Speaker 1: Welcome to tex Stuff, a production from my Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Joathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
Speaker 1: and how the tech are you. It's time for a
Speaker 1: text Stuff Tidbits probably gonna be how longer tidbits episodes?
Speaker 1: I just don't know how to do short ones apparently,
Speaker 1: But I wanted to talk about obsolescence. Uh. And this
Speaker 1: is because I read an article which I'll be talking
Speaker 1: about later in this episode that really got me to
Speaker 1: thinking about it in kind of a big picture way.
Speaker 1: And um, I really want to talk about the dangers
Speaker 1: of obsolescence, of of technology going obsolete. And I've done
Speaker 1: a few episodes where I've talked about these kind of things.
Speaker 1: I know, I as actor and I did a fun
Speaker 1: episode where we just talked about, you know, technology that
Speaker 1: no longer is really relevant. But this goes beyond that.
Speaker 1: I've also talked about this with in connection to the
Speaker 1: right to repair, and in case you're new to that phrase,
Speaker 1: it refers to a movement in which consumers and some
Speaker 1: organizations are really pressuring companies to open up options for
Speaker 1: the maintenance and repair of their products. That they produce
Speaker 1: so that you are not forced as a customer to
Speaker 1: either throw out something that no longer works and then
Speaker 1: replace it prematurely, or you have to jump through hoops
Speaker 1: to go through the quote unquote official channels to repair it.
Speaker 1: And we all know why companies want to build these
Speaker 1: kinds of systems that require users to go through official channels.
Speaker 1: And it's all called revenue. Um. If I make a
Speaker 1: widget and I sell my widget to you, well that's
Speaker 1: good for me, you know, but it's only good that
Speaker 1: one time, because you might your widget and then you're
Speaker 1: off on your married little way. But if I also
Speaker 1: make sure that I build the widgets in such a
Speaker 1: way that only I am able to do maintenance and
Speaker 1: repair on those widgets, well then you have no option
Speaker 1: but to bring the widget back to me when you
Speaker 1: need that kind of work done and then pay me
Speaker 1: a fee in the process. Or you have to throw
Speaker 1: away your broken widget and maybe you're gonna buy a
Speaker 1: new one from me. You know that either way, I
Speaker 1: make money. And when my widget company becomes a global conglomerate,
Speaker 1: you know, widgets around the world, I might end up
Speaker 1: creating a whole network of repair shops out there, and
Speaker 1: each one has to pay me a hefty license fee
Speaker 1: for the privilege of being allowed to work on widgets.
Speaker 1: And I then provide the correct tools and documentation so
Speaker 1: that people can do that, but only if they pay
Speaker 1: me the licensing fee. So that independent repair shop down
Speaker 1: the road that you have a good relationship with, well,
Speaker 1: they don't get access to in of those resources, or
Speaker 1: you know, they might be ill equipped to do any
Speaker 1: work on the product, or they might even be incapable
Speaker 1: of during doing work on the product because I've locked
Speaker 1: it away essentially, and they're not part of the system,
Speaker 1: so you can't go to them. So the right to
Speaker 1: repair movement essentially says it is unfair and anti competitive
Speaker 1: for companies to lock down their products so that you
Speaker 1: can't maintain and repair stuff yourself or to go to
Speaker 1: someone of your own choosing. And we're seeing that kind
Speaker 1: of story you play out across the world. Various governments
Speaker 1: are starting to pass laws to try and guarantee the
Speaker 1: right to repair. And this will also come into play
Speaker 1: with the concept of obsolescence. So when I say obsolescence,
Speaker 1: I'm thinking about a few possible pathways that essentially lead
Speaker 1: to the same destination. And the destination is that you've
Speaker 1: got a product or maybe a service that no longer
Speaker 1: is receiving support from the company that created it. Uh,
Speaker 1: the product or service might still work, but there are
Speaker 1: better or at least more supported options that are out there,
Speaker 1: and over time its performance will diminish. So in other words,
Speaker 1: maybe you've got a particular hardware gadget. The company that
Speaker 1: made that gadget has gone out of business, and so
Speaker 1: you don't have any way of getting in your replacement
Speaker 1: parts or anything. No one's making them because the company
Speaker 1: that did make them is gone now. So while it works,
Speaker 1: it's fine, but once it breaks down, you might be
Speaker 1: stuck with just a dead piece of technology. And this
Speaker 1: is a huge problem in tech in general. And it's
Speaker 1: also kind of what the tech industry is largely built upon,
Speaker 1: and that can be a really bad thing. In fact,
Speaker 1: it's kind of what you know, hype and product cycles
Speaker 1: are all built around. So I always think of back
Speaker 1: in the day when Steve Jobs was alive and he
Speaker 1: was Master of the Product presentation at Apple. You could
Speaker 1: really sense audience excitement in an Apple presentation. Even if
Speaker 1: you were just watching that presentation on streaming video. You
Speaker 1: could just sense how excited the crowd was, and Steve
Speaker 1: Jobs would come up on stage and pull out the
Speaker 1: latest iPhone or iPad or Mac or whatever and gush
Speaker 1: about how it blows the doors off all the other
Speaker 1: technologies out there, either like introducing something for the first time,
Speaker 1: like that first iPhone presentation way back in early two
Speaker 1: thousand seven, or showing how the latest model has become
Speaker 1: an incredible improvement over all past models, and everyone ends
Speaker 1: up going nuts. The crowd ate it up. And these
Speaker 1: were the same crowds who a year earlier would have
Speaker 1: gone gaga over the previous generation of those products and
Speaker 1: so on, But now it was almost like they were
Speaker 1: ready to throw their current iPhone or iPad or whatever
Speaker 1: into the garbage and rush out and buy a new one.
