Speaker 1: Cool Media.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to it could happen here, a podcast about it,
Speaker 2: the Consumer Electronics Show, happening here to everyone, And of
Speaker 2: course it is in fact happening to everyone, because over
Speaker 2: the course of the day, all of our subjects here,
Speaker 2: all of our experts here, have watched different kinds of
Speaker 2: dudes explain the different kinds of jobs they want to
Speaker 2: replace with a chatbot that was trained on Reddit. So
Speaker 2: I'm gonna go around a circle and introduce our guests today.
Speaker 2: First off, we've got the great Ed Anguiso Junior. Ed,
Speaker 2: thank you for being here, Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 2: We've got Garrison Davis, who's also great, but I'm not
Speaker 2: gonna say it at the same time because I don't
Speaker 2: want Ed's compliment to feel like less. But you're contractually
Speaker 2: obligated to not mind.
Speaker 3: Yes, thank you boss.
Speaker 2: Great to be here, as always, very natural, very natural.
Speaker 2: Zi hi hi, hello, hello, oh hello, hello, thank you.
Speaker 2: This is your first cees as well, that's your first
Speaker 2: time being a journalist. Also true. How do you how
Speaker 2: do you feel doing the job that Alex Garland has
Speaker 2: just reminded us in the movie Civil War is a
Speaker 2: fundamentally noble, perfect endeavor only practiced by heroes.
Speaker 4: I love wearing a dress, shirt and tie and just
Speaker 4: getting very drunk.
Speaker 2: You were very surprised when I gave you your gun,
Speaker 2: but you can't be a journalist without one. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: I playing with it without the safety. Remember, And last,
Speaker 2: but certainly not least, In fact, may be better than
Speaker 2: some people in the room. Again, I'm not going to
Speaker 2: say who. You can wonder that for yourself, feel David Roth.
Speaker 5: Thanks, I agree that I'm pretty good. How much better
Speaker 5: I am than how many people in this room?
Speaker 2: I'm not. I'm not even really like something that not
Speaker 2: like talking about. Yeah, exactly because we haven't gotten those
Speaker 2: numbers back from Open AI.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it would be irresponsible to speculate at the end.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you got away for three. So what I want
Speaker 2: to do here? I think this is kind of our
Speaker 2: roll up. We've spent our last day on the floor.
Speaker 2: I want to go around and I'll start first. You
Speaker 2: guys have a second to get your thoughts together. What
Speaker 2: comes to mind im media is like, this is the
Speaker 2: thing that I had the most positive reaction to, and
Speaker 2: this is the thing that I had the most negative
Speaker 2: reaction to. I think is a solid way for us
Speaker 2: to start out, and I think my most negative reaction,
Speaker 2: obviously was the Amy artificial child best Friend toy, which
Speaker 2: was deeply upsetting and uncomfortable, and I hated both that.
Speaker 2: Like I could tell, from an industrial design standpoint, pretty
Speaker 2: good design, Like it looked like something like, oh, Kitt'll
Speaker 2: think that's cute, and from a this is our intent
Speaker 2: for this product standpoint, it felt like a replacement for
Speaker 2: the love of adults in the life of a small child,
Speaker 2: which I thought was like evil in a profound way.
Speaker 2: And I guess the best thing that I saw. I'm
Speaker 2: not perfectly competent at this point to like analyze how
Speaker 2: well it worked, but from the demo I saw, I
Speaker 2: was very impressed with Naqi. Knakis basically reads facial micro
Speaker 2: motions in order to let people control a computer, not exclusively,
Speaker 2: but especially if they're quadriplegic or whatever. Like I thought
Speaker 2: that was really interesting, and it's the kind of thing
Speaker 2: because honestly, I might loop that in with There was
Speaker 2: a AI assisted like Caine for people who were blind.
Speaker 2: There was another device that led you to control a
Speaker 2: computer through like facial movements in your mouth. It was
Speaker 2: like a retainer. All the stuff that's like Oh, these
Speaker 2: are like really, people care a lot about helping somebody
Speaker 2: regain the ability to utilize technology to let them reconnect
Speaker 2: to the world. That's like the opposite of replacing a
Speaker 2: child's parents with a toy ed You're in the hot
Speaker 2: seat next, you know.
