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 iHeart Radio and
Speaker 1: love all things tech. It's time for the tech News
Speaker 1: for Thursday, November four, twenty one, and we're gonna start
Speaker 1: off with kind of a funny story. So on Tuesday,
Speaker 1: we talked about how Facebook, the company, has adopted the
Speaker 1: name Meta as a rebrand for the overall corporation. So, Facebook,
Speaker 1: the social media platform is just one part of that
Speaker 1: business and it's not changing its name. But now it
Speaker 1: turns out that another company disputes Facebook's right to the
Speaker 1: meta name Meta. PC, a company that's been around for
Speaker 1: around a year, applied for a trademark for the name
Speaker 1: Meta back this past August, which was obviously a couple
Speaker 1: of months before rumors popped up that Facebook was going
Speaker 1: to even rebrand. However, the company has not yet actually
Speaker 1: received a trademark from the trademark office. Assuming there are
Speaker 1: not other conflicts, you would think that the PC company
Speaker 1: would get the trademark due to being what we call
Speaker 1: in the biz firstees. If they do get the trademark, well,
Speaker 1: then Facebook would not be allowed to just adopt the
Speaker 1: name without getting permission first. Now see, Facebook wouldn't have
Speaker 1: necessarily known about this issue because the trademark had not
Speaker 1: yet been registered. So I don't think the company was
Speaker 1: bullishly trying to take over the Meta name from Meta PC.
Speaker 1: I just don't think they even realized Meta pc was
Speaker 1: a thing, uh, And they just probably assumed there were
Speaker 1: no impediments in the way of getting a new name.
Speaker 1: I mean, if if there was no register trademark, then
Speaker 1: it looks like there's no foul, right. But the owners
Speaker 1: of Meta PC, Zack shut and Joe Darger, say they're
Speaker 1: willing to part with the rights to the name of
Speaker 1: Meta for a cool twenty million dollars. And they also
Speaker 1: tweeted a photoshop picture of Mark Zuckerberg holding a Meta
Speaker 1: pc in his hands, and they said that if they
Speaker 1: do sell the name, they'll make sure to pick something
Speaker 1: new that suits their PC company, and maybe they just
Speaker 1: go with the name Facebook. That seems like that's coming up,
Speaker 1: which is, you know, kind of a funny, little like
Speaker 1: tongue in cheek response. Whether this actually goes anywhere largely
Speaker 1: depends upon the trademark office and whether or not they
Speaker 1: allow Meta pc to have Meta registered as a trademark.
Speaker 1: If the Trademark office denies that, well, then Meta pc
Speaker 1: really doesn't have any leverage. However, it would also presumably
Speaker 1: mean that Facebook slash meta would also have issues registering
Speaker 1: the trademark. Otherwise the office is really playing favorites. So
Speaker 1: I'll have to see how this all turns out. And
Speaker 1: now for less whimsical Facebook news, because of course there's
Speaker 1: gonna be some first up Facebook, the social network site
Speaker 1: is giving up on facial recognition technologies, and that's a
Speaker 1: good thing. I mean, we've talked a lot about how
Speaker 1: facial recognition technology is often flawed in its implementation, and
Speaker 1: that frequently we see that the tech tends to work
Speaker 1: pretty well for certain ethnicities and not so great for others.
Speaker 1: Misidentifying people, you know, you get a lot of false positives,
Speaker 1: that kind of thing. And we also know that this
Speaker 1: technology can lead to serious problems, such as certain populations
Speaker 1: being disproportionately harmed by it. You know, if if police
Speaker 1: forces are reliant upon a technology that routinely makes mistakes
Speaker 1: when it comes to identifying people of of certain ethnicities,
Speaker 1: that's a real problem. So Facebook saying no to facial
Speaker 1: recognition algorithms. That's a good thing. What's less good is
Speaker 1: that Meta, the parent company of Facebook, is totally not
Speaker 1: making that same commitment. Meta plans to continue to rely
Speaker 1: on facial recognition technology as it builds out it's metaverse products,
Speaker 1: and I get the feeling that Zuckerberg is really pushing
Speaker 1: for the metaverse stuff to be the future of the company,
Speaker 1: and considering the fact that Facebook is having trouble attracting
Speaker 1: young users, I think that that's kind of all signs
Speaker 1: point that way. So while I'm glad to see Facebook
Speaker 1: move away from facial recognition, I worry that we're really
Speaker 1: just putting that problem on hold. Then again, I have
Speaker 1: no idea how popular this metaverse concept is going to be.