Speaker 1: Now I'm exaggerating a little bit, but only a little bit.
Speaker 1: So Back in two thousand fourteen, Rogerner of Recon dug
Speaker 1: through some data and discovered that about forty of smartphone
Speaker 1: owners were updating their phones every single year. Now, that's
Speaker 1: pretty incredible. Here in the United States, back when the
Speaker 1: iPhone first came out, it was pretty standard to sign
Speaker 1: two year contract agreements with providers like cell phone providers
Speaker 1: and it would lock you into that provider for two years.
Speaker 1: But as part of that you would typically typically get
Speaker 1: a really big discount on phone models, so your your
Speaker 1: phone choice was being subsidized. You weren't having to pay
Speaker 1: the full retail price for a phone, which was considered
Speaker 1: to be a pretty nice trade off because the upfront
Speaker 1: cost was so much lower. In fact, with a lot
Speaker 1: of phone plans, the phone would be part of the plan.
Speaker 1: You wouldn't be paying any extra. Now that money would
Speaker 1: be factored into your monthly ill, but that was monthly.
Speaker 1: It wasn't all up front, and it was just a
Speaker 1: different world back then. Like these days, you typically buy
Speaker 1: your phone outright and then you have it added on
Speaker 1: to whatever plan you happen to have, or maybe you
Speaker 1: even switch plans. It's a very different world. But yeah,
Speaker 1: back then, getting a new phone often meant that you
Speaker 1: were agreeing to a two year contract, and if you
Speaker 1: were upgrading every year, then it's not like you were
Speaker 1: renewing that two year agreement. Instead, you were having to
Speaker 1: pay the upfront cost of the smartphone and keep it
Speaker 1: on the plan that you already had, or you were
Speaker 1: gonna have to pay extra and cancel a plan. So
Speaker 1: it was pretty remarkable that still for people of smartphone
Speaker 1: owners were actually going through that process here in the US,
Speaker 1: because I mean it was not it was it was
Speaker 1: a considerable investment. Now that churn rate forty percent of
Speaker 1: the owners upgrading every year. That was great for Apple,
Speaker 1: It was tough on consumers, and it was terrible for
Speaker 1: the environ It still is. But it showed that the
Speaker 1: consuming public was a willing participant in this acceleration of obsolescence.
Speaker 1: And I'm not even getting into the concept of planned obsolescence.
Speaker 1: That's when a company creates a product or service where
Speaker 1: the company already anticipates when it will stop supporting that
Speaker 1: service or when it will replace it. Um. And that
Speaker 1: means that we already know from the get go that
Speaker 1: this thing that's going out has a limited lifespan, and
Speaker 1: after that it's kind of buyer beware. Um, I'm not
Speaker 1: even talking about that. Or you know technology that's only
Speaker 1: designed to last a couple of years and then breaks
Speaker 1: down so you are forced to replace it. That's another
Speaker 1: element of obsolescence, but I've covered it before. Uh, but yeah,
Speaker 1: that also plays a role in this. But let's think
Speaker 1: about the consequences that follow from this trend of needing
Speaker 1: to replace technology so frequent a and how those consequences
Speaker 1: can play out. Now, I mentioned environmental impact that actually
Speaker 1: is really huge. The whole supply chain, from start to finish,
Speaker 1: has a massive environmental impact, and it's rarely a good one.
Speaker 1: For example, let's look at the very beginning of the
Speaker 1: supply chain. So a lot of tech that we have
Speaker 1: requires stuff that uses what we call rare earth metals.
