Speaker 1: Thanks for tunion to tech Stuff. If you don't recognize
Speaker 1: my voice, my name is oz Valoshan, and I'm here
Speaker 1: because the inimitable Jonathan Strickland has passed the baton to
Speaker 1: Karra Price and myself to host tech Stuff. The show
Speaker 1: will remain your home for all things tech, and all
Speaker 1: the old episodes will remain available in this feed. Thanks
Speaker 1: for listening. Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeart
Speaker 1: Podcasts and Kaleidoscope. I'm Anzaloshan and today co host Kara Price,
Speaker 1: and I will bring you three things first. The headlines
Speaker 1: this week, including new and scary uses of chatchipt and
Speaker 1: a sobering reminder of the climate impact of data processing.
Speaker 1: On today's Tech Support segment, we have a conversation with
Speaker 1: four or four Media's Joseph Cox about U haul criminals,
Speaker 1: and then finally with Thrill to introduce a new segment
Speaker 1: which we lovingly call when did This Become a Thing?
Speaker 1: We go on a wild ride with Cara, which ends
Speaker 1: with a revelation about what it means to be a
Speaker 1: digital native. All of that on this week in Tech.
Speaker 1: It's Friday, January seventeenth. Stay with us, Karen Good Afternoon.
Speaker 1: I actually wasn't expecting to Good afternoon, Good afternoon, I
Speaker 1: actually wasn't expecting to see you this afternoon.
Speaker 2: Why am I not supposed to be here?
Speaker 1: Well, now you are supposed to be here. I'm glad
Speaker 1: you're here, but I actually thought you were supposed to
Speaker 1: be in LA this week.
Speaker 2: I was actually I was supposed to be on the
Speaker 2: other coast for work, and obviously I wasn't able to go.
Speaker 2: And I think I speak for both of us when
Speaker 2: I say that our hearts really go out to the
Speaker 2: people who were impacted by the fires and who continue
Speaker 2: to be impacted by the fires. And while I'm glad
Speaker 2: I'm here, I'm not glad about the circumstances.
Speaker 1: No, obviously me neither. But actually what's been going on
Speaker 1: in LA has some interesting text stories around it, and
Speaker 1: so I actually, if you'll allow me, wants to go
Speaker 1: first in this week's news roundup.
Speaker 2: We will forego the continentass and I will let you go.
Speaker 1: So last week you actually sent me a screenshot of
Speaker 1: an Instagram story.
Speaker 2: The only way to get you anything from Instagram. You're
Speaker 2: not on it, which I love about you.
Speaker 1: I'm not I do have the application, I just he.
Speaker 2: Goes on browser people.
Speaker 1: But basically, this Instagram post that you screenshotted for me
Speaker 1: was a picture of this raging inferno, and overlaid was
Speaker 1: text that reads, quote, the average AI data center uses
Speaker 1: three hundred thousand gallons of water a day to keep cool,
Speaker 1: roughly equivalent to water use in one hundred thousand homes.
Speaker 1: Open brackets, NPR, close brackets. Please skip the silly ais,
Speaker 1: the questions to chat GPT, having AI write all of
Speaker 1: your emails. Life needs water, not tech.
Speaker 2: Water is the essence of life.
Speaker 1: To be fair, whata, it is the essence of life.
Speaker 2: And it's also the essence of fighting fires in a
Speaker 2: city where droughts are just commonplace.
Speaker 1: Totally, and I was actually pretty compelled by this post
Speaker 1: that you sent me until I dug a little deeper,
Speaker 1: say more. This was, of course misinformation.
Speaker 2: I sent you misinformation.
Speaker 1: You sent me misinformation, but I didn't amplify.
Speaker 2: This is why I don't listen to news and Instagram stories.
Speaker 1: But my first clue was this open brackets, NPR, close brackets,
Speaker 1: and that gave me an opportunity. Okay, thank you Watson.
Speaker 1: That gave me an opportunity to do some research and
Speaker 1: figure out what the source of this story was, and
Speaker 1: I actually found the original NPR story.
Speaker 2: What was the NPR story.
Speaker 1: Well, it was published in August twenty twenty two, Oh
Speaker 1: my god, and the headline was data center's backbone of
Speaker 1: the digital economy, face water scarcity and climate risk. Now,
Speaker 1: this was published three months before November twenty twenty two,
Speaker 1: which is when chat GPT three entered the world and
Speaker 1: generative AI became something that kind of has entered the
Speaker 1: mainstream discourse. But the NPR story makes no mention of it.
