Speaker 1: Thanks for tunion to text stuff. If you don't recognize
Speaker 1: my voice, my name is Ozvoloshian and I'm here because
Speaker 1: the inimitable Jonathan Strickland has passed the baton to Cara
Speaker 1: Price and myself to host Tech Stuff. The show will
Speaker 1: remain your home for all things tech, and all the
Speaker 1: old episodes will remain available in this feed. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production of iHeart Podcasts and Kaleidoscope.
Speaker 1: I'm Os Voloshian, and today will bring you the headlines
Speaker 1: this week, including the UK government's demand for a back
Speaker 1: door into all iPhone users encrypted accounts. Then, on today's
Speaker 1: Tech Support, a new finding that using AI might make
Speaker 1: human cognition quote atropeed and unprepared in our final segment,
Speaker 1: and look at Elon Musk's government contracts. All of that
Speaker 1: on this Week in Tech. It's Friday, February fourteenth. Happy
Speaker 1: Valentine's another week, another lonely studio, especially painful on Valentine's Day.
Speaker 1: Cara Price, we miss you, but hosting solo means I
Speaker 1: do get to share a few extra headlines today, and
Speaker 1: producer Eliza Dennis is here to go through them with me.
Speaker 1: Eliza are you ready, absolutely, So let's start with a
Speaker 1: story that's in your backyard. Lithium ion batteries in La.
Speaker 2: Right, Lithium ion batteries are in all kinds of tech products,
Speaker 2: so I'm positive there are just tons of abandoned batteries
Speaker 2: across LA because of the wildfires.
Speaker 1: Yes, in fact, the most in history, and the LAist
Speaker 1: has a fascinating story on the cleanup. One of the
Speaker 1: big issues is how easy it is for damage batteries
Speaker 1: to ignite or even explode, and if they do catch fire,
Speaker 1: they may take up to ten times more water to contain,
Speaker 1: so you can imagine this is really not helpful in
Speaker 1: a wildfire situation.
Speaker 2: So the Palisades and Eaten fires out in LA are
Speaker 2: one hundred percent contains now, thank god. But yes, this
Speaker 2: definitely is a concern for them future.
Speaker 1: Yes, but even more immediately once the fires are over.
Speaker 1: The batteries can still explode weeks after they were initially overheated,
Speaker 1: which makes cleaning up and disposing of them pretty difficult.
Speaker 1: And also, even if they look undamaged, it turns out
Speaker 1: they can be releasing toxic gas into the air or
Speaker 1: leaching chemicals into the ground. And the EPA which is
Speaker 1: overseeing the cleanup, said these fires burn more electric vehicle
Speaker 1: batteries and home energy storage systems than any fires that
Speaker 1: ever burnt before. According to Weiss, as of October last year,
Speaker 1: there were over four hundred and thirty thousand teslas alone
Speaker 1: in the LA area, and a number of these vehicles burn.
Speaker 1: So the scale of the cleanup is pretty huge, and
Speaker 1: it's a delicate operation, right. The EPA workers collect the
Speaker 1: batteries and seal drums, bring them to staging areas, and
Speaker 1: if they still have charge, the batteries are put in
Speaker 1: this saltwater brine solution to decharge them, and then you
Speaker 1: have to find a recycler who can salvage the minerals
Speaker 1: from the batteries, which remain in high demand.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is so interesting because I just never thought
Speaker 2: that an electric vehicle would kind of change the way
Speaker 2: that we do disaster recovery. But here we are. So
Speaker 2: you have another story for.
Speaker 1: Me, Yes, Well, I can't resist stories coming out of
Speaker 1: the UK, and I saw this headline the Washington Post
Speaker 1: and I was pretty shocked. Actually, so security officials in
Speaker 1: the UK have demanded that Apple create a backdoor that
Speaker 1: would allow authorities to access any Apple user's data uploaded
Speaker 1: to the cloud. Now, this wasn't a request to access
Speaker 1: a specific user account, which law enforcement quite often does.
Speaker 1: This was a request to have an unlimited back door.
Speaker 2: Wow. I mean this feels like a real invasion of privacy.
Speaker 1: Not only that the order was actually issued secretly. So
Speaker 1: thanks to the Washington Post, democracy dies in darkness. While
Speaker 1: you may think you're safe outside of the UK, that's
Speaker 1: just not true if this order goes ahead, because anyone
Speaker 1: around the world can be subject to these demands from
Speaker 1: the UK government. So if for some reason the British
Speaker 1: government want to look at your encrypted phone day and
Speaker 1: this order goes through, they would just be able to
Speaker 1: do that.