Speaker 1: Rare earth metals consist of a group of seventeen elements.
Speaker 1: Fifteen of them are lanthanide elements. The two others are
Speaker 1: not lanthanides, but they're frequently found in the same ores
Speaker 1: as the other lanthanides are, and as rare earth metals implies,
Speaker 1: all seventeen of the elements are classified as metals, and
Speaker 1: unlike metals like iron, these elements don't appear as visible
Speaker 1: lumps and or you're not going to find a vein
Speaker 1: of these lanthanides. They're actually not that rare um not
Speaker 1: in the grand scheme of things. Most of them are
Speaker 1: far more abundant in the Earth's crust than say, gold is. However,
Speaker 1: most of the time they're found in such low concentrations
Speaker 1: that mining them would cost more than what you would
Speaker 1: get out of what you mind, so you would be
Speaker 1: losing money on the process. So it's not that there
Speaker 1: isn't a lot of these rare earth metals out there,
Speaker 1: but that it takes a lot of effort to get
Speaker 1: enough of them efficiently to make a profit. Now, these
Speaker 1: metals are embedded in minerals and rocks, so you have
Speaker 1: to take several steps to get at the metals. One
Speaker 1: way you could do this is you could just you know,
Speaker 1: dig up a massive pit and you use explosives to
Speaker 1: break up rocks, and you shovel up all the broken pieces,
Speaker 1: and you put these pieces through a process in which
Speaker 1: you crush the rocks down and use chemicals to separate
Speaker 1: the metals from the minerals, and then you skim the
Speaker 1: metals away and you use those and you're left with
Speaker 1: a lot of waste rock and chemical mixtures that you
Speaker 1: have to dispose of properly, and all of that just
Speaker 1: to get it that low concentration of those rare earth metals,
Speaker 1: and we need a lot of those. Not just for
Speaker 1: the tech industry though, that is one that has a
Speaker 1: very high demand for these rare earth metals. But they're
Speaker 1: used in stuff like batteries, for example, and as we
Speaker 1: shift more towards depending upon stuff like electric motors to
Speaker 1: power our vehicles, the demand for rare earth metals is
Speaker 1: going to continue to rise dramatically. They're also really important
Speaker 1: for renewable energy systems like wind turbines, which is kind
Speaker 1: of ironic when you think of the potential environmental impact
Speaker 1: of mining. But we also use them for stuff like
Speaker 1: catalysts to facilitate certain chemical processes, or phosphors to illuminate
Speaker 1: stuff like screens, or use them to polish glass in
Speaker 1: order to produce high performing optics. Militaries around the world
Speaker 1: depend up on rare earth metals is a critical component
Speaker 1: in high tech military gear, everything from GPS equipment to
Speaker 1: guided missiles. So we need a lot of this stuff.
Speaker 1: And like I said, while there's plenty of it on Earth,
Speaker 1: it isn't always found in high concentrations. So this leads
Speaker 1: us to the really ugly part of that situation. I'll
Speaker 1: talk about that after we come back from this break. Okay,
Speaker 1: to have a mining operation that's large enough to get
Speaker 1: sufficient amounts of rare earth metals, and yet the operation
Speaker 1: has to be cheap enough so that it can be profitable.
Speaker 1: Certain conditions need to be present, and one of those
Speaker 1: typically is a general disregard for the environment. Putting environmental
Speaker 1: protections in place, you know, taking care not to cause damage,
Speaker 1: and addressing problems as they arise. All of that is
Speaker 1: expensive and time consuming, and if your profit depends on
Speaker 1: keeping costs down, you're probably not going to pay that
Speaker 1: much attention to environmental concerns. So that means a lot
Speaker 1: of rare earth metal mining operations are taking place in
Speaker 1: regions where there are lacks or no environmental protections in place.
Speaker 1: Some places would forego pretty much even the most basic
Speaker 1: environmental protections and would just start pumping stuff like ammonium
Speaker 1: chloride and ammonium sulfate directly into the earth, all in
Speaker 1: an effort to separate rare earth metals from the rest
Speaker 1: of the soil and rock in there. This was a
Speaker 1: pretty common practice in China. For example, the chemical waste
Speaker 1: can be environmentally hazardous. In China, it wasn't unusual to
Speaker 1: simply build wastewater pools to hold the runoff. They were
Speaker 1: kind of like massive above ground pools literally, and they
Speaker 1: would just hold the wastewater and these pools frequently had
Speaker 1: little to no protection around them, meaning that if something
Speaker 1: were to disturb the pools, the wastewater could potentially contaminate
Speaker 1: the local area. Some of the waste materials are not
Speaker 1: just toxic, but somewhat radioactive, which creates additional concerns. And
Speaker 1: I'm mostly using the past tense here because in recent years,
Speaker 1: China has started to address this issue, working toward new
Speaker 1: ways to mind rare earth metals that are more environmentally responsible.