Speaker 1: If the metaverse is dependent upon users having access to
Speaker 1: expensive hardware, it may be that only a subset of
Speaker 1: people will ever really have access to it. Anyway, I
Speaker 1: think it's clear that Facebook slash that doesn't really view
Speaker 1: facial recognition tech as being a problem, or at least
Speaker 1: not a deal breaking one. A Facebook investor named Roger
Speaker 1: mcnammy addressed an audience at the Web Summit event and
Speaker 1: recommended that governments conduct criminal investigations into Facebook, even calling
Speaker 1: for executives to face jail time should they be found
Speaker 1: to be responsible for crimes. Mcnami first invested in Facebook
Speaker 1: around and held onto that stock through to two thousand
Speaker 1: nineteen before he began to start selling it off, and
Speaker 1: he has criticized Facebook multiple times in the past. He
Speaker 1: outlined four areas he believes deserve criminal investigation, and he
Speaker 1: also alluded that he has two others on top of
Speaker 1: those four, bringing the total up to six. And they
Speaker 1: range from business issues like Facebook allegedly failing to disclose
Speaker 1: information to the SEC, even though as a publicly traded company,
Speaker 1: is obligated to do that, but it also goes up
Speaker 1: to charges that Facebook was potentially complicit in the political
Speaker 1: riots that happened on January six, which, holy cow, that's
Speaker 1: January six of this year. I mean, my ability to
Speaker 1: remember dates in my own lifetime is notoriously bad. Like
Speaker 1: I might be like, well, that happened a year ago,
Speaker 1: and it really happened six years ago. But let me
Speaker 1: tell you, the pandemic has made it nearly impossible for
Speaker 1: me to keep things straight anyway. This is more of
Speaker 1: a sign that there's a growing opposition to meta slash
Speaker 1: Facebook on multiple fronts, and we're not done yet. The
Speaker 1: Washington Post reports that in twenty Mark Zuckerberg himself approved
Speaker 1: a request which was more like a demand from the
Speaker 1: government of Vietnam, which wanted Facebook to take down posts
Speaker 1: that were critical of the Communist party in in charge
Speaker 1: in Vietnam. The government said that Facebook, you know, if
Speaker 1: they didn't comply, then the government would for bid Facebook
Speaker 1: and Vietnam and Zuckerberg reportedly caved into the demands and
Speaker 1: authorized the removal of thousands of posts, and the Washington
Speaker 1: Post says that Facebook's response was essentially, you know, when
Speaker 1: asked about this, they said, you know, we did it.
Speaker 1: But if we didn't do it, then Facebook would have
Speaker 1: gone away in Vietnam, and that would have been even
Speaker 1: worse censorship. That would have meant people were cut off
Speaker 1: from a tool that they were depending upon. And that's
Speaker 1: a difficult argument for me. I mean, I get what
Speaker 1: they're saying, but at the same time, this is predicated
Speaker 1: on the idea that Facebook is providing a service. But
Speaker 1: arguably you could say that service is to be a
Speaker 1: pr arm for the Vietnam government, at least as far
Speaker 1: as silencing any dissenting voices so that I don't know.
Speaker 1: That argument doesn't work so well for me. The Washington
Speaker 1: Post also says that the Vietnamese government was effectively using
Speaker 1: Facebook to track down activists and critics of the government,
Speaker 1: claiming that even a post that levied just the tiniest
Speaker 1: amount of criticism towards the Communist Party could result in
Speaker 1: jail time for the user, which is a big Yike's
Speaker 1: let's shift over to Google. The company is once again
Speaker 1: throwing its corporate hat in the ring for defense contracts. Now.
Speaker 1: A few years ago, Google was participating in the development
Speaker 1: of Project Mayven, infected essentially one out a bidding war
Speaker 1: for it, and Project Maven had a lot of controversial
Speaker 1: stuff involved in it, including things that could potentially be
Speaker 1: used in drone programs, and this in turn led Google
Speaker 1: employees to walk out with a protest on Google Uh.