Speaker 2: Can you tell me, like why now? iPhones have sort
Speaker 2: of been around for a while.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So this backdoor is for a specific type of
Speaker 1: cloud storage that Apple started offering in twenty twenty two
Speaker 1: called Advanced Data Protection. Most iCloud storage can be unlocked
Speaker 1: by the user and by Apple, but with Advanced Data Protection,
Speaker 1: only the user can access their data stare in the cloud. Basically,
Speaker 1: it extends the end to end encryption of I messages
Speaker 1: and FaceTime to all data on iCloud, but it's a
Speaker 1: setting that users have to opt into. It's not turn
Speaker 1: on my default and advanced data protection obviously offers more
Speaker 1: security protections from hacking, but also from law enforcement who
Speaker 1: often serve Apple with search warrants to access iCloud storage
Speaker 1: and backups, often without the user ever knowing.
Speaker 2: Right, And I do believe that this is a tension
Speaker 2: that a lot of tech companies feel. There's definitely a
Speaker 2: friction between law enforcement and the data privacy of their users.
Speaker 1: Absolutely. You probably remember back in twenty six when the
Speaker 1: FBI tried to order Apple to unlock the phone of
Speaker 1: a dead terrorist. Apple fought back and the two groups
Speaker 1: eventually came to a compromise letting the government scan the
Speaker 1: phone for illegal material. But there's a similar tension around
Speaker 1: this story. The Washington Post, who broke the story noted
Speaker 1: that when Apple was warned about this order in March,
Speaker 1: they threatened to quote publicly withdraw critical security features from
Speaker 1: the UK market, depriving UK users of these protections.
Speaker 2: Wow, I mean sounds like fighting words.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And there's this brewing larger fight between Britain and
Speaker 1: various EU countries and the American tech giants, which is
Speaker 1: super interesting and something I'm sure we'll cover soon, but
Speaker 1: that's a side point on this story. The key thing
Speaker 1: here is that Apple knows, as I'm sure we all
Speaker 1: do by now, that any backdoor or security workaround is also,
Speaker 1: by definition, available to bad actors. On a brighter note,
Speaker 1: this week, I'd like to shout out the latest web
Speaker 1: telescope images which show the most beautiful image of a
Speaker 1: new star forming in vivid definition.
Speaker 2: Okay, yes, for our listeners, if you haven't seen any
Speaker 2: of these images from the web telescope, please stop what
Speaker 2: you're doing and go look at them. They are absolutely unbelievable.
Speaker 1: They really are. So the Web is this space telescope
Speaker 1: that takes stunningly sharp images and it looks deeper into
Speaker 1: space than any previous telescope, which means actually looking further
Speaker 1: back in time, around thirteen point five billion years into
Speaker 1: the past.
Speaker 2: Yeah. That will never stop blowing my mind. That looking
Speaker 2: at the space pins looking back in time. So just
Speaker 2: keep that in mind when you're looking at these images.
Speaker 1: Exactly Well, this week's images really areline blowing. How to
Speaker 1: describe an audio that, think of a vertical collision of
Speaker 1: pain and blue translucent light, almost kaleidoscopic and what's truly
Speaker 1: unbelievable is that this gorgeous array of colours contains newly
Speaker 1: forming stars, and the image may help us understand a
Speaker 1: little more about the environment in which planets are born.
Speaker 2: This story makes me so happy. I absolutely love the
Speaker 2: web telescope.
Speaker 1: METO and there's actually this really beautiful documentary I saw
Speaker 1: a few months ago called Deep Sky, all about the
Speaker 1: Web Telescope. I saw it in Imax and it was
Speaker 1: an incredible experience that I really do recommend. But that's
Speaker 1: it for the headlines this week. Thanks for joining me, Eliza,
Speaker 1: Happy to do it. Coming up on this week's Tech Support,
Speaker 1: we discussed the potential impacts of AI on our cognition
Speaker 1: stay with us, so today for our Tech Support segment,
Speaker 1: we're turning to four or four Media's Immanuel Myberg to
Speaker 1: discuss a question and a lingering fear I and I
Speaker 1: think many of us have about the rise of generative AI,
Speaker 1: which is will this make us dumber? That's definitely a
Speaker 1: reductive statement, but it's not a million miles from what
Speaker 1: a study from Microsoft recently found, which shows that AI
Speaker 1: might affect our critical thinking skills. It's something that's been
Speaker 1: asked every time a new technology is invented. For example,
Speaker 1: when the radio came out, some people worried that reading
Speaker 1: skills would diminish. In more recent generations, it's not been
Speaker 1: uncommon to hear concerns about TV or video games or
Speaker 1: smartphones rotting our brains. But in the case of this study,
Speaker 1: that might actually be happening. So, Emmanuel, thanks so much
Speaker 1: for joining us this week.
