaker 1: and York. Anyway, Eno says he feels n f T
Speaker 1: s are being peddled by the equivalent of snake oil
Speaker 1: salespeople and marketed to suckers, hucksters and suckers I think
Speaker 1: is how he put it, which sounds like p T.
Speaker 1: Barnum would be all over the n f T market
Speaker 1: if you are alive today. I happen to agree with
Speaker 1: Eno on this. Should we actually build a metaverse and
Speaker 1: you can listen to yesterday's episode to hear my thoughts
Speaker 1: about that, then n f T S could arguably be
Speaker 1: is full if you wanted to port digital goods from
Speaker 1: one environment into another, though that process would also require
Speaker 1: that a lot of other pieces fall into place, and
Speaker 1: it's by no means a guarantee that it would actually happen.
Speaker 1: But right now, n f t s are really just
Speaker 1: a digital record of a transaction, and you don't actually
Speaker 1: end up owning anything tangible, at least not in the
Speaker 1: sense that we typically think of. I've often said it's
Speaker 1: kind of like buying a star. If you've ever seen
Speaker 1: one of those commercials, you don't really actually own anything,
Speaker 1: and there's no way to say, hey, that's my star,
Speaker 1: so no one else can buy it, Like there's nothing
Speaker 1: stopping some other companies saying, well, we're selling stars, and
Speaker 1: that same star is owned by like eight different people.
Speaker 1: I mean, not that anyone would really care or do
Speaker 1: anything about it. It's just it's it's meaningless, is what
Speaker 1: I'm saying. Anyway, One thing n f T s can
Speaker 1: do is allow fans of an artist or creator a
Speaker 1: chance to support that person's work and show their enthusiasm
Speaker 1: for it. So if an artist works primary le in
Speaker 1: web based media, it can be difficult to monetize that work.
Speaker 1: You might create a Patreon account or something like that,
Speaker 1: But there are fundamental differences between an artist who works
Speaker 1: in the digital realm versus someone who works in a
Speaker 1: physical form of media. N f T s can be
Speaker 1: one way to financially support artists, but that's not really
Speaker 1: how n f t s are marketed. They're pushed more
Speaker 1: as a status symbol or speculative investments, and I feel
Speaker 1: that that's pretty harmful and that that was mostly what
Speaker 1: Eno was getting at. You can read up on what
Speaker 1: he has to say at the Crypto Syllabus website and
Speaker 1: it's under the article Brian Eno on n f T
Speaker 1: s and automaticism. Finally, New Scientists has published an article
Speaker 1: titled human brain cells in a dish learned to play
Speaker 1: Pong faster than an Ai, which is all sorts of
Speaker 1: clickbait for yours. Truly, the headline appears to have been
Speaker 1: engineered in such a way that there's no way I
Speaker 1: could avoid clicking on it. It brings to mind something
Speaker 1: like a Frankenstein film in which a doctor has a
Speaker 1: little bit of brain matter and a dish, and he's
Speaker 1: watching a screen and sees a paddle hit a ball
Speaker 1: on the screen and then proclaim it's alive a love
Speaker 1: But what is actually going on here? All right? Well,
Speaker 1: so some scientists at Cortical Labs took living brain cells,
Speaker 1: incorporated them into a processor, and connected that to a
Speaker 1: quote unquote virtual game world. A large discipline within AI
Speaker 1: and machine learning is the creation of what are called
Speaker 1: artificial neural networks. Well, this is kind of similar, except
Speaker 1: it's using actual neural tissue to serve as neural nodes.
Speaker 1: I would love to tell you more about this, but
Speaker 1: the article is distressingly short on details, and Cortical Labs
Speaker 1: their website gets a bit loosey goosey with their own language.
Speaker 1: For example, from a blog post that was posted just
Speaker 1: a couple of days ago called what does it mean
Speaker 1: to Grow a Mind? The Cortical Lab blog reads up,
Speaker 1: we don't know what we're making because nothing like this
Speaker 1: has ever existed before, an entirely new mode of being,
Speaker 1: a fusion of silicon and neuron, a native to the
Speaker 1: digital world, lit with the Promethean fire of the human mind.
Speaker 1: So they don't really know what they're making. Well, nothing
Speaker 1: could go wrong there, you know. Um, I'll set aside
Speaker 1: my pessimism and skepticism and need to know more and
Speaker 1: just say that bio circuits are fascinating and they come
Speaker 1: complete with their own set of ethical issues to consider,
Speaker 1: but they might also end up being the backbone of
Speaker 1: a new branch of machine learning and AI. And that's
Speaker 1: it for this episode of the Tech News Tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: When we come back later this week, like I said,
Speaker 1: we're going to have some reruns of classic episodes, but
Speaker 1: we'll be back next week with some new ones. And
Speaker 1: I hope every and out there is having a safe,
Speaker 1: healthy and happy holiday season. I know that is incredibly
Speaker 1: challenging considering the the way things work today, but I
Speaker 1: still hope you're all well, and I look forward to
Speaker 1: talking to you again and really soon. Text Stuff is
Speaker 1: an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.