Speaker 1: They didn't really like the idea of their work being
Speaker 1: used to help war efforts. Now Google has bid in
Speaker 1: the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability can track that the Defense
Speaker 1: Department has has put up. Now, this project is a
Speaker 1: successor to a previously abandoned program, which was the Joint
Speaker 1: Enterprise Defense Infrastructure or JEDI. Now you might remember that
Speaker 1: JEDI saw a bidding war and it really came down
Speaker 1: to between Microsoft and Amazon, and Microsoft ultimately won the
Speaker 1: bid and was selected by the Department of Defense. But
Speaker 1: then Amazon sued based upon this, uh, this particular agreement.
Speaker 1: They challenged the contract and they claimed that then President
Speaker 1: Trump had interfered in the whole process, and because Trump
Speaker 1: had beef with Amazon and Jeff Bezos, Trump effectively scuttled
Speaker 1: Amazon's bid and forced the Defense Department to go with Microsoft. Anyway,
Speaker 1: As a result of all that, that particular project fell through,
Speaker 1: and now Google is competing to win a place at
Speaker 1: the table for the new project. So JEDI was a
Speaker 1: kind of winner takes all approach with one company winning
Speaker 1: the full bid, but the Joint Warfighting project will actually
Speaker 1: see the Defense Department work with multiple companies, so it's
Speaker 1: not you know, winner take all solution. As for what
Speaker 1: Google would do should it become part of this project,
Speaker 1: it sounds like the main components for Google would be
Speaker 1: to provide things like cloud storage and cloud computing services
Speaker 1: and mostly be used in noncombat oriented applications such as developing,
Speaker 1: you know, monitoring the developing situation with the pandemic and
Speaker 1: making uh analysis of that, perhaps predicting where the pandemic
Speaker 1: might develop in the future, as well as things like
Speaker 1: climate change. So stuff that's not directly tied to combat activities,
Speaker 1: at least based upon the initial descriptions. Nowhord yet on
Speaker 1: whether Google employees are fine with this. Earlier this week,
Speaker 1: I talked about a crypto scam that referenced squid game. Well,
Speaker 1: now the Verge reports on a different scam involving cryptocurrency.
Speaker 1: This scam plays on some old fishing tactics, that's fishing
Speaker 1: with a pH And here's how it works. When you
Speaker 1: come into possession of cryptocurrency, you know, whether you earn
Speaker 1: it or you buy some or you're gifted it or whatever,
Speaker 1: that cryptocurrency needs to quote unquote live somewhere. It has
Speaker 1: to be stored somewhere. It's code, but it has to
Speaker 1: have a storage space. So one way to store it
Speaker 1: is in a digital wallet that only the owner has
Speaker 1: access to. So effectively, this is just a piece of software,
Speaker 1: and that software will live on a computer or other device,
Speaker 1: and if you were to lose access to that device,
Speaker 1: you would also lose the digital wallet because it's the
Speaker 1: software that's on that computer. It's it's on that physical device.
Speaker 1: This is why you will occasionally hear those rough stories
Speaker 1: about someone who's no longer able to access a hard
Speaker 1: drive that might have like a hundred bitcoin on it
Speaker 1: or whatever. Anyway, the digital wallet is a way for
Speaker 1: you to hold cryptocurrency so that you can use it
Speaker 1: in transactions. Well, the scam involves creating mock ups of
Speaker 1: well known digital wallet companies, so copying them, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: and these are companies that have a pretty decent reputation
Speaker 1: or at least not a bad reputation, and the scam
Speaker 1: artists make a copy of those sites to make it
Speaker 1: look as realistic as possible, and then they buy out
Speaker 1: ads on Google so that they rank in Google search results.
Speaker 1: So when you search for digital wallet, the ad results
Speaker 1: pop up above everything else. I mean, you know how
Speaker 1: Google searches work. If you search for something, the ad
Speaker 1: supported results are the first things to pop up. So
Speaker 1: on a casual glance, you might just say, oh, I'll
Speaker 1: just pick the first one. I need a digital wallet.
Speaker 1: I'm going to pick the first one that's probably the
Speaker 1: best one. And you wouldn't even know that this was
Speaker 1: a scam that was using the ads in order to
Speaker 1: get this sort of placement. So then you go to
Speaker 1: the scam site and the scammers might try to just
Speaker 1: you know, get as much of your personal information as
Speaker 1: possible and cleaning stuff like your bank account or your
Speaker 1: credit card number, you know, your typical phishing attacks strategy,
Speaker 1: or they might be even more sneaky. They might have
Speaker 1: you go through the process of creating a new digital wallet.