Speaker 1: The actual quote was quote a mid size data center
Speaker 1: consumes around three hundred thousand gallons of water. Again, no
Speaker 1: mention of quote the average AI data center from the
Speaker 1: Instagram story. The story was really just about regular old
Speaker 1: data centers that were processing Google searches and doing weather
Speaker 1: forecasts and helping bitcoin traders making lose fortunes. That wasn't
Speaker 1: the only distortion in the non My mind has been
Speaker 1: in the non AI slop that you sent me. It
Speaker 1: is human generated slop.
Speaker 2: It distresses me to know end that we're in, like
Speaker 2: true crises, how easy it it is for people to
Speaker 2: get excited about information that seems compelling and not only
Speaker 2: believe it, but share it because it seems so compelling.
Speaker 1: I've actually find the truth of this story as interesting
Speaker 1: as the misinformation. So the Instagram story said that these
Speaker 1: three hundred thousand gallons per day of water could otherwise
Speaker 1: serve one hundred thousand US homes per day, it's just
Speaker 1: made up. No, In the NPR story, it's one thousand.
Speaker 1: So that's quite a big difference. As we know, there's
Speaker 1: been this kind of explosion in demand for data centers
Speaker 1: exactly because of AI. The La Times actually reported that
Speaker 1: a single query on a chatbot that uses AI is
Speaker 1: estimated to require at least ten times more electricity than
Speaker 1: a standard search on Google. So there is this spiritual
Speaker 1: truth of the story you shared, which is data centers
Speaker 1: create heat. Heat needs water to cool it down, and
Speaker 1: the explosion in generative of AI is putting a lot
Speaker 1: more strain on data centers. So there is actually weirdly
Speaker 1: lot of truth in the story.
Speaker 2: But the connection directly between data centers and the fires
Speaker 2: in Los Angeles.
Speaker 1: There is no suggestion there is a direct connection, and
Speaker 1: that's primarily because there aren't that many data centers in
Speaker 1: the Los Angeles area. There are a lot of data
Speaker 1: centers in northern California, and there is now actually a
Speaker 1: big program to build more data centers in southern California,
Speaker 1: so this could become kind of a bigger problem. But Cara,
Speaker 1: I know, I'm really only allowed one story, but this
Speaker 1: one is sort of very much connected, and it's in
Speaker 1: one of my favorite news sources. Can you guess what
Speaker 1: it is?
Speaker 2: The Daily Mail?
Speaker 1: No?
Speaker 2: I really one of your favorite the New York Posts?
Speaker 1: No? No, no, Yeah, you're embarrassing. Sorry, this is the
Speaker 1: Sacramento Bee.
Speaker 2: I love the Sacramento Bee.
Speaker 1: Sacramento is a great paper. On December eighteenth, twenty twenty four,
Speaker 1: The Bee ran a prescient op ed by Dean Flores,
Speaker 1: a former California State Senator, under the headline California's next
Speaker 1: water war won't concern agriculture. It will be about AI.
Speaker 2: Mmmm, so it's not the almonds, it's the AI.
Speaker 1: It's the AI is the AI and the almonds, And
Speaker 1: and Flores continues that the struggle for water, of course,
Speaker 1: is not a new topic in California. It used to
Speaker 1: be farms versus cities, agriculture versus know, urban development, but
Speaker 1: now there's this third great demand on the water supply
Speaker 1: of a drought prone state. There are actually more than
Speaker 1: two hundred and seventy data centers already in California, and
Speaker 1: in California, water consumption from those data centers is in
Speaker 1: the billions of gallons each year and there.
Speaker 2: And Flores points this out in his.
Speaker 1: Exactly and says that data centers could double or triple
Speaker 1: their water demand in the next decade in California. And
Speaker 1: I just think what Flora's ended his piece saying was
Speaker 1: this story hasn't yet been written. AI infrastructure is being
Speaker 1: built in real time, so there are opportunities to kind
Speaker 1: of do better when it comes to figuring out how
Speaker 1: to to meet this demand.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I do agree with you, Oz, and I
Speaker 2: think it's important on this show when we cover things
Speaker 2: that can be a little bit paranoia inducing or anxiety provoking,
Speaker 2: for us to talk about technology that really is solving
Speaker 2: a human problem. I have a ton of friends in La.
Speaker 2: My sister lives in LA, and they are all using
Speaker 2: this technology called watch Duty. Do you know what watch
Speaker 2: to do? So? Watch Duty is an app that is
Speaker 2: so beta looking that it kind of looks like the
Speaker 2: Oregon Trail. And unfortunately it does look like the Oregon
Speaker 2: Trail as of last week, because it's just like firefire, firefire, horrible,
Speaker 2: don't be there, don't do this. But what watch Duty
Speaker 2: is in practice is this free app that shows active fires,
Speaker 2: evacuation zones, and air quality indexes in the LA area.