Speaker 1: But for a couple of decades that just wasn't the case.
Speaker 1: And now there are regions in China where the locals
Speaker 1: are having to tackle monumental cleanup jobs that could take
Speaker 1: as long as a century to complete. Then, on top
Speaker 1: of the environmental concerns, we have human rights concerns. In
Speaker 1: places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, mining operations
Speaker 1: are sometimes run by violent militias which sometimes rely on
Speaker 1: forced labor to operate, the mind so slavery essentially. While
Speaker 1: China is the main source for many rare earth metals,
Speaker 1: some of them do also come out of Africa and
Speaker 1: so are heavy dependence upon the materials helps support violent
Speaker 1: groups and human suffering, and that makes that obsolescence problem
Speaker 1: all the more critical, right. I mean, it's grim enough
Speaker 1: that we're having to deal with the consequences of our
Speaker 1: technological needs this way, but then to add with it
Speaker 1: this cycle in which we're encouraged to replace our tech
Speaker 1: frequently and make the problem worse. It exacerbates everything. It's
Speaker 1: it's pretty gruesome when you think about it. And then
Speaker 1: on top of that, for another environmental issue, what do
Speaker 1: you do with the old tech, the stuff that went
Speaker 1: obsolete if you can't repair it, which is you know,
Speaker 1: part of the issue. If you're not able to repair it,
Speaker 1: or even if you did repair it, but it couldn't
Speaker 1: keep up with what you needed to do because everything
Speaker 1: else has advanced beyond the capabilities of the hardware. What
Speaker 1: do you do with the hardware? The ideally you would
Speaker 1: send it to a place where it could be recycled
Speaker 1: or the materials inside it could be reclaimed and then
Speaker 1: used in other materials other products down the line. But
Speaker 1: a lot of it just ends up going to landfills.
Speaker 1: And that's awful, especially when you consider that a lot
Speaker 1: of the stuff that goes into our tech is potentially
Speaker 1: you know, it is toxic and could potentially contaminate the
Speaker 1: environment if it leaches out of the hardware. So again,
Speaker 1: this obsolescence issue is feeding into the environmental crisis. And
Speaker 1: of course there are other things we should have to
Speaker 1: think about two and these aren't quite as global a
Speaker 1: concern like They're not like I would argue, environmental impact
Speaker 1: that almost gets to existential levels of crisis. Human rights
Speaker 1: violations also obviously incredibly important. But there are some other
Speaker 1: things that we have to remember as well. There aren't
Speaker 1: that critical in that same scale, but are still important.
Speaker 1: For example, there's the burden that companies carry when they
Speaker 1: go all in on a certain system. This is how
Speaker 1: we get what we call legacy systems. So let's use
Speaker 1: a hypothetical picture to understand this, all right, So we've
Speaker 1: got this business um, and this business company does business
Speaker 1: e stuff in the business world in the nineteen sixties,
Speaker 1: and the company decides to purchase a brand new computer
Speaker 1: system in order to run certain critical operations. That's going
Speaker 1: to free up people so that they only have to
Speaker 1: work an hour a day, at least, that's what we
Speaker 1: all believe back in the day. It turns out that
Speaker 1: work will fill up all the available hours, even if
Speaker 1: we offload some of the workload to machines. Anyway, the
Speaker 1: company's processes lean very heavily on this new technology. Some
Speaker 1: of it's automated. All these different special proprietary programs have
Speaker 1: been written, and these very key functions are moved onto
Speaker 1: this machine. Now, meanwhile, the company grows and expands, It
Speaker 1: adds to its services, it invests in new systems, but
Speaker 1: in an effort to be as efficient as possible the
Speaker 1: but it continues to rely on this older computer system
Speaker 1: to run that certain group of mission critical processes because
Speaker 1: building a comparable new system to handle those tasks and
Speaker 1: then migrating everything over to the new system would be
Speaker 1: costly and time consuming. So time goes on. Now we're
Speaker 1: at a point where modern systems aren't compatible with the
Speaker 1: older one at all, but we still need to run
Speaker 1: those those old processes. They're still part of our business.