Speaker 3: Yeah, thank you for having me.
Speaker 1: You wrote a story with the headline Microsoft's study finds
Speaker 1: AI makes human cognition quote atropheed and unprepared. With the subhead,
Speaker 1: researchers find that the more people use AI at their job,
Speaker 1: the less criticals thinking they may use I found this
Speaker 1: absolutely fascinating. Can you tell us a bit about the study,
Speaker 1: who conducted it, why, what it found.
Speaker 3: So this was a study that was conducted primarily by
Speaker 3: researchers at Microsoft, who collaborated with some researchers at Carnegie
Speaker 3: Mellon University. And what they did for this study is
Speaker 3: they recruited three hundred and nineteen knowledge workers. Knowledge workers
Speaker 3: in this case refers to most people with an office job, right,
Speaker 3: most people who work on computers who generate reports data
Speaker 3: things like.
Speaker 1: This to bankers, journalist, teachers.
Speaker 3: Yeah, anything that, like most work that is not manual labor,
Speaker 3: you can think of as knowledge workers, right. And they
Speaker 3: collected nine hundred and thirty six first hand examples of
Speaker 3: how these people used generative AI in their jobs and
Speaker 3: then asked them to complete a questionnaire where they asked
Speaker 3: them how they used THEAI tool, how they felt about
Speaker 3: using the AI tool, how confident they were in the
Speaker 3: AI tool's ability to give them a reliable, good output,
Speaker 3: and how confident they were in their own ability to
Speaker 3: do the job with or without the AI tool.
Speaker 1: So, in Manuel, what were the conclusions of this study
Speaker 1: that was partly led by Microsoft.
Speaker 3: So the bottom line here is that the researchers found
Speaker 3: that the more these knowledge workers were confident that the
Speaker 3: generative AI tool was doing the job well enough, the
Speaker 3: less likely they were to use critical thinking to make
Speaker 3: sure it's correct.
Speaker 1: We did a story on tech Stuff a few weeks
Speaker 1: ago about how London taxi drivers have bigger hippocampuses than
Speaker 1: the London bus drivers because they saw that they had
Speaker 1: to kind of make out the route as they go
Speaker 1: along versus following a preset route. I found that super fascinating.
Speaker 1: You're smiling. How do you see this story in relation
Speaker 1: to that story.
Speaker 3: I share the personal anecdote in the story that I
Speaker 3: think many people can relate to. So, when I first
Speaker 3: moved out to college in San Francisco, it was a
Speaker 3: little bit before the iPhone became very popular and everyone
Speaker 3: had access to Google Maps on their phone, and I
Speaker 3: would leave my house with a little mini map of
Speaker 3: the city and all the bus routes, and doing that
Speaker 3: for a year, you learn the city, and then you
Speaker 3: just have an intuitive understanding of where you are and
Speaker 3: relations just to the rest of the city, the rest
Speaker 3: of the bus lines, and you know how to get
Speaker 3: places without looking at your phone, which wasn't available to
Speaker 3: me at the time. And ever since then, every time
Speaker 3: I moved to a new city, I never learned the
Speaker 3: city again in the same way because I relied on
Speaker 3: the phone. Same thing with I'm old enough to remember
Speaker 3: remembering my friend's phone numbers and my family's phone numbers.
Speaker 3: Still remember some of those numbers, but ever since I
Speaker 3: had a contact list on my phone, like, never remember
Speaker 3: another phone number again.