Speaker 2: And it's actually, you know, anecdotally been a lifeline for
Speaker 2: people living there. And it's just this really great act
Speaker 2: of humanity and that it's not selling people data, it's
Speaker 2: not showing you ads. You don't have to log in,
Speaker 2: and it is completely donation based. It's a nonprofit. Well,
Speaker 2: you know, I wanted to highlight this because I think
Speaker 2: often about disaster capitalism, and this, to me is more
Speaker 2: disaster troubleshooting.
Speaker 1: Yeah. One of the fundamental interesting things about tech is
Speaker 1: it often does emerge in response to real world problems
Speaker 1: and can help solve them or at least mitigate them.
Speaker 1: It's just what happens a day after, which is often
Speaker 1: where things go wrong. So carry you've already over delivered
Speaker 1: by telling me something interesting about the story.
Speaker 2: Nothing new.
Speaker 1: I didn't know about Watch Duty, But what have you
Speaker 1: got for me?
Speaker 2: Well, the last decent man on the internet read it.
Speaker 2: Our old friend served me with something so demented. Just
Speaker 2: just bear with me because this is there's a lot
Speaker 2: of like R two D two in this But there's
Speaker 2: a video that I'm going to show you in a
Speaker 2: second that shows this guy who goes by the online
Speaker 2: name STS three d. He's created a robot rifle what
Speaker 2: that can shoot automatically and he's giving this robot rifle
Speaker 2: directions using chat GPT.
Speaker 1: Are you serious?
Speaker 2: I got it? Did you? Did you know this?
Speaker 1: I didn't know this.
Speaker 2: This is okay, So let me let me just show
Speaker 2: you this video.
Speaker 1: Oh my god.
Speaker 2: Chat gpt, we're under attack from the front left and
Speaker 2: front right.
Speaker 1: Respond to bording with it.
Speaker 3: Oh my god.
Speaker 2: If you need any further assistance, just let me know.
Speaker 2: By the way, that's chat gpt talking back him.
Speaker 1: One round. There is a rifle following this guy's voice commons.
Speaker 2: Like an automated assault leaptip cheez.
Speaker 1: Wow. What did you think when you saw this?
Speaker 2: Well? I thought to myself, Am I going to do
Speaker 2: another story this week where chat gpt is being used
Speaker 2: by individuals to create weapons?
Speaker 3: Yes?
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know.
Speaker 2: When I saw it, I couldn't really wrap my head
Speaker 2: around how it was actually working and how chat GPT's
Speaker 2: API was being used to operate operate.
Speaker 1: So I have this friend, you have another friend you
Speaker 1: talk about tech stuff with I knew, oh geez, and
Speaker 1: he's straight.
Speaker 2: So I sent this video and he basically said that
Speaker 2: STS three D. The guy in the video is using
Speaker 2: voice to text and is basically feeding that to chat GPT,
Speaker 2: and then he's running a separate program that can control
Speaker 2: the robot gun's movements, like you know how many degrees
Speaker 2: to move the gun, when to shoot it. And that
Speaker 2: program that he is designed is communicating with chat GPT.
Speaker 1: His speaking to check GPT, which is then interpreting his
Speaker 1: requests and passing it on to the robot, but presumably
Speaker 1: not in natural language, presumably translating natural language into a
Speaker 1: computer command.
Speaker 2: That's correct. Okay, that's correct, And that's why he's talking
Speaker 2: to something that sounds like Siri. The other thing that
Speaker 2: I want to mention, of course, is that open Ai
Speaker 2: got wind of this because the video went viral, right
Speaker 2: and they came out and said that what this user
Speaker 2: is doing goes against company policy. There's a very interesting
Speaker 2: loophole that I found accidentally through reading about this on futurism,
Speaker 2: which was actually reported by the intercept last year, which
Speaker 2: is that open Ai quietly removed language prohibiting the use
Speaker 2: of its tool for military purposes. And of course this
Speaker 2: makes sense because just last month it was reported that
Speaker 2: open ai is launching a partnership with Andrel, the American
Speaker 2: defense company. Yeah, you know, for open Ai to stand
Speaker 2: up and say okay, yes, for an individual user using
Speaker 2: open Ai in this way goes against company policy, but
Speaker 2: quietly in the background take out language opposing the use
Speaker 2: of it for military defense.