Speaker 1: We might even be at a point where no one
Speaker 1: on staff really has the knowledge that the company had
Speaker 1: relied upon in the past. So building a new version
Speaker 1: of the old system is even harder because no one
Speaker 1: remembers how the old one was built. Right, You have
Speaker 1: this loss of knowledge over time. This does happen in companies,
Speaker 1: so then the company continues to try and support the
Speaker 1: old computer system, now an ancient computer system that's running
Speaker 1: this original process because those processes are still important to
Speaker 1: the business, and the company really has to scramble whenever
Speaker 1: the old computer system breaks down. And all things breakdown
Speaker 1: over time, gosh darn it entropy, so this is not easy.
Speaker 1: By now, the company that produced the original computer system
Speaker 1: might be out of business, or maybe it is in business,
Speaker 1: but it's long stop supporting that piece of equipment, so
Speaker 1: you have no one to turn to when things go
Speaker 1: wrong in that case. Now, this happens all the time,
Speaker 1: particularly for companies that have to build out really customized
Speaker 1: systems to handle stuff that might be unique to that
Speaker 1: one company. So every time they upgrade their processes or
Speaker 1: their systems, management has to decide whether or not they
Speaker 1: should invest even more money to migrate stuff off of
Speaker 1: old platforms or just to keep relying on the old ones.
Speaker 1: And sometimes the idea of migration really feels like you're
Speaker 1: reinventing the wheel. So it kind of is hard to
Speaker 1: go to different stakeholders in the company and say, hey, guys,
Speaker 1: I know we've already done this, but we kind of
Speaker 1: need to do it again in on this new system
Speaker 1: so that we can operate with fewer risks, and invariably
Speaker 1: someone's going to say, well, what's wrong with the old one? Now?
Speaker 1: The same thing holds true for tons of individual consumers
Speaker 1: to One of the things that always blows my mind
Speaker 1: is when I look at the market share for various
Speaker 1: versions of the Windows operating system. Now, I know I'm
Speaker 1: talking about software in this case rather than hardware, but
Speaker 1: software does relate back to hardware because one of the
Speaker 1: issues is as operating systems get more complex, they require
Speaker 1: more advanced hardware to run. That means if you are
Speaker 1: stuck with an older computer, right you can't afford to
Speaker 1: buy a new one, maybe you don't have access to
Speaker 1: a new one. You could be in a part of
Speaker 1: the world where you have an old computer and that's
Speaker 1: that's as good as it's going to be for you. Well,
Speaker 1: you have no real access to newer operating systems because
Speaker 1: your hardware isn't capable of running them, so you're stuck
Speaker 1: on the older models. I decided I wanted to look
Speaker 1: at the distribution of current Windows market share on desktop computers.
Speaker 1: So more than eight of those computers are still using
Speaker 1: Windows ten. I should remind you that's not the latest
Speaker 1: version of Windows, but it is by far the most
Speaker 1: popular version out there. However, point four nine per cent
Speaker 1: of desktop systems are still using Windows XP. Now, I
Speaker 1: know point for nine is tiny, it's literally less than
Speaker 1: half a percentage point, but keep in mind Windows XP
Speaker 1: first came out in two thousand one, more than twenty
Speaker 1: years ago, and Microsoft ended all support for the operating
Speaker 1: system back in. That means there have been no patches,
Speaker 1: no updates for about eight years, and there are a
Speaker 1: whole bunch of reasons why that means sticking with Windows
Speaker 1: XP is a bad thing. Interestingly, there's still more folks
Speaker 1: using Windows XP then there are using Windows Vista. Windows
Speaker 1: Vista accounts for just point one nine of all desktop
Speaker 1: Windows machines, and Vista came out in two thousand seven.
Speaker 1: It was actually meant to be the successor to Windows XP.
Speaker 1: So you see how that went. All right, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: be ranting a little bit longer, but actually probably get
Speaker 1: a drink, so we're gonna take another quick break. Okay,
Speaker 1: before the break, my point was that people rely on
Speaker 1: computers running on Windows XP no longer have support for
Speaker 1: that operating system. Microsoft does not support it anymore, and
Speaker 1: any vulnerabilities in the operating system are going to stay
Speaker 1: there no matter what. There's no hope of the security patch. Now,
Speaker 1: you could argue that because the market share is so
Speaker 1: low that so relatively so few people are actually using
Speaker 1: Windows XP, no one would really bother to try and
Speaker 1: exploit a vulnerability that's there anyway, because the target population
Speaker 1: would be too small to make it worth your while.
Speaker 1: In other words, you could create malware, but you would
Speaker 1: be hitting so few people. What would be the point that?
Speaker 1: That is a an argument security through obscurity, But when
Speaker 1: companies in support, it means folks can be left without options.