Speaker 1: But instead of actually creating a new wallet, what the
Speaker 1: scammers do is they assign you an existing digital wallet
Speaker 1: that belongs to the scammers, so it looks like it's yours.
Speaker 1: They give you the access to it, but they control
Speaker 1: the wallet. So then you spend some money, you purchase cryptocurrency,
Speaker 1: or you otherwise transfer cryptocurrency that you own into this wallet,
Speaker 1: you are effectively stuffing the scam artist's wallet full of
Speaker 1: your own cash. The scheme works because Google adds acts
Speaker 1: like a shortcut. It's cutting in line. So by creating
Speaker 1: a convincing fake and then buying out ad space, the
Speaker 1: scam artists have their bogus site appear above the real one,
Speaker 1: So security experts recommend that you make sure you scroll
Speaker 1: down below the ad results on Google Search for that
Speaker 1: very reason, because you can't be sure that the advertised
Speaker 1: sites are legit, and Google seems unable or unwilling to
Speaker 1: put in the work to protect consumers, which is pretty
Speaker 1: ugly stuff. We've got more stories to cover after we
Speaker 1: take this quick break. We're back, all right. At the
Speaker 1: cop twenty six Climate Summit, more than forty countries have
Speaker 1: committed to transitioning away from coal fired power plants. Uh,
Speaker 1: the countries that have large economies, large developed economies, they
Speaker 1: plan on making that divide much earlier. They plan to
Speaker 1: get out of coal firing by which is fairly aggressive
Speaker 1: for developing economies. Those countries are looking more at the
Speaker 1: twenty four these, which you know, makes sense because they're
Speaker 1: not in a position to easily transition away as much
Speaker 1: as those that have really big economies. The countries that
Speaker 1: agreed included ones like Vietnam, Indonesia, Ukraine, Canada, Poland, and
Speaker 1: several more, But there were also some really notable absences
Speaker 1: from that list, like the United States, for example, or
Speaker 1: India or China, you know, really big countries that still
Speaker 1: depend heavily on coal powered power plants. So there's still
Speaker 1: a lot of work that needs to be done, and
Speaker 1: unfortunately a lot of that work depends on countries that
Speaker 1: are you know, responsible for a lot of coal consumption,
Speaker 1: but yet not they haven't yet committed to changing that.
Speaker 1: On a related note, many countries and financial institutions agreed
Speaker 1: to end overseas financing for fossil fuel projects, and the
Speaker 1: United States was among those. So the US is saying, yeah,
Speaker 1: we won't, we won't help fund overseas fossil fuel prod jecks,
Speaker 1: but um back off of us on our own home turf.
Speaker 1: I guess. The Australian government has issued a demand to
Speaker 1: clear View AI, famous for its facial recognition database services.
Speaker 1: The company is to destroy all images and facial templates
Speaker 1: related to Australia's citizens because the government has determined that
Speaker 1: clear Views business violates Australia's privacy laws. So for a refresher,
Speaker 1: one way that clear View has built out its massive
Speaker 1: facial recognition databases is that it's scraped social networking sites,
Speaker 1: using programs to collect and analyze images that were publicly
Speaker 1: posted on platforms like Facebook, and they built out databases
Speaker 1: using those images, and that lets clear View train machine
Speaker 1: learning systems to match new images against those databases and
Speaker 1: clear View markets this to governments and police forces around
Speaker 1: the world. Clear View plans to appeal the decision of
Speaker 1: the Australian Court system, saying that the images that it
Speaker 1: uses were published in the United States, since Facebook is
Speaker 1: an American company and therefore Australia doesn't have jurisdiction, and
Speaker 1: the company also claims clear Views claims that because people
Speaker 1: were posting to public profiles, they have no right to privacy,
Speaker 1: which is a big old roof, so we'll have to
Speaker 1: see how that goes. The startup company Too Simple, That's
Speaker 1: tu Simple, which is designing self driving transportation trucks, plans
Speaker 1: to test its autonomous vehicles on the roads without a
Speaker 1: human safety operator before twenty twenty two, which is right
Speaker 1: around the corner, so any day now. The company plans
Speaker 1: to unleash driverless trucks with no safety human operator in
Speaker 1: there for the eighty mile run between the cities of
Speaker 1: Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona. The trucks will travel down public
Speaker 1: roads to do this, so there will be people in
Speaker 1: regular rold cars on the roads at the same time.