Speaker 1: I mean it is that, isn't It's like you always
Speaker 1: talk about how things get faster and faster. It took
Speaker 1: Google like fifteen years to ten years to abandon their
Speaker 1: don't be evil policy. Yeah, it has taken open Ai
Speaker 1: five minutes to make an exception for military use of
Speaker 1: that technology.
Speaker 2: Well, they pivoted from a five oh one c to
Speaker 2: a private company quickly.
Speaker 1: There you go.
Speaker 2: Coming up, we'll discuss another reason to hate moving. Stay
Speaker 2: with us. So today for our tech support segment, we
Speaker 2: have a story about how cybercrime is meeting good old
Speaker 2: fashioned IRL crime and somehow it all comes together thanks
Speaker 2: to well as a lesbian, it's an important company, you haul,
Speaker 2: and we're going to get this story from Joseph Cox,
Speaker 2: who's one of the brilliant tech writers at four or
Speaker 2: for Media.
Speaker 1: Joseph, Welcome, it's great to have you on the show.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1: So you wrote this story in four of for with
Speaker 1: the headline quote violent hackers are using you Haul to
Speaker 1: dox targets.
Speaker 2: So when I read this story or saw this headline originally,
Speaker 2: I'm sort of like, well, what does you Haul have
Speaker 2: to do with doxing and hackers?
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it's not obvious at first, and I don't
Speaker 3: think anybody really thinks of you Haul of being a
Speaker 3: juicy hacking target. But when you take a step back
Speaker 3: and you think about it, people who use you Haul,
Speaker 3: they're probably going to give their real phone number because
Speaker 3: obviously they need to pick up the truck and they
Speaker 3: need to organize that. They might give their real address
Speaker 3: as well, because you know, you all needs to verify that,
Speaker 3: and maybe they're real payment information because obviously they need
Speaker 3: to pay for the truck as well. So it's actually
Speaker 3: a really good source for accurate information if a hacker
Speaker 3: is trying to reveal somebody's identity and you Haul has
Speaker 3: been hacked multiple times over the years. You know, happened
Speaker 3: in twenty twenty and I think twenty thirteen as well,
Speaker 3: and in at least one of those cases it did
Speaker 3: include driver license information. But at the time we didn't
Speaker 3: really have any context of oh, well, why do hackers
Speaker 3: care about you whole? And I think this story shows
Speaker 3: why some people may care about that sort of target.
Speaker 1: So who's doing this and what do we know about them?
Speaker 3: So it's predominantly a group or a nebulous network of
Speaker 3: people known as comm which is short for community, and
Speaker 3: this is made up of a lot of young hackers
Speaker 3: who take over phone numbers, they break into companies, but
Speaker 3: the main thing is that they try to get as
Speaker 3: much data as they can on potential targets.
Speaker 1: As a practical matter, Joseph, how are the hackers getting
Speaker 1: this information from you Hall?
Speaker 3: So they're not not targeting individual you Haul customer accounts.
Speaker 3: What they're doing is they're making phishing pages which will
Speaker 3: trick people into handing over passwords, but specifically for you
Speaker 3: Haul employee accounts.
Speaker 1: This is like the Sony pictures.
Speaker 3: Heck, yeah, So when the hackers have the loging credentials
Speaker 3: for a you Haul employee, you know, they essentially become
Speaker 3: that employee with all of the sort of access to
Speaker 3: information they might have, so they can rifle through customer data.
Speaker 3: And this is a constant problem across companies where you
Speaker 3: have it, especially with US and UK telecoms as well.
Speaker 3: These hackers will break into employee accounts so then they
Speaker 3: can look up customer information.
Speaker 1: What do they tend to be going after and who
Speaker 1: is the typical victim?
Speaker 3: In writing this story, I spoke to somebody who writes
Speaker 3: the tools to steal you haul logins and they told
Speaker 3: me that basically people inside the com use to dox
Speaker 3: one another or dos other targets, and they were, you know,
Speaker 3: it sounded like quite surprised the amount of data you
Speaker 3: can get in there.
Speaker 1: Doxing is when you sort of get somebody's private details
Speaker 1: and then publicize them.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Docting is where you will take and find somebody's personal information,
Speaker 3: maybe their physical address, email address, phone number, and then
Speaker 3: maybe some more sensitive data as well, and either using
Speaker 3: that for your own means or publishing it online. Now
Speaker 3: I don't know exactly what a specific member of the
Speaker 3: comm has used this data for, but you can easily
Speaker 3: see it potentially being used for physical violence. Members of
Speaker 3: the com often shoot at each other's houses or hire
Speaker 3: people to do so. They throw bricks through them, they
Speaker 3: rob one another armed with hammers or other weapons. And
Speaker 3: I absolutely put the harvesting of this U haul data
Speaker 3: inside that context and that it is being you by
Speaker 3: violent criminal hackers.