Speaker 6: The thing I loved the most was obviously the Global
Speaker 6: Pavilion for connecting Web three businesses across cryptoching. Oh yeah,
Speaker 6: DeFi fintech cb DC's which your central bank, digital currencies
Speaker 6: and legal ADVARC. You know this in my heart flutter
Speaker 6: because you know what, even when you think they're down,
Speaker 6: Crypto finds a way to squirm into your life.
Speaker 3: It really is the zombie of the tech world. Yeah,
Speaker 3: because it's dead and yet it's undead. It's constantly trying
Speaker 3: to crawl back somehow.
Speaker 2: The fact that it's dead makes it more dangerous.
Speaker 3: Now to exactly it's specifically a zombie. I will try
Speaker 3: to figure out what's the vampire, but specifically Crypto is
Speaker 3: the zombie.
Speaker 2: Yeah. When I first read the line that is not dead,
Speaker 2: which can eternal lie and with strange eons, even death
Speaker 2: may die.
Speaker 6: Yeah, when I think of you know, twenty eight years
Speaker 6: later trailer where they use that poem.
Speaker 2: Three sex.
Speaker 6: You know, like, I'm just guessing where the price of
Speaker 6: bitcoin is gonna go. I think we're at the beginning
Speaker 6: of a golden age, not for us, but for the grifters.
Speaker 6: Oh God, next week, when are dear Golden boy gets
Speaker 6: or Orange boy gets elected so I are inaugurated? Has
Speaker 6: he already won the election?
Speaker 2: Did well?
Speaker 3: Well, that's that's that's debatable. I think there was some
Speaker 3: very curious irregularities in multiple states right.
Speaker 2: Straightforward from here to be encouraging the blue and on
Speaker 2: people that know, now let him, let him have it,
Speaker 2: have it. You're right, he wasn't shot at all. That
Speaker 2: was all an AI trick. Yeah, that was they are
Speaker 2: fifteen would blow your whole head off that way.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 6: The thing I actually did like the most similar to you,
Speaker 6: I really did like the assistive tech. I mean the
Speaker 6: stuff that is for people who are disabled not able
Speaker 6: body either experience things either cognitive decline or you know,
Speaker 6: the neodegenerative things or paralyzed. Like, this is actual stuff
Speaker 6: that we need a lot more investment in development and
Speaker 6: I assume maybe the scaleut production of it and figure
Speaker 6: out ways that it can be offered to people in
Speaker 6: a variety or in a spectrum re use cases. Right,
Speaker 6: I ain't the stuff that I did not like.
Speaker 4: Hmm.
Speaker 6: You know, I didn't really care for a lot of
Speaker 6: the luxury surveillance stuff, you know, the fake cgms that
Speaker 6: you know. I'll never forget this woman telling someone right
Speaker 6: next to me it's a it was a medical device
Speaker 6: that when I asked, she looks at my attag and goes, no,
Speaker 6: it's not a medical.
Speaker 2: We had a beautiful moment where it was this like
Speaker 2: it was like a set of smart goggles, which there
Speaker 2: were a lot of that had like night vision, but
Speaker 2: also it had like threat assessments. So the specific thing
Speaker 2: they bragged is like it can help a police officer
Speaker 2: identify if somebody has a gun. Right, And this was
Speaker 2: right after we had gone to an AI security camera
Speaker 2: that I had flipped off with both hands and it
Speaker 2: had identified as a man giving the thumbs up. And
Speaker 2: I don't feel great about it identifying the gun.
Speaker 6: Luxury surveillance for health, luxury surveillance for air recognition. Also
Speaker 6: like they had it in litter boxes and shit, don't
Speaker 6: need that, really don't fucking need that. Why does the
Speaker 6: letter box need to be connected? To the internet, and
Speaker 6: why does he need a camera in it?
Speaker 2: You know that does maybe think of a better world
Speaker 2: where we have exactly as much money and focus on AI.
Speaker 2: But it's all integrating it into cat focused products like
Speaker 2: fifty dollars being poured into cattle.
Speaker 5: Translate whatever your cat is saying into French perfectly.
Speaker 2: Your cat can make deals with Chinese and by the way,
Speaker 2: we've hooked him up to venture capital. We have an
Speaker 2: open line soft bank.