Speaker 1: The company has said it plans to conduct multiple runs
Speaker 1: over several weeks to test the technology, and it acknowledges
Speaker 1: that this is a challenging problem. You can design a
Speaker 1: system to handle known scenarios pretty well, but then preparing
Speaker 1: for the unknown is a totally different matter. I'm sure
Speaker 1: a lot of you out there have been in a car,
Speaker 1: you know, traveling in a car when something unexpected happened,
Speaker 1: and that can be a really intense and scary thing
Speaker 1: for humans in many cases. But at least we are
Speaker 1: pretty good at assessing things quickly and making a decision.
Speaker 1: We don't always make the right decision, but you know,
Speaker 1: we can extrapolate a lot of stuff based upon our
Speaker 1: experience and make judgments about what to do. For computer
Speaker 1: systems that encounter something new, there's no experience to draw upon,
Speaker 1: and they're not very good at associative thinking. They can't
Speaker 1: really say, well, I've never seen this, but i've seen
Speaker 1: something like this, and I think this is the right
Speaker 1: way to do it. They're not really they can't really
Speaker 1: do that very well. The machine still has to make
Speaker 1: a decision, and it may not have anything solid to
Speaker 1: guide that decision. So let me give you a very
Speaker 1: simple example. Let's say the vals traveling at night, and
Speaker 1: there's a puddle across the road, and the headlights of
Speaker 1: the vehicle hit the puddle and reflect off of it.
Speaker 1: Now a human would recognize that as a reflection, they
Speaker 1: might slow down so they can go through the puddle
Speaker 1: without like hydroplaning or something. But otherwise they know what
Speaker 1: they're looking at. But a machine could theoretically misinterpret that
Speaker 1: reflection and see it as an obstacle that's in the road,
Speaker 1: so the machine might try to swerve out of the
Speaker 1: way or slam on the brakes. Now that scenario I
Speaker 1: just gave is one that I'm sure all autonomous vehicle
Speaker 1: companies have anticipated and have worked on. That's not like
Speaker 1: it's so out of the ordinary no one would have
Speaker 1: thought of it. I'm sure that's factored in. But my
Speaker 1: point is that machines don't magically no real risk from
Speaker 1: something that isn't a risk at all. That being said,
Speaker 1: too simple is taking this process seriously. The company has
Speaker 1: been limiting the human free tests so far to a
Speaker 1: dedicated track. So so far, anytime they've run a test
Speaker 1: where there has been no human in the truck, they've
Speaker 1: only done it on a dedicated track that doesn't connect
Speaker 1: to public roads, and for the moment, on the public
Speaker 1: road tests, they still have operators writing the route between
Speaker 1: the two cities. And because Too Simple is using this
Speaker 1: established route, like it's not open ended, right, it's not
Speaker 1: saying you're going from here to let's pick a city
Speaker 1: Atlanta and just find the best route. They're not doing that.
Speaker 1: They're saying go from here to here, and this is
Speaker 1: the path that you you should take. That means that
Speaker 1: the company has been limiting the variables, right. They have
Speaker 1: this established route that creates a more knowable course, and
Speaker 1: you can still have things that are unexpected happen, but
Speaker 1: you've cut way back on those variables and it allows
Speaker 1: us to continue to build toward a future where autonomous
Speaker 1: vehicles are a viable solution. So while I have some
Speaker 1: reservations about a top of as trucks, I do think
Speaker 1: that the process Too Simple has laid out is one
Speaker 1: with the appropriate amount of caution and accountability. Okay, geeky
Speaker 1: news alert. The following news item is extremely geeky. A
Speaker 1: startup out of Australia called q Control that's c t
Speaker 1: r L has created an error suppression technique that improves
Speaker 1: quantum algorithms by an astonishing two thousand and yeah, I
Speaker 1: get it like that, that alone is effectively gobbledegook. So
Speaker 1: what the heck do I even mean by this? Let's
Speaker 1: start off with talking about quantum computers. When you boiled
Speaker 1: down computer science with classical computers, you're talking about processing
Speaker 1: information in the form of bits, and a bit is
Speaker 1: a single unit of information it can buy be a
Speaker 1: zero or a one, and a zero is always a
Speaker 1: zero and the one is always a one. So you
Speaker 1: can think of it like a light switch with an
Speaker 1: off and on. But quantum can computers rely on cubits,
Speaker 1: and these under certain conditions, can technically be both a
Speaker 1: zero and a one at the same time, plus all
Speaker 1: values in between. And when you take that and you
Speaker 1: combine it with a properly designed quantum algorithm, you can
Speaker 1: potentially solve a certain subset of computational problems much faster
Speaker 1: than you could if you were to use a classical computer. So,
Speaker 1: for example, let's say I give you a really really
Speaker 1: big number, it's hundreds of digits long, and I tell
Speaker 1: you I created this number by multiplying two prime numbers together.