Speaker 2: So this is really about being an admin. It's not
Speaker 2: about getting individual information.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: I kind of feel like a lot of people when
Speaker 1: it comes to Internet privacy, unless they've been like scanned
Speaker 1: in some way themselves. You know, their eyes can glaze
Speaker 1: over a little bit. But in your story, people actually
Speaker 1: got shot after being dogsed.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I think people have a pretty old understanding of
Speaker 3: what cybercrime is. They imagine, you know, somebody in a
Speaker 3: hoodie overall, laptop in a dark basement or whatever doing
Speaker 3: these sort of abstract, obscure crimes. Cybercrime today's done by
Speaker 3: people who are a lot younger, and they're a lot
Speaker 3: more violent in some cases. If they want to get
Speaker 3: hold of maybe login tokens, you know, the two FA
Speaker 3: tokens to get into an account. Some will even threaten
Speaker 3: to go shoot up some of the's house. And that's
Speaker 3: why I'm so fascinated by this community. Because it's a
Speaker 3: complete intersection of digital and physical crime. You know, as
Speaker 3: a crime reporter for more than ten years, I've never
Speaker 3: quite seen as latent an intersection as these guys.
Speaker 1: This is the metaverse, but not the one that all
Speaker 1: the investors were hyping.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's the metaverse, but not the very cringe one
Speaker 3: from Mark Zuckerberg. Is unfortunately, the very real way. And
Speaker 3: it's funny you bring up metaverse because actually a lot
Speaker 3: of the people that get into this community, they actually
Speaker 3: fall into it through video games such as Minecraft or Roadblocks,
Speaker 3: which arguably are the metaverse, and then they end up
Speaker 3: in this world of cybercrime.
Speaker 2: And do you think there's a part of playing those
Speaker 2: games that kind of like blurs the line between like
Speaker 2: the reality of what they're doing and the games that
Speaker 2: they're used to playing.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Absolutely. And when I've spoken to many different members
Speaker 3: of the com Roadblocks and Minecraft keep coming up over
Speaker 3: and over again where even hackers will break into each
Speaker 3: other's Roadblocks accounts to steal, you know, their rare hat
Speaker 3: or their rare eye or something, and eventually that escalates
Speaker 3: into well, there's steal hundreds of thousands of dollars of cryptocurrency,
Speaker 3: as well.
Speaker 1: Is there a single story or a single real world
Speaker 1: crime that for you, really throws this into relief for
Speaker 1: the kind of non tech news junkie.
Speaker 3: So recently I wrote about something called the Colm World War,
Speaker 3: which is obviously not an entirely serious term. This is
Speaker 3: what members of the comm called it themselves. But there
Speaker 3: were a series of robberies, shootings and brickings between different
Speaker 3: rivals inside the como and.
Speaker 1: Before the West Side story of Legs exactly.
Speaker 3: And I would say it's sort of bubbled over out
Speaker 3: of calm and into the wider public, because I've seen
Speaker 3: videos where Colm will hire people to go throw a
Speaker 3: brick at somebody's house, but they throw it at the
Speaker 3: wrong home and then it's just impacted the completely random
Speaker 3: person and now they have a smashed door or smashed
Speaker 3: ring door, camera or whatever. So it is starting to
Speaker 3: bleed over into the world of just ordinary people who
Speaker 3: have no idea why somebody is throwing a brick through
Speaker 3: the window because something happened on roadblocks.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: Fortunately, if you are a general member of the U
Speaker 3: haul using public, you probably don't need to worry about
Speaker 3: this in that maybe somebody you know or somebody nearby
Speaker 3: unfortunately becomes a target of calm. You know, that's kind
Speaker 3: of impossible to say, and I would just be very
Speaker 3: bad luck. But they do predominantly go and try to
Speaker 3: rob people or target people who hold a lot of cryptocurrency.
Speaker 3: They have various tools which can determine, Oh, this person
Speaker 3: has x amount of bitcoin in their coin base account,
Speaker 3: let's go after them. So, I mean, the threat to
Speaker 3: a bitcoin investor is very, very different to a sort
Speaker 3: of ordinary member of the public, and you should be
Speaker 3: worried then.
Speaker 2: So if you're a lesbian bitcoin investor.
Speaker 1: Is the center of the ven diagram, you're going to
Speaker 1: calm You probably already the bricks already have lesbian lucky
Speaker 1: don't drive. Joseph, thank you for joining us today and
Speaker 1: we hope to see you on the program again soon.