Speaker 1: This is one of the things I think about. Why
Speaker 1: I'm grateful that I'm an elder millennial is because My
Speaker 1: education was basically, you know, reading tons of things, memorizing
Speaker 1: facts and then regurgitating them, probably in a way which
Speaker 1: was below the standard of any LM today, well below
Speaker 1: the standard. But the process of learning to do that
Speaker 1: made me who I am today, and it's I find
Speaker 1: it quite concerning to think that so many people don't
Speaker 1: get the experience of having to train their own brain.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a really interesting question that I think is
Speaker 3: maybe bigger than the study, which is what do we
Speaker 3: feel comfortable outsourcing to technology? Which parts of our brain
Speaker 3: do we feel comfortable outsourcing in this way? So do
Speaker 3: I need that muscle in my brain to remember ten
Speaker 3: phone numbers? I don't know. Maybe that gray matter is
Speaker 3: better used for another task. I feel fine about that,
Speaker 3: but I feel less fine about the fact that I'm
Speaker 3: not as good as I used to be at navigating
Speaker 3: cities and so on. Obviously, to go back to the
Speaker 3: fact that this comes from Microsoft, Microsoft is the biggest
Speaker 3: investor in open AI. It's a giant tech company. Like
Speaker 3: all the other giant tech companies, it is at this
Speaker 3: point heavily invested in generative AI tools being widely adopted
Speaker 3: and used by people in their personal lives and their
Speaker 3: professional lives and so on.
Speaker 1: So why are they funding and publishing research that drives
Speaker 1: a whole news cycle about how AI might be bad
Speaker 1: for us?
Speaker 3: Yeah, the same reason that a lot of these AI
Speaker 3: companies have these self reflective studies about the negative side
Speaker 3: effects of AI tools. Right. So, I think last year
Speaker 3: I wrote a story about Google doing a study about
Speaker 3: how AI tools make it much easier to produce disinformation
Speaker 3: and spread it online. But the purpose of that study
Speaker 3: was for Google to say, we developed these tools, we
Speaker 3: recognize this is a problem. Here's our idea for how
Speaker 3: we can mitigate that problem to put you at ease
Speaker 3: so you can feel more comfortable about buying our AI tools.
Speaker 3: And similarly, Microsoft here is recognizing that this is a
Speaker 3: problem and offering a solution so they can move forward
Speaker 3: and developing and deploying these AI tools.
Speaker 1: And how can it be mitigated? I mean, did any
Speaker 1: of the users or the subjects that the study talk
Speaker 1: about how AI is beneficial to them in their work
Speaker 1: or what's the what's the optimistic takeaway here?
Speaker 3: So in general, they note that there is a shift
Speaker 3: between what they call people doing task execution to oversight,
Speaker 3: and when you shift into that oversight role. That's when
Speaker 3: things can get lax and you use less critical thinking
Speaker 3: and mistakes can slip through, and that's bad. And what
Speaker 3: they suggest is developing AI tools with this problem in
Speaker 3: mind and sort of constantly encouraging the person who is
Speaker 3: using the AI tool to use critical thinking to examine
Speaker 3: the output. Like they say, they could offer guided critiques
Speaker 3: for you know, how to approach an output from AI.
Speaker 3: Something that I thought was really interesting and we've seen
Speaker 3: maybe your listeners have heard about deep Seek, which was
Speaker 3: this popular LLLM from China, and one of the things
Speaker 3: that it does, and I think increasingly we're going to
Speaker 3: see other AI tools do, is that you presented with
Speaker 3: the problem and it doesn't just spit out the final answer.
Speaker 3: It kind of shows you its quote unquote thought process.
Speaker 1: Right, it's just so called reasoning models, right, yes.
Speaker 3: Right, So it's showing you how it's getting to the conclusion.
Speaker 3: It's presenting you at the and that's another thing that
Speaker 3: the researchers here say might help make people continue to
Speaker 3: think critically about the output by showing how the AI
Speaker 3: is arriving at that conclusion. And when you look at that,
Speaker 3: maybe you'll you'll be able to note, oh wait, this
Speaker 3: is a bad process and this is a bad conclusion.
Speaker 1: Well, it brings me back to my school days and
Speaker 1: that very frustrating phrase show your workings. Yeah, do you
Speaker 1: have any tips? I mean, it's somebody who's you know,
Speaker 1: a journalist who covers this, but also as a person
Speaker 1: in the world who spends more time thinking about this
Speaker 1: than the average person, about how we should as regular
Speaker 1: people think about finding the right balance and using AI
Speaker 1: tools to help us versus kind of corroding our own
Speaker 1: abilities on the past.