Speaker 1: Which two prime numbers did I use? Well, then you
Speaker 1: would need to start trying out different prime numbers to
Speaker 1: see if they divide evenly into the big number I
Speaker 1: gave you, and then to make sure that the other
Speaker 1: number that it produced was itself a prime number. And
Speaker 1: you'd be going, Nope, it's not that one. Hope, it's
Speaker 1: not that one. Nope. I mean, it would take you ages,
Speaker 1: potentially centuries to get to the right pair, depending on
Speaker 1: how big the number I was I gave you. And
Speaker 1: and that's how classical computers kind of tackle these problems.
Speaker 1: They sequentially go through all the possible answers to find
Speaker 1: the one that fits, and even a fast computer would
Speaker 1: take a very long time to get to that answer.
Speaker 1: But quantum computers can effectively make all the guesses at
Speaker 1: the same time, assuming one that the computer has enough
Speaker 1: cubits to do this, and to the algorithm you've designed
Speaker 1: that the computer is following works. So all the pieces
Speaker 1: need to be there. It's not just the power of
Speaker 1: the quantum computer. It's also the quality of the algorithm
Speaker 1: you're using to try and solve a problem. But when
Speaker 1: all the pieces are there, the quantum computer will give
Speaker 1: solutions to those problems. I guess I should say we
Speaker 1: typically get solutions with a certain percentage of confidence behind them,
Speaker 1: kind of like, I'm sure this is the right answer.
Speaker 1: So really we get answers in the form of probabilities
Speaker 1: rather than certainties when we're talking about quantum computers. Anyway,
Speaker 1: the startup says it has created a means of suppressing
Speaker 1: errors with quantum algorithms, which theoretically should make it easier
Speaker 1: to design quantum algorithms that can take advantage of quantum computing. Now,
Speaker 1: I can't pretend to even have a partial understanding of
Speaker 1: how they achieve this. I mean, the the bits that
Speaker 1: I've told you about quantum computer so far, that's pretty
Speaker 1: much right around my level of understanding of quantum computers.
Speaker 1: It goes a little deeper than that, but not a
Speaker 1: whole lot. Like once you start really getting into things
Speaker 1: like entanglement and superposition, things get a little too wibbly
Speaker 1: wobbly for me to be able to follow properly. But
Speaker 1: this is really cool. It means that quantum computers could
Speaker 1: potentially be used for a larger range of applications as
Speaker 1: we continue to build stronger quantum computers. And I first
Speaker 1: wrote how quantum computers work back when we were talking
Speaker 1: about cubits on the order of like ten cubits for
Speaker 1: our computer, and we're seeing that grow every single year
Speaker 1: to a point where we could potentially do some really
Speaker 1: cool things with quantum computers and tackle some very difficult problems.
Speaker 1: It also, by the way, means that some of the
Speaker 1: principles that are behind modern day encryption will have to
Speaker 1: be completely rethought, because a good quantum computer with a
Speaker 1: solid algorithm could potentially crack encryption at a fraction of
Speaker 1: the time it would take us using classical methods, which
Speaker 1: means that essentially, at that stage, we everyone who has
Speaker 1: access to a quantum computer in one of these algorithms
Speaker 1: effectively has a skeleton key to all encrypted information everywhere. Obviously,
Speaker 1: that will change things dramatically, but we're not there yet.