Speaker 3: Thanks Joseph, thank you so much.
Speaker 1: Coming up, Kara's Big Adventure stay with us. I'm excited
Speaker 1: to be launching this new segment that we're calling when
Speaker 1: did this become a thing? We've got a few listener
Speaker 1: emails to our account tech Stuff podcast at gmail dot
Speaker 1: com and they were very touching and very encouraging, but
Speaker 1: also directive and one of the listener emails. Basically said Jonathan,
Speaker 1: over the course of sixteen years, had so many interesting
Speaker 1: segments about the history of various technologies, and you know
Speaker 1: we're hungry for more of that. And so when did
Speaker 1: this become a thing? It's kind of in service of
Speaker 1: trying to scratch that itch.
Speaker 2: Yeah, each week we're going to bring you a story
Speaker 2: or observation from the real world and try to figure
Speaker 2: out when it became a thing.
Speaker 1: And this has a little bit of our favorite pair
Speaker 1: of historical platonic freelance detectives.
Speaker 2: That's correct. I get to be the Watson to your Sherlock.
Speaker 1: And this week you have something that you encountered in
Speaker 1: the wild that made you question when something became a thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was more of a rescue mission. So I
Speaker 2: recently had this experience where I came face to face
Speaker 2: with one of the twentieth centuries most prolific writers and
Speaker 2: feminist icons. And it wasn't the best case scenario. She
Speaker 2: had fallen on the street and was a little bit disoriented,
Speaker 2: and my first thought was, we will not lose a
Speaker 2: feminist icon on my watch. My second thought was, we
Speaker 2: won't lose her because I'm going to call an ambulance
Speaker 2: on my cellphone. That took too long, and so we
Speaker 2: headed to an urgent care that Margo we can call her.
Speaker 2: Margo knew about and she was adamant that she'd been
Speaker 2: there many times before. So I Google mapped the address.
Speaker 2: Google Map says it's closed, closed, like permanently. She's like,
Speaker 2: it's not closed. I was there recently. It's closed.
Speaker 1: Are you gaining her trust? By this point is she
Speaker 1: likes sign to know?
Speaker 2: And then I'm like, all right, I'm gonna call an
Speaker 2: uber to go to another urgent character CityMD. She insists
Speaker 2: on paying for the uber. I said, you can't play
Speaker 2: for the uber. It doesn't work that way. We get
Speaker 2: to CityMD. I see it that freaking iPad that they
Speaker 2: want to use to scan her ID. I'm like, no,
Speaker 2: we're not using an iPad. We're using paper. Then, And
Speaker 2: this is my favorite part of the story because it's
Speaker 2: kind of sweet. She has this like lightning thought where
Speaker 2: she's like, oh, my cat has a vet appointment today
Speaker 2: in the afternoon. I said, okay, I'll use Google and
Speaker 2: I'll look up what animal hospital you go to in
Speaker 2: the phone number. She goes, you can do that. I said, yeah,
Speaker 2: all right, So I call the vet and I'm thinking
Speaker 2: to myself, well, when you go to the vet, they
Speaker 2: have everybody listed by the animal name, not the parent name.
Speaker 2: So I turned to her and I say, Margot, what's
Speaker 2: your cat's name? And dead stare Puss and I'm like, okay,
Speaker 2: here we go. I said, my friend's cat, Puss, has
Speaker 2: an appointment today and we're gonna need to cancel because
Speaker 2: Puss's mother has been in an accent. She's okay, thank
Speaker 2: you so much for telling us. Okay. Then the last
Speaker 2: point of sort of technological contact was when we ended
Speaker 2: up in the er where she had to go after
Speaker 2: CityMD because she was having trouble breathing, and they said,
Speaker 2: you need a chest X ray and I told her
Speaker 2: I can't stay here for four hours, but I'll come
Speaker 2: pick you up and take you home when you are
Speaker 2: ready to leave. How well you have an iPhone? It
Speaker 2: was off. I never seen an iPhone off. It was
Speaker 2: fully off. I said, you know this nurse here who
Speaker 2: is about my age, will help you call me. And
Speaker 2: I think each touch point here made me reflect upon
Speaker 2: how easy it was for me to navigate, and not
Speaker 2: that she is well. She's certainly more intelligent than I
Speaker 2: am intellectually speaking, but that there is a digital divide
Speaker 2: between us that made this experience far less harrowing. Because
Speaker 2: I was with her and she said as much. I
Speaker 2: think she realized very early on that, like all of
Speaker 2: those things that I think that are so second nature
Speaker 2: to me, we're not even like on Margo's radar as possibilities.