Speaker 3: Ooh, that's a big question, I would say. I think
Speaker 3: this is easy to forget. We're kind of early in
Speaker 3: the game here about the widespread adoption of these tools,
Speaker 3: and from what I see, a lot of our stories
Speaker 3: are basically about the outputs being bad and the outputs
Speaker 3: being wrong and ways that are not immediately obvious. So
Speaker 3: today I would approach any output from any AI with
Speaker 3: a lot of skepticism. Can it be useful? For sure?
Speaker 3: Is it making people more efficient at work? For sure?
Speaker 3: But like open aya has a new research tool, I
Speaker 3: would never just trust the output blindly. I would have
Speaker 3: to double check. Maybe it's a good jumping off point, right,
Speaker 3: I remember in school they told us it's like Wikipedia
Speaker 3: might be a good thing to look at, but it's
Speaker 3: a jumping off point. It's not the end of your
Speaker 3: research or something similar to that. As for in the future,
Speaker 3: when these tools maybe get more competent, I think then
Speaker 3: it's a question of personal choice. I enjoy the process
Speaker 3: of writing. I'm going to continue to do it the
Speaker 3: way that I've done it because that's what I like
Speaker 3: to do, even if chat Gupte makes it instantaneous.
Speaker 1: And Matanuel, thank you so much for joining us today.
Speaker 3: Oh thank you.
Speaker 1: Coming up a look at Elon Musk's history of government contracts.
Speaker 1: Stay with us. If you're even mildly tuned into the news,
Speaker 1: you can't escape the mention of the Department of Government
Speaker 1: Efficiency aka DOGE. DOGE is also a cryptocurrency issued by Musk,
Speaker 1: but it's not actually a department of government like Defense
Speaker 1: or Treasury. It's an entity within the United States Digital Service,
Speaker 1: which has now been renamed by Executive order to United
Speaker 1: States DOGE Service, which means the head of the US
Speaker 1: DOGE Service, Elon Musk, does not need to be vetted
Speaker 1: or approved by Congress, which meant Elon had nothing to
Speaker 1: stop him from getting straight to work, and so he
Speaker 1: and Doge have been very, very, very busy. In the
Speaker 1: twenty six days since President Trump's inauguration, Doge has been
Speaker 1: tearing through the federal government officially in the name of
Speaker 1: reform and efficiency. Government staffers across agencies are being asked
Speaker 1: to resign, programs are being put on hold, Budgets are
Speaker 1: getting slashed, sometimes with the assistance of AI, and this
Speaker 1: is of course nothing new for the man at the
Speaker 1: center of it all, Elon Musk. In fact, it mirrors
Speaker 1: his managerial style at other companies slash first, fix later,
Speaker 1: and he's shown time and again that he'd rather cut
Speaker 1: too much and add back than be too gentle at
Speaker 1: the first pass. As of this taping, those claims have
Speaker 1: identified and cut over one billion dollars in government spending
Speaker 1: the goal two trillion dollars, which means that while it's
Speaker 1: already been a chaotic few weeks, there's no sign of
Speaker 1: anything slowing down. This got me interested in how Musk
Speaker 1: and his fellow Silicon Valley titans first intersected with government
Speaker 1: spending and what their relationship to government efficiency really is, Because,
Speaker 1: of course, efficiency is in the eye of the beholder.
Speaker 1: To prepare for this segment, I had an interesting conversation
Speaker 1: with David Eves, who's a professor of Digital Government at
Speaker 1: University College London, and he said to me, quote, what's
Speaker 1: disappointing is the lack of imagination for a bunch of
Speaker 1: people who benefited from various forms of industrial policy to
Speaker 1: have this simplistic shrink government is always attitude Tesla SpaceX.
Speaker 1: These organizations exist because people chose to invest. Like they saw,
Speaker 1: they had a vision and they chose to invest. Now
Speaker 1: we'll have more of David's take later, but first let's
Speaker 1: establish and baseline points. There is, indeed lots of spending
Speaker 1: from Washington. The national debt is at about thirty two
Speaker 1: trillion dollars right now, and surely, as in any complex entity,
Speaker 1: whether a government or a massive corporation or a university,
Speaker 1: not every dollar is getting much bang for its well buck. Still,
Speaker 1: as much as there is interesting cutting costs and eliminating
Speaker 1: debt from leaders in Congress, whether calling for cuts in
Speaker 1: defense or the National Endowment for the Arts, many elected
Speaker 1: officials and civil servants are strongly opposed to. This particular
Speaker 1: style of cost cutting is very Silicon Valley very moved
Speaker 1: fast and break things again. It's a tactic that seems
Speaker 1: to have worked for the richest man alive in his
Speaker 1: work in the private sector, specifically in Silicon Valley. But
Speaker 1: what I find so interesting is the fact that Elon
Speaker 1: Musk and his companies have actually benefited more than a
Speaker 1: little from government spending. Some might even call it inefficiency.