Speaker 6: Siri, why you know that I would love this translation.
Speaker 6: Let's help my cat make some deals. Let's help me
Speaker 6: figure out why or how he learned to open my door.
Speaker 6: You know, things like this, But what we get an
Speaker 6: am bullshit.
Speaker 2: I want to see a guy a dressed as Steve
Speaker 2: Jobs be like ladies and gentlemen. We have finally done it.
Speaker 2: We have gotten across the concept of death to a cat.
Speaker 2: Stand there mortality? Actually that like common ad where he's
Speaker 2: talking about AI. But he's like, we.
Speaker 5: Taught proofs to a dog, got turtle back on what
Speaker 5: a dog would think.
Speaker 2: About It was just a dog sitting at a table
Speaker 2: smoking a cigarettes. The future. Mm hmm, Garrison, you're.
Speaker 3: Up best of ces. I think was definitely the VLC
Speaker 3: media booth the park where they they had like they
Speaker 3: had big big traffic cones on their head, wearing them
Speaker 3: like wizard hats with with huge cloaks.
Speaker 2: They were dressed a wizards. They were dressed as wizards.
Speaker 3: And we walked up to them and they said.
Speaker 2: Let's let's start VLC folks. If you if you don't
Speaker 2: know this, this was especially relevant to those of us
Speaker 2: who pirated a lot. It's a media app that allows
Speaker 2: you to basically play any kind of like any video,
Speaker 2: idiophile yes, or audio file, and now it will automatically
Speaker 2: give you subtitles to using local AI. That's not like
Speaker 2: reaching to the cloud or anything to do it.
Speaker 3: Because putting some titles on pirated media can sometimes be
Speaker 3: really hard. So they said, we have something that analyzes
Speaker 3: the audio that's being spoken in whatever media you're watching,
Speaker 3: and we will.
Speaker 2: Put some titles up for you.
Speaker 3: We walked up and we're like, so what do you
Speaker 3: have here? Like, we are not selling anything, We have
Speaker 3: nothing to sell.
Speaker 2: You in this beautiful they're fringe. So it was in
Speaker 2: this like yeah, yeah, wonderful accents. I'm not going to
Speaker 2: take the degree of like I don't give a fuck
Speaker 2: about anything else of this stupid goddamn show that they
Speaker 2: gave off. They exuded it.
Speaker 3: And they're they're they're by far the coolest because of
Speaker 3: something Robert you said to them.
Speaker 2: I walked up and I was like, Velc's a very
Speaker 2: popular app. They just crossed six billion downloads. I've been
Speaker 2: using them for almost as long as you've been alive.
Speaker 2: And I walked up and I was like, I've been
Speaker 2: using your product for fifteen years in order to pirate media.
Speaker 2: And they said, very nonchalantly, keep.
Speaker 3: Going, keep it, keep going, keep doing that, keep doing that.
Speaker 6: I'm obsessed.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's amazing.
Speaker 5: All sad about this too, because, like I, it's a
Speaker 5: good app. I have also used it. I saw the
Speaker 5: guy in the hat and I was like, Oh, it's
Speaker 5: the VLC from you know, from on your desktop. And
Speaker 5: then I was like, that's that's stupid. I don't need
Speaker 5: to talk to the man. He's wearing a hat and
Speaker 5: a cape. And I'm glad that you followed through. As
Speaker 5: a journalist. Pushed aside your instinct to be like, do
Speaker 5: not approach stranger in a cape.
Speaker 2: Garrison does not have that Answerry no, No. At some
Speaker 2: point the contrary I feel a magnetic attraction. This is
Speaker 2: why I keep an air tag on them. Great way
Speaker 2: to get abducted.
Speaker 3: I think similarly, obviously, all of the AI stuff for kids,
Speaker 3: all of like the AI slop is like obviously bad.
Speaker 3: We've talked about that a lot already. The other thing
Speaker 3: that's like kind of like the worst is so much
Speaker 3: what you said ed like a level of surveillance tech.
Speaker 3: I tried out multiple a systems that are supposed to
Speaker 3: like detect and predict behavior based on facial expressions or gesture,
Speaker 3: and this is really tricky. There was one at Eureka Park.
Speaker 3: It's creating company that's powered I believe b Samsung with
Speaker 3: money and also they've access to like their training data.