Speaker 1: I mean, this story raises the perfect question, almost as
Speaker 1: though we planned it. When did this become a thing?
Speaker 1: When did the world sort of cleave into two where
Speaker 1: you're either totally able to navigate everything because of having
Speaker 1: a tool which makes it easy, or you're just kind
Speaker 1: of struggling to translate. In other words, when did digital
Speaker 1: natives become a thing. Yes, but let's start by defining
Speaker 1: our terms, which always a good thing to do at
Speaker 1: the beginning. What is a digital native?
Speaker 2: You know, I actually have no idea, but I've always
Speaker 2: considered myself a digital native. I'm a New Yorker first,
Speaker 2: but I'm definitely a digital native second.
Speaker 1: I also always consider myself a digital native, even if
Speaker 1: somewhat reluctantly. Weirdly, because as a child, I was diagnosed
Speaker 1: with dyspraxia, which basically means can't catch a ball, can't
Speaker 1: do nice handwriting.
Speaker 2: You haven't really grown out of that, No, I haven't
Speaker 2: tell you. I haven't.
Speaker 1: But I got my prescription was a laptop, like aged
Speaker 1: eight years old, to do my homework on and stuff,
Speaker 1: and so I became a digital native basically in the
Speaker 1: late nineties.
Speaker 2: You know, I did not know this about you, And
Speaker 2: this might be one of our sort of unspoken personal
Speaker 2: connections because I went to one of those kooky laptop
Speaker 2: schools that I think has ultimately netted out to be
Speaker 2: the wrong idea. But I went to one of those
Speaker 2: schools where they taught us C plus plus before they
Speaker 2: taught us basic algebra.
Speaker 1: So we both had this feeling of being digital natives.
Speaker 1: But I thought I would do some research on what
Speaker 1: that term actually means and where it comes from. Turns
Speaker 1: out it was coined in the year two thousand and one,
Speaker 1: around the same time we both got our laptops by
Speaker 1: an educational consultant called Mark Prinsky, and he had this
Speaker 1: idea that education needed to change in response to young
Speaker 1: people whose brains were literally different from the brains of
Speaker 1: the generation before because they'd already been shaped by gaming
Speaker 1: and spending time online and being more used to finding
Speaker 1: information on the web than, for example, in a book.
Speaker 1: And he had this quite powerful quote, which was today's
Speaker 1: students have not just changed incrementally from those of the past,
Speaker 1: nor simply changed their slang, clothed, body adornments, or styles,
Speaker 1: as has happened between generations previously, but a really big
Speaker 1: discontinuity has taken place. One might even call it a singularity,
Speaker 1: an event which changes things so fundamentally that there is
Speaker 1: absolutely no going back.
Speaker 2: Wouldn't you say, that's like the fact that I now
Speaker 2: say google it, then look it up.
Speaker 1: That's the singularity.
Speaker 2: Right. When you talk to some people who are older,
Speaker 2: they'll say, call for one one, where's four one one going.
Speaker 1: To get me? And it's interesting, you just made that
Speaker 1: point about calling four one one. Prince Ki also has
Speaker 1: this concept of digital natives versus digital immigrants and digital immigrants,
Speaker 1: of people like Margo who kind of live in the
Speaker 1: digital world but carry the accent of where they come from.
Speaker 1: Whether it's like printing out an email is one of
Speaker 1: the examples that Prince Key uses, or kind of beckoning
Speaker 1: someone over to look at your computer screen rather than
Speaker 1: sending them a link.
Speaker 2: And you know, I think that there are definitely those
Speaker 2: things that mark people today as digital immigrants. You know,
Speaker 2: I think, my poor mother, but you know, sometimes she'll say, oh,
Speaker 2: you know, let's call for takeout. What nobody's home. There's
Speaker 2: actually this book called the Victorian Internet, which is by
Speaker 2: Tom's Standage, and it's all about the history of the
Speaker 2: development of the telegraph and how it parallels to the Internet.
Speaker 2: And in it he tells the story from when the
Speaker 2: telegraph was first introduced around the time of the American
Speaker 2: Civil War. And I mean, this could have been my mom.
Speaker 2: A mom goes to the telegraph office with a bowl
Speaker 2: of sour kraut to send her son to the battlefront,
Speaker 2: you know, like by wire.
Speaker 1: So she really was a digital immigrant, bringing a native
Speaker 1: cuisine and then trying to send day with a telegraph.
Speaker 2: That's correct. And you know, back in the time of
Speaker 2: the Civil War, change felt fast. It did not feel
Speaker 2: as fast as it feels now. Where you know, by
Speaker 2: the time you have a software update, you need to
Speaker 2: like learn how to use a whole new phone. You
Speaker 2: could blink and miss an entire technological evolution. And I
Speaker 2: do blink and miss entire things sometimes.