Speaker 1: According to The New York Times, Musk had around one
Speaker 1: hundred contracts through seventeen different federal agencies last year alone,
Speaker 1: and within the last decade, musks companies, SpaceX and Tesla
Speaker 1: have received at least eighteen billion dollars in government contracts. Now,
Speaker 1: tens of billions of dollars might sound like a pittance
Speaker 1: next to Elon's estimated net worth, which fluctuates, but last
Speaker 1: time I checked was around three hundred and eighty billion dollars.
Speaker 1: But those government contracts have driven up the share price
Speaker 1: his companies and personally enriched him, and the timing and
Speaker 1: the nature of the government funding given to SpaceX and
Speaker 1: Tesla has at times been crucial to their success. Let's
Speaker 1: start with Tesla. Back in twenty ten, the company was
Speaker 1: just starting out and had only sold a couple of
Speaker 1: thousand cars two years before. They'd nearly gone bankrupt, but
Speaker 1: then the Department of Energy stepped in and gave Tesla
Speaker 1: a four hundred and sixty five million dollar loan, which
Speaker 1: the company used to develop a new car model. Just
Speaker 1: three years after this loan, in twenty fourteen, with the
Speaker 1: model s on the market, the carmaker had sold just
Speaker 1: over thirty one thousand cars. With that success, they were
Speaker 1: able to pay back their loan to the Department of
Speaker 1: Energy early. But some have pointed out that a private
Speaker 1: sector investor would have demanded more than just a repayment
Speaker 1: of the loan. They would have demanded a stake in
Speaker 1: Tesla itself, which today will be worth many, many multiples
Speaker 1: of what it was then. So why doesn't the taxpayer
Speaker 1: see that benefit when they're taking the risk. There's this
Speaker 1: concept in investing called the efficient frontier, which basically tells
Speaker 1: investors how much risk is acceptable in proportion to a
Speaker 1: potential reward. Per my favorite source investor Pedia quote, portfolios
Speaker 1: that lie below the efficient frontier are suboptimal because they
Speaker 1: do not provide enough return for the level of risk.
Speaker 1: So if you're a US taxpayer, it kind of sucks
Speaker 1: that you take on all the risk of bailing out
Speaker 1: a company but get barely any return if it survives.
Speaker 1: Remember the Auto bailout anyway. Since then, Tesla has been
Speaker 1: awarded contracts for things like building solar panels to the government,
Speaker 1: providing tactical vehicles for US embassies, money for things the
Speaker 1: government deemed necessary. Then there's also the ev tax credit,
Speaker 1: which existed during the early years of Tesla until twenty nineteen,
Speaker 1: and then was reinstated during the Biden administration seventy five
Speaker 1: hundred dollars to Americans who purchased an electric vehicle. No doubt,
Speaker 1: this encouraged sales and allowed Tesla to set a slightly
Speaker 1: higher price than the market may have allowed before the
Speaker 1: tax credit. As for SpaceX, well, Musk's rocket manufacturer has
Speaker 1: gotten a lot of discretionary government funding, in particular from
Speaker 1: NASA and the Department of Defense. Musk's contracts with those
Speaker 1: agencies total up to about fifteen billion dollars in the
Speaker 1: last decade, for things like designing space landing systems and
Speaker 1: government use of Starlink, which is a satellite network that
Speaker 1: helps people in remote areas connect to the Internet. David Eves,
Speaker 1: the professor, pointed out to me that a major turning
Speaker 1: point for SpaceX was the Russian incursion into Ukraine in
Speaker 1: twenty fourteen. Up until that point, the US had relied
Speaker 1: on Russian made rocket engines to launch stuff into space,
Speaker 1: but after the conflict in Ukraine, the US government deemed
Speaker 1: this a threat to national security and created the National
Speaker 1: Security Space Launch Program, which gave contracts to US companies
Speaker 1: to develop rocket technology. SpaceX won one of these contracts.