Speaker 3: They're called Visomatic And specifically why this exists. It is
Speaker 3: a camera that you can put on a put on
Speaker 3: a computer. It will it will detect where your face
Speaker 3: is pointing and where your eyes are paying attention to.
Speaker 3: And the reason why this exists is for online test taking.
Speaker 3: It so people don't like look at their phone to
Speaker 3: like to like cheat, So it at tracks where your
Speaker 3: eyes are moving and if your eyes look down too much,
Speaker 3: it's gonna flag it as someone's possibly cheating. So this
Speaker 3: was obviously like introduced after the pandemic. There's a lot
Speaker 3: a lot of online test taking. Samsung uses this tech
Speaker 3: themselves for any kind of like online exams that they
Speaker 3: as a company will put on, you know, whether it's
Speaker 3: like for people, students, employees. But they also had like
Speaker 3: other features where you could switch it. I assume it's
Speaker 3: doing all the same work, it just is placed differently
Speaker 3: on the monitor and instead of can you know, do
Speaker 3: like object detection you know what you're wearing, and the
Speaker 3: general like behavior analysis if you seem like you're behaving suspiciously,
Speaker 3: which is something that we tried at the K booth,
Speaker 3: which also a South Korean company, for their own like
Speaker 3: like surveillance detection. But I asked Visomatic, like like what
Speaker 3: kind of use cases do you see for this beyond
Speaker 3: test taking? You know, like yeah, general surveillance, Like yeah,
Speaker 3: we want to learn how to like predict or like
Speaker 3: analyze potentially suspicious human behavior. As we were walking by
Speaker 3: the s K version, one quite funny thing is as
Speaker 3: I walked by it first, it first identified me as
Speaker 3: a blonde woman holding a cup. It then changed and
Speaker 3: said blonde person, which I think is pretty it's pretty.
Speaker 2: Deep, very progressives, doing the opposite of a Facebook.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it could sense the pronouns. It's like hmm, maybe
Speaker 3: maybe not maybe not a woman, maybe not a blonde person.
Speaker 3: But but yes, that was you know, something that was
Speaker 3: like quite well done. Specifically the visomatic stuff, like very functional.
Speaker 3: It could tell when I was looking at the screen,
Speaker 3: when I was looking at my phone. It could tell
Speaker 3: from like various various angles, like what what I was holding,
Speaker 3: what I was looking at, where my attention was being directed.
Speaker 1: Like it was.
Speaker 3: It was very well done. It was very accurate. But
Speaker 3: you know, possibly scary.
Speaker 2: Well, speaking of possibly scary, the sponsors of this podcast
Speaker 2: don't know who they are. Could be the Washington State
Speaker 2: Highway Patrol again, in which case, thank you boys for
Speaker 2: your noble service on our nation's roads. I'm not saying
Speaker 2: that because I got pulled over the other week and
Speaker 2: I'm really trying to fight a case right now. I
Speaker 2: would never do that anyway. Thanks guys, and we're back.
Speaker 2: Is it my turn? It is your turn?
Speaker 3: Okay, So I'm going to introduce our special white woman
Speaker 3: correspondents to give us some exciting breaking news in the
Speaker 3: white woman tech development world.
Speaker 4: Okay, so the first one is positive sure contexts. I'm
Speaker 4: a transwoman.
Speaker 7: And one of the boosts that was pretty interesting it
Speaker 7: was this group were they French, Garrett, you remember.
Speaker 3: I I you know they're they're They're European. They're called
Speaker 3: el E ell E Health. It's ELI.
Speaker 4: Anyways. This is a at home hormone tester, so it
Speaker 4: is saliva base. It's like a little disposable package. Currently
Speaker 4: they only advertise cortisol and progesterone, but they have plans
Speaker 4: for estrade, isle and other hormones as well, testosterone as well.
Speaker 4: Sorry and yeah, So you swab your mouth in the
Speaker 4: morning or evening and then you wait, what was it like,
Speaker 4: fifteen minutes, twenty minutes, and then you scan this little
Speaker 4: like QR thing on the device and your phone calculates
Speaker 4: what your levels are. And this has very interesting implications
Speaker 4: for like the DIY hormone market or use case. I
Speaker 4: started DIY and did my own like blood tests, but
Speaker 4: a lot of like trans kids don't have access to that.