Speaker 1: Well, I know you think of yourself as a digital
Speaker 1: native since you grew up with tech. Do you still
Speaker 1: you know, I do in.
Speaker 2: The sense of the idea of new technology is not
Speaker 2: incredibly daunting to me.
Speaker 1: I think it was subtractive to you.
Speaker 2: Yes, And I think we were born at a time
Speaker 2: when technology was changing so rapidly that we are not
Speaker 2: completely thrown by the idea of like the facts not
Speaker 2: being the predominant form of communication for ten years, right, right.
Speaker 1: But do you think if you kind of got given
Speaker 1: a grand tour of downtown New York by an eighteen
Speaker 1: year old, they will be surprised by your use of technology?
Speaker 2: I think it's more if like I spent five days
Speaker 2: with an eighteen year old, they'd be like, why are
Speaker 2: you not charting your every move on Snapchat? Which is
Speaker 2: not to say that like I couldn't live in the
Speaker 2: world with them, but they live in the world different.
Speaker 1: Yeah, truly, we're living Margo's living in more or less
Speaker 1: an analog world. We're probably living in a hybrid world.
Speaker 1: And many the younger people are living in a fully
Speaker 1: digital world.
Speaker 2: Well, and that's the irony of connectivity, I think, right,
Speaker 2: Which is this idea that like the world is actually
Speaker 2: quite siloed by like how you use technology. If you
Speaker 2: use it properly, you can be very connected, but it
Speaker 2: can also be very isolating totally.
Speaker 1: And we should point out that the framing of native
Speaker 1: versus immigrant is rather loaded.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And one of the things that really struck me
Speaker 2: with what Margo experience was that there was friction at
Speaker 2: every turn in her accident. And that's just not only
Speaker 2: because she was in an accident. It's because we are
Speaker 2: constantly encountering, like almost every day, a more and more
Speaker 2: digitized world, right. And you know, the thought that I'm
Speaker 2: left with is that even though there is a definition
Speaker 2: for digital needs and we fit into that definition, it's
Speaker 2: not a permanent state.
Speaker 1: I do wonder if there will emerge another term, something
Speaker 1: to supplant digital natives the way postmoderns are planted modern.
Speaker 1: You know, one of the guests that we were most
Speaker 1: excited and proudest to have on Sleepwalkers, our former podcast,
Speaker 1: was uv Al Noah Harari, who wrote a book called Homodeus,
Speaker 1: which is basically all about how using technology and merging
Speaker 1: with technology was changing Homo sapiens into almost this new
Speaker 1: species Homodeus human but with these godlike powers enabled by
Speaker 1: new technology. I found it as a young pre teenager
Speaker 1: pretty crazy getting a laptop in the early two thousands,
Speaker 1: which was theoretically to do my homework because I was dyspraxic,
Speaker 1: but more realistically to play the Oregon Trail and Cassel Wolfenstein.
Speaker 1: And I remember sort of having this laptop and other
Speaker 1: kids didn't, and it was sort of this little It
Speaker 1: didn't change too much, but it was a kind of
Speaker 1: moment of like I was ahead of the curve in
Speaker 1: some way. But imagine going to school now as a
Speaker 1: nine year old in the age of chech GPT three.
Speaker 1: What does that experience of having not only the whole
Speaker 1: world's information at your fingertips for a search, but having
Speaker 1: any answer which is probably better than the answer or
Speaker 1: teacher or your parent can provide, at the click of
Speaker 1: a button. What does that do to a developing brain.
Speaker 1: That's it for this week on Tech Stuff. I'm Oz
Speaker 1: Valoshin and I'm Kara Price.
Speaker 2: This episode was produced by Eliza Dennis, Victoria Domingez, and
Speaker 2: Lizzie Jacobs. It was executive produced by me, Kara Price, Ozwalashan,
Speaker 2: and Kate Osbourne for Kaleidoscope and Katrina Norvel for iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 2: The engineer is Charles Demontebello and it's mixed by Kyle Murdoch,
Speaker 2: who also wrote our theme song.
Speaker 1: Join us next Wednesday for tech Stuff The Story, when
Speaker 1: we'll share an in depth conversation with Jessica Lesson, CEO
Speaker 1: of the information about a vibe shift in Silicon Valley.
Speaker 2: Please rate, review, and reach out to us at tech
Speaker 2: Stuff podcast at gmail dot com. We want to hear
Speaker 2: from you