Speaker 1: As David pointed out, this was not a government decision
Speaker 1: to maximize efficiency. The Russian rockets were cheap and plentiful,
Speaker 1: but it arguably benefited the United States and certainly benefited SpaceX.
Speaker 1: More money came must sway during the war in Ukraine
Speaker 1: through Starlink, the satellite network. By the fall of twenty
Speaker 1: twenty two, Ukraine had received more than twenty thousand Starlink terminals,
Speaker 1: which aided in restoring military and civilian communications in the country.
Speaker 1: Some of these terminals were donated by Starlink, but some
Speaker 1: were purchased by USAID with government funds. That's USA, the
Speaker 1: agency whose operations have essentially been halted by DOGE. In
Speaker 1: twenty twenty one, SpaceX was awarded a multi billion dollar
Speaker 1: contract to help land the first woman and first person
Speaker 1: of color on the Moon as part of NASA's Artemis programme.
Speaker 1: While Mask's DOGE is cutting DEI efforts across federal agencies,
Speaker 1: SpaceX is still building a spacecraft for long term exploration
Speaker 1: of the Moon, and for SpaceX, the contracts keep on rolling.
Speaker 1: Last year, the company was selected to build a vehicle
Speaker 1: that would take the International Space Station safely out of
Speaker 1: orbit in twenty thirty due to its outdated technology and capabilities.
Speaker 1: But in many ways, this is a story far bigger
Speaker 1: than just Elon. As David Eves told me, quote, one
Speaker 1: cannot underestimate the importance of the US federal government in
Speaker 1: the creation of Silicon Valley. For example, you wouldn't have
Speaker 1: the smartphone without the touchscreen, which was developed by researchers
Speaker 1: at the University of Delaware with funding from the CIA
Speaker 1: and the National Science Foundation, not to mention the countless
Speaker 1: innovations through DARPER, the Research and Development Agency of the
Speaker 1: Department of Defense. I mean, I think we all know this,
Speaker 1: but we wouldn't even have the Internet without DARPER, which
Speaker 1: funded the development of upernet, the Advanced Research Projects Agency network.
Speaker 1: Back in the sixties, and this network was declared operational
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy one, and soon there was an early
Speaker 1: form of email through advances in remote login and file transfer.
Speaker 1: We wouldn't have GPS or autonomous vehicles without Darper or
Speaker 1: digital virtual assistance like Siri, which were originally meant to
Speaker 1: provide assistance to soldiers in the field. Back in the sixties,
Speaker 1: one million dollars was provided to start building Arpernet, which
Speaker 1: with inflation, would be over nine million dollars today. The
Speaker 1: wealth creation that money has spurred, particularly in Silicon Valley,
Speaker 1: has been completely insane. It just bears remembering many of
Speaker 1: the inventions that are at the heart of so much
Speaker 1: tech we use today were funded because someone in the
Speaker 1: federal government said, here, have some money, this is important,
Speaker 1: figure it out. And those priorities, of course change and
Speaker 1: evolve from administration to administration. But one of the frustrating
Speaker 1: things about watching Doge hack away agency budgets is that
Speaker 1: there's very little transparency surrounding the tactics or motivations of
Speaker 1: Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency. Most of all,
Speaker 1: I'm actually craving a definition of the word efficiency. A
Speaker 1: final thought from David quote. The government's main role is
Speaker 1: an aggregator of capital so it can make investments. And
Speaker 1: if the public is robbed of its confidence in the
Speaker 1: public sector's ability to make investments that generate public good outcomes,
Speaker 1: then we've been robbed of a critical tool to address
Speaker 1: the key problems of our time. Food for thought. But
Speaker 1: that's all we have time for this week on tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: For tech Stuff, I'm os Vloshin. This episode was produced
Speaker 1: by Eliza Dennis, Victoria de Mingez, and Lizzie Jacobs. It
Speaker 1: was executive produced by me Kara Price and Kate Osborne
Speaker 1: for Kaleidoscope and Katrina Norvel b iheartpodt but he'd Fraser
Speaker 1: is our engineer and Kyle Murdoch mixed this episode and
Speaker 1: also wrote the theme song. Join us next Wednesday for
Speaker 1: tex Stuff The Story, when we'll share an in depth
Speaker 1: conversation with Harney Freed, the man the world turns to
Speaker 1: when they aren't quite sure is this image real or not?
Speaker 1: Please rate, review, and reach out to us at tech
Speaker 1: Stuff Podcast at gmail dot com. We love hearing from you.