Speaker 1: And I want to be clear, I am not saying
Speaker 1: that companies are obligated to continue to provide support, and
Speaker 1: definitely that would be unreasonable and frankly impossible unless we
Speaker 1: all just collectively said, yeah, we're good, we don't we
Speaker 1: don't need things to be any better than how they
Speaker 1: are right now. And you know that doesn't sound likely.
Speaker 1: So it's more that I just want folks to be
Speaker 1: aware of these consequences, that these things happen, and to
Speaker 1: plan for that, to take that into account. So let's
Speaker 1: relate this back to that right to repair movement. So
Speaker 1: another reason it's so in hordnant to have the right
Speaker 1: to repair is because companies can and do in support
Speaker 1: for certain products, whether they are hardware or software. Sometimes
Speaker 1: the company does this by choice because they want to
Speaker 1: focus on newer products. Sometimes it's by necessity because the
Speaker 1: company might just go out of business so there's no
Speaker 1: one left to provide support. But then, what happens if
Speaker 1: you depend upon that company's older product. What if that's
Speaker 1: critical to your business. Well, for small stuff, it could
Speaker 1: be an annoyance, right, maybe a tiny hardship for you
Speaker 1: to go out and find a replacement. But let's think
Speaker 1: about bigger things, like massive pieces of equipment or more critically,
Speaker 1: medical gear. So first let's talk about heavy equipment. So
Speaker 1: some of the most passionate folks in the right to
Speaker 1: repair movement are farmers. They want the ability to do
Speaker 1: maintenance and repair on farming equipment, which they rely upon
Speaker 1: for their livelihoods and which, due to heavy use, can
Speaker 1: frequently require maintenance and repair by companies like John Deere
Speaker 1: have essentially locked away the ability to make those kinds
Speaker 1: of repairs so that you can only do them if
Speaker 1: you have the access and tools to do them, and
Speaker 1: John Dear reserves that access to licensed repair shops and dealerships.
Speaker 1: That means if you are a farmer and your equipment
Speaker 1: breaks down, you can't fix it yourself. You have to
Speaker 1: take that to one of these licensed entities to get
Speaker 1: work done. You probably won't have many options in certain regions,
Speaker 1: which also means you're going to get locked into whatever
Speaker 1: the price to repair the thing is right at that place.
Speaker 1: You can't shop around. In the words, you can't say, oh, well,
Speaker 1: this repair shop gave me a quote of X thousand dollars,
Speaker 1: let me go ask this other one. You might not
Speaker 1: have those options. So it's the very definition of anti competitiveness.
Speaker 1: But what if John Deer were to go out of
Speaker 1: business entirely. Now, that's not likely to happen, but let's
Speaker 1: assume that it did for some reason. If the equipment
Speaker 1: is all locked down with proprietary systems, and if there's
Speaker 1: no way to increase access to those systems, then that
Speaker 1: equipment is obsolete. That doesn't mean the equipment is just
Speaker 1: going to spontaneously stop working, but does mean it's living
Speaker 1: on borrowed time. If a formerly licensed repair shop goes
Speaker 1: out of business in a region, that could mean that
Speaker 1: the farmers in that area have no local options when
Speaker 1: it comes to maintenance and repair, which would put additional
Speaker 1: hardships on the farmers. So you can see how obsolescence
Speaker 1: paired with a proprietary approach to repair can be really harmful. Now,
Speaker 1: the whole reason I decided to dedicate an episode to
Speaker 1: this is I read a very upsetting piece in the
Speaker 1: I E E E Spectrum and it's titled their Bionic
Speaker 1: Eyes are Now Obsolete and Unsupported, which like science fiction,
Speaker 1: but it is science fact. The piece covers the story
Speaker 1: of how a company called Second Site Medical Products developed
Speaker 1: retinal implant systems that could restore some site actually not
Speaker 1: even really restore, but provide digital vision to visually impaired
Speaker 1: and blind people. It is not ultra high definition resolution
Speaker 1: images or anything like that, but it would provide some
Speaker 1: visual capabilities to people who otherwise would be living without them.
Speaker 1: And by some I mean there were a couple of
Speaker 1: different models. The first one had sixteen pixels a vision.