Speaker 1: But this is the sort of thing that kind of
Speaker 1: sets us on that Pathway. While we're on the world
Speaker 1: of kind of science fiction, I want to talk about
Speaker 1: a story I published in Vice, and the story says
Speaker 1: ethical AI trained on Reddit posts said genocide is okay
Speaker 1: if it makes people happy, and I get it that
Speaker 1: headline grabs your attention. But let's talk about some stuff.
Speaker 1: One method of machine learning involves feeding tons of samples
Speaker 1: to a computer model. We kind of talked about it
Speaker 1: with Clear View AI in this very episode. So the
Speaker 1: computer models job is to sort through the data that's
Speaker 1: being fed to it and then to make some sort
Speaker 1: of decision based upon that data. Now, the example I
Speaker 1: always give is, imagine you've got like ten thousand photos
Speaker 1: and some of those photos have coffee mugs in them
Speaker 1: and some of them don't. And you're trying to teach
Speaker 1: a computer what a coffee mug is, and you're feeding
Speaker 1: these images into it, and it gives you some results,
Speaker 1: and some of the things that says are right and
Speaker 1: some are wrong. Some it misses some coffee mugs and
Speaker 1: misidentifies other things as coffee mugs. So you tweak things,
Speaker 1: You repeat the training, and you do this over and
Speaker 1: over and over again. You might use a sample that
Speaker 1: has millions of data points in it, might run that
Speaker 1: test thousands of times in an effort to refine your
Speaker 1: computer model. Well, no computer magically knows the answer to
Speaker 1: these things. It is this training process that's important. And
Speaker 1: in this case, we're talking about an AI called ask
Speaker 1: Delphi or ask Delphi if you prefer, as in the
Speaker 1: Oracle of Delphi, and you are to ask it ethical
Speaker 1: questions and it gives you answers. Well, again, it has
Speaker 1: to be trained to do this, and it's very easy
Speaker 1: for these kind of models to be trained improperly. So
Speaker 1: I wouldn't be at all surprised by this. This isn't
Speaker 1: a shocking thing to me. It's actually entirely expected, really,
Speaker 1: But I do think that the people who wrote the
Speaker 1: Vice article do make some good points. They do say
Speaker 1: maybe handing ethical judgments to AI is not a great
Speaker 1: idea because an AI is always going to be reliant
Speaker 1: upon the biases that taught that AI in the first place.
Speaker 1: That also means that you probab probably shouldn't use AI
Speaker 1: to be in charge of any system that hinges on
Speaker 1: ethical judgments, which that's a much larger scale. Right. It's
Speaker 1: one thing to ask AI, Hey, is it cool if
Speaker 1: I do this? It's another thing if you're talking about
Speaker 1: a system that, at some point or another needs to
Speaker 1: make a call about whether something is ethical or not. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know that that starts to really bring in a
Speaker 1: lot of questions. I think the headline was just a
Speaker 1: bit sensational, but I think the piece was actually really valuable.
Speaker 1: And finally, Ridley Scott put it best. In space, no
Speaker 1: one can hear you toot, at least I think that's
Speaker 1: how that goes. Also, that's totally not true. If you
Speaker 1: happen to be in a spaceship that's got an atmosphere
Speaker 1: in it and there are other people near you and
Speaker 1: it's not too loud in the environment, they might hear
Speaker 1: you if you start cutting muffins. But I wanted to
Speaker 1: open the segment with that joke because it's about space tacos. Yeah,
Speaker 1: tacos in space. So our final story is that astronauts
Speaker 1: aboard the International Space Station grew a batch of hatch
Speaker 1: chili is as part of their experiments aboard the I
Speaker 1: s S, and on Friday, astronaut Megan MacArthur tweeted that
Speaker 1: she had made tacos using the space grown chilies as
Speaker 1: one of the ingredients. Now, the other components all came
Speaker 1: up from Earth and various launches, so I don't have
Speaker 1: any exciting stories to talk about space beef here, but
Speaker 1: this is really cool. Growing the chilies was an experiment
Speaker 1: all by itself, and astronauts conducted scientific observations before the
Speaker 1: fruits of their labor could become taco ingredients. I just
Speaker 1: thought that was a neat story to end on. And
Speaker 1: that's it for the news for Thursday, November four one.
Speaker 1: If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in
Speaker 1: future episodes of tech Stuff, reach out and let me know.
Speaker 1: The best way to do that is on Twitter. The
Speaker 1: handle for the show is text Stuff hs W and
Speaker 1: I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is
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