Speaker 4: So this is a it's a good idea if it's
Speaker 4: actually effective, Like we alln't have hands on yet, we
Speaker 4: haven't tested it yet, but I would love to do
Speaker 4: a comparison of like testing my own levels and then
Speaker 4: trying this very interesting, very intriguing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we will certainly as soon as possible test this
Speaker 3: compared to the regular like mail in blood tests, which
Speaker 3: is like the current way to do it, but that
Speaker 3: requires shipping your blood to a laboratory and that's maybe
Speaker 3: not always the best or even like convenient. So being
Speaker 3: able to test this just at home without shipping any
Speaker 3: of your DNA to some random laboratory would be really
Speaker 3: really cool.
Speaker 4: Right, There's no insurance involved. This is completely supposedly close source.
Speaker 2: From what y'all were telling me earlier today, when you
Speaker 2: explained this to me, it sounded kind of like the
Speaker 2: people making this have an understanding of the dangers inherit,
Speaker 2: particularly to the trans community, and why they might want
Speaker 2: to use this, and a focus on privacy. For that reason,
Speaker 2: I didn't.
Speaker 4: Press them on that because I don't know, I follow.
Speaker 2: You know, wide variety of Yeah.
Speaker 3: No, we tried to expect as much intel as possible
Speaker 3: about kind of what their future plans are, but but
Speaker 3: not specifically like in that level.
Speaker 2: But privacy, like they seemed like they had of coursably good.
Speaker 3: Understand of course, because it's because it's because it is
Speaker 3: your own, like DNA and hormones, you know, like I,
Speaker 3: I do not know this company is even thinking about
Speaker 3: trans people if it is trans friendly, but it could
Speaker 3: be used by trans people regardless.
Speaker 2: Yeah, much like a glock exactly exactly.
Speaker 4: The potential is great.
Speaker 7: And then probably my least favorite goofs I have to
Speaker 7: call out some other white women, my so cal boho
Speaker 7: white women. It's evjects and has that spelled e V
Speaker 7: E V J e C t okay?
Speaker 4: And what this is?
Speaker 7: Oh god, yes, this is a special plug for your
Speaker 7: charging port of your EV. So the idea is a
Speaker 7: nefarious party sees you and your fancy EV and approaches
Speaker 7: you and you need a quick getaway their words, their words,
Speaker 7: their words, by the way, like they see your fancy
Speaker 7: car and your targets. So this device will like e jacks,
Speaker 7: you can just drive away from the charge.
Speaker 2: Leaving broken pieces of plastic both yes, the charger.
Speaker 7: Like this is not single use. Yes, so yeah, all
Speaker 7: those all those people targeting so caw white women.
Speaker 5: This is finally someone is serving the community of people
Speaker 5: that think that if you find a zip tie on
Speaker 5: your car door handle, MS.
Speaker 3: That was the first thing I said as soon as
Speaker 3: soon as we walked away, I was like, this product
Speaker 3: wins the Crulson Media Award for the most white Woman's
Speaker 3: specificly right, like, if you see a slice of cheese
Speaker 3: on your windshield.
Speaker 2: You're already targeting right away.
Speaker 3: This is this is that exact demographic of people who
Speaker 3: think they're going to get trafficked in like your local
Speaker 3: like olive garden parking lots.
Speaker 8: Gang stalked Americans in the Tesla charging station in Brentwood, California,
Speaker 8: where the average income is like in the eight figures.
Speaker 2: I gotta say, though, you're being very unfair to them.
Speaker 2: It was so nice of them to put down the
Speaker 2: phone where they were doom scrolling TikTok, to look at
Speaker 2: all of the different reasons their kids are going to
Speaker 2: be abductive. They're talking about this.
Speaker 5: Product, you know, they're like, some finally someone's gonna do
Speaker 5: something about it, create a disposable piece of plastic.
Speaker 6: You notice that guy is always sitting down in the
Speaker 6: gym and the coffee shop and the gas station. This
Speaker 6: is how he doesn't get it.
Speaker 4: I'd be careful.
Speaker 2: I feel like I could have upsold them, and like,
Speaker 2: what if we put some explosives in this, you know,
Speaker 2: really like keep off of the car, like a flashbacks
Speaker 2: inside of it.