Speaker 1: So imagine that your vision consists of sixteen blocks, and
Speaker 1: those blocks can either be white, gray, or black. That's
Speaker 1: kind of what people were experiencing. UH. The follow up
Speaker 1: to that had sixty pixels, so a better resolution, nothing
Speaker 1: close to what we experience with typical human site, but
Speaker 1: ill better than nothing, in fact, significantly better than nothing
Speaker 1: if you're using it to help navigate your environment, avoid obstacles,
Speaker 1: that sort of stuff. But in this company, Second Site
Speaker 1: was teetering towards bankruptcy and ended support for its Argus
Speaker 1: line of retinal implants, which meant that if a recipient's
Speaker 1: implant began to fail, there was no way. There's no support,
Speaker 1: there's no support to address a failure, the recipient would
Speaker 1: become technologically blind. And again, the implants did not just
Speaker 1: all spontaneously fail once the company got into trouble, but
Speaker 1: as problems would come up for a person, that person
Speaker 1: found they had few options available to them. Here's another example.
Speaker 1: Because of the elements in these implants, you couldn't go
Speaker 1: and get an m r I done because mr I
Speaker 1: uses very powerful magnetic fields and elements in the implants
Speaker 1: could end up being damaged. It could end up damaging
Speaker 1: the patient, it could damage the m r I equipment.
Speaker 1: So before you ever got an MRI I done, you
Speaker 1: were supposed to contact the company and talk with them
Speaker 1: about this possibility, but with the company in financial turmoil
Speaker 1: and ending support, there was no answer on the other
Speaker 1: end of the line. So it wasn't just that the
Speaker 1: technology was failing, but that when other things were cropping up,
Speaker 1: like health issues, there was no way to chat with
Speaker 1: the company and work out an approach. So it gave
Speaker 1: very few options available to the people who had received
Speaker 1: one of these retinal implants. They could have the implant
Speaker 1: surgically removed, but that process is obviously an invasive process.
Speaker 1: It's expensive and potentially quite painful. Typically, these implant surgeries
Speaker 1: are done under local and esthetic, not like general So
Speaker 1: for many of us, when our tech goes obsolete, it
Speaker 1: creates an inconvenience. You know, it could be a significant
Speaker 1: in inconveni It's depending on how far in you were.
Speaker 1: Like if you were one of the people who bought
Speaker 1: an HD DVD player and bought an entire library of
Speaker 1: HD DVDs, thinking this is the future of video. When
Speaker 1: HD DVD went under, you're probably a little frustrated that
Speaker 1: you were stuck with this library. It was never going
Speaker 1: to expand beyond what you had, and if your player
Speaker 1: breaks down, it's kind of game over. But when we're
Speaker 1: talking about medical technology, this goes well beyond that. It
Speaker 1: becomes a real impact on quality of life or perhaps
Speaker 1: even the ability to live. It can be a life
Speaker 1: or death matter, depending upon the technology. Second Site, by
Speaker 1: the way, held a public offering in one This was
Speaker 1: essentially an effort to raise more funds and to pursue
Speaker 1: the development of a new brain implant system called Orion,
Speaker 1: which is that the company has a very limited kind
Speaker 1: of pilot program where they have the Orion system. Now,
Speaker 1: the Orion is not a retinal implant, it's a brain implant.
Speaker 1: It's also meant to provide artificial vision to recipients, so
Speaker 1: it is a vision system, but it involves a brain implant.
Speaker 1: So if you think a retinal implant is a risky
Speaker 1: thing to remove, imagine having a brain implant where you've
Speaker 1: had something surgically implanted into your brain and the company
Speaker 1: responsible for the technology is potentially going out of business.
Speaker 1: That is terrifying. So for the six people who received
Speaker 1: the Ryan implant so far, one has already chosen to
Speaker 1: have it surgically removed, which could not have been an
Speaker 1: easy decision. Second Site, the company continued to struggle. The
Speaker 1: initial share price of Second Site when it had its
Speaker 1: public offering was five dollars per share, but in February,
Speaker 1: like this month, the price had fallen down to a
Speaker 1: dollar fifty per share. The founders pretty much all left,
Speaker 1: like all the leadership had stepped down, almost all the
Speaker 1: employees were laid off, almost all the equipment had sold
Speaker 1: off at auction. And now what remains of Second Sight
Speaker 1: is merging with a company called Nano Precision Medical. And
Speaker 1: there's still a lot of unanswered questions regarding the Argus
Speaker 1: and Orion products. So the question like, is the merged
Speaker 1: company going to restore support for the argus retinal implants.
Speaker 1: I don't know the answer to that, although I feel
Speaker 1: like there's an ethical obligation to do so. But again,
Speaker 1: we're not talking about whether or not your smartphone can
Speaker 1: support you know, the latest OS here, we're talking about
Speaker 1: actual vision. The Second Site story also reminds us of
Speaker 1: the importance of standardization. There are other companies out there
Speaker 1: in the biomedical space. They're creating text that can provide
Speaker 1: digital vision to the blind, but it's not as simple
Speaker 1: as someone with a failing argus to retinal implant going
Speaker 1: to a competing biotech company and getting a tune up. Right,
Speaker 1: They can't just swap out parts. These are all proprietary approaches,
Speaker 1: sometimes fundamentally different approaches to try and get the similar result.
Speaker 1: And I feel the second site story really illustrates the
Speaker 1: risks involved in adopting a technology. Now, if the payoff
Speaker 1: for that technology is significant enough, like if we're talking
Speaker 1: about a return of vision, you can convincingly argue to
Speaker 1: me that the risk is worth it. Right, that risking
Speaker 1: the possibility that the company that creates the tech could
Speaker 1: go under and you are left with technology that has
Speaker 1: a limited lifespan that might still be worth it to you.
Speaker 1: I think that has to come down to the individual.
Speaker 1: But I feel that this does help us frame what
Speaker 1: we should be thinking about when we evaluate any company's products.
Speaker 1: And the more critical the product is, the more closely
Speaker 1: we should look at the company, and it behooves us
Speaker 1: to ask really tough questions like what happens if that
Speaker 1: company should go out of business. We're looking at all
Speaker 1: these companies talking about the metaverse right now, with some
Speaker 1: of them offering up virtual real estate in virtual environments, Well,
Speaker 1: one of the questions I ask is how likely are
Speaker 1: those environments to survive long enough for whatever the metaverse
Speaker 1: ends up being to really be a real thing, you know,
Speaker 1: not just bits and pieces Star Citizens style, but an actual, full,
Speaker 1: cohesive and coherent thing or many things in the case
Speaker 1: of multiple metaverses or whatever. If you don't feel like
Speaker 1: that one company is going to last the test of time,
Speaker 1: it makes no sense to buy virtual real estate that
Speaker 1: the company is providing, because those servers may just not
Speaker 1: even be on by the time there's anything useful to
Speaker 1: do in the metaverse. So that's something that I'm seeing
Speaker 1: right now, Like that's a Those are questions that I
Speaker 1: think a lot of people need to be asking themselves
Speaker 1: before they start getting into this virtual gold rush of
Speaker 1: the met to verse and web three and all that stuff. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: this episode covered a lot of ground, but it really
Speaker 1: all comes back to taking that big picture look when
Speaker 1: it comes to our relationship with technology. I feel it's
Speaker 1: our responsibility to to do that every now and then
Speaker 1: to step back and to understand what our love of
Speaker 1: tech means not just to ourselves, but to each other
Speaker 1: and to our environment and two people in other parts
Speaker 1: of the world. We need to be aware and understand
Speaker 1: that so that we make decisions that make sense and
Speaker 1: we're not just buying the next new shiny thing because
Speaker 1: it's newer and shinier than the stuff we already have,
Speaker 1: and maybe taking a little more care when it comes
Speaker 1: to adopting text so we can make the price we
Speaker 1: pay actually worth it. Right. What if you go out
Speaker 1: and spend a couple of thousand dollars investing into technology
Speaker 1: and the whole thing goes could put It's not just
Speaker 1: that you lost a couple of thousand dollars, which is
Speaker 1: already a big deal, but all those other prices that
Speaker 1: are paid throughout the supply chain, the environmental price, all
Speaker 1: these things like that's part of it too. And that's
Speaker 1: why I think it's good to take this critical thinking
Speaker 1: and compassionate approach to approaching tech. Uh. And you know,
Speaker 1: I'm someone who uses a lot of tech myself. I've
Speaker 1: got a smartphone, I've got a couple of different computers,
Speaker 1: I've got a television, and you know, various components connected
Speaker 1: to it. So I am I am part of the
Speaker 1: system too. I'm not saying this is some sort of
Speaker 1: techno hermit who has decided to stand away from any
Speaker 1: technology whatsoever. I'm just trying to make it more of
Speaker 1: my process to take these sort of things into full
Speaker 1: consideration before I jump in on stuff. I feel like
Speaker 1: it's the responsible thing to do as a consumer. All Right,
Speaker 1: that's it for this episode. I'm gonna jump down off
Speaker 1: the soapbox. It's feeling like it's a little tall for me.
Speaker 1: And if you have suggestions for topics I should cover
Speaker 1: in future episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out to
Speaker 1: me on Twitter. The handle for the show is text
Speaker 1: stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again
Speaker 1: really soon. Y. Tech Stuff is an I Heart Radio production.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i
Speaker 1: Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
Speaker 1: your favorite shows.