Speaker 6: Called the police station and took a picture of him.
Speaker 2: And someone scared. A lady driving a Vibe. That's one
Speaker 2: of the electric cars.
Speaker 3: Right, It's like a crocodile tail. As as it a jects,
Speaker 3: it whips around, mobilizing anyone in the vicinity.
Speaker 2: We're calling it the Iguana, and it does with enough
Speaker 2: force to break a grown man's tyle. Yes, okay, David Roth.
Speaker 5: So there's a lot of I guess I gathered less
Speaker 5: than in years past that this was at one point
Speaker 5: like basically a car show. There is not a lot
Speaker 5: of transit stuff this time around. I didn't get to
Speaker 5: see very much of it, but I did have. I
Speaker 5: guess this is both my best and my worst experience,
Speaker 5: the most powerful transit experience of my life.
Speaker 2: So I live in New York City.
Speaker 5: I take the subway pretty much everywhere I go, and
Speaker 5: you know, it has its ups and downs. For the
Speaker 5: most part, it's good. It moves like twelve hundred people
Speaker 5: through a tunnel of thirty odd miles an hour, and
Speaker 5: for the most part, everybody, everybody else alone or you know,
Speaker 5: watch its videos on their phone and stuff. But I
Speaker 5: knew that there had to be a better way, and
Speaker 5: at the Las Vegas Convention Center I got to experience it.
Speaker 5: You're familiar Elon Musk, serial entrepreneur. Yeah, so he invented
Speaker 5: something called the hyper loop, which is a car that
Speaker 5: goes through a tunnel that's the exact same size as
Speaker 5: the car at eleven miles an hour and it takes
Speaker 5: there's someone has to drive it, and also someone has
Speaker 5: to help you get into the car, but you can
Speaker 5: fit up to three additional people into the car, so
Speaker 5: that ratios everyone, I know, Yes, right, so yeah, you
Speaker 5: got two people moving three people two hundred yards at
Speaker 5: the speed of like a brisk walk.
Speaker 2: Now, David, this kind of technology wasn't possible just a
Speaker 2: few decades, right exactly. I mean this was the sort
Speaker 2: of thing.
Speaker 5: Though there had been tunnels, they were mostly used by animals,
Speaker 5: voles miners, yes, right, and thought yeah, and that was
Speaker 5: mostly for pirates in at least one movie I saw recently, Yes,
Speaker 5: but no one had thought about it as a transit
Speaker 5: sort of thing. It was more of a like a
Speaker 5: place where you would go if you needed to get
Speaker 5: copper and of course, but in this case, so this
Speaker 5: is like where it's good to have and this I
Speaker 5: guess every ces is like this. This was my first
Speaker 5: to be reminded that there are visionaries out there who
Speaker 5: are like, what if you put car through hole? What
Speaker 5: if instead of a thing that moves multiple people at once,
Speaker 5: you had a thing that took exactly the same number
Speaker 5: of people to move that number of people slightly more
Speaker 5: than Yes, Yeah, so that was cool. I mean it's
Speaker 5: just like fun to see like where this stuff is going.
Speaker 5: And I really wonder if we're not going to start
Speaker 5: seeing things like cars on the streets of American cities,
Speaker 5: you know, like it could be okay, David, I mean
Speaker 5: most of the obviously this is something we'd going last
Speaker 5: there was like three or four good things you all
Speaker 5: said them. I thought the accessibility tech stuff was the
Speaker 5: the stuff that made me feel good about what was
Speaker 5: going on here, and there was a great deal of
Speaker 5: stuff that made me feel like pretty bad about what
Speaker 5: was going on. Yeah, you're up to and including like
Speaker 5: the survey and stuff beyond the you know, like advanced
Speaker 5: Samsung powered snitch tech so that nobody whatever your boss
Speaker 5: can tell if you're really looking at the.
Speaker 2: Zoom that you're on.
Speaker 5: Don't really love that personally, But for me, the a
Speaker 5: lot of the smart home stuff is a real drag,
Speaker 5: like just in the sense that.
Speaker 2: It clearly, first of all, beyond being.
Speaker 5: Like sort of unnecessary, there's a level of just willingly
Speaker 5: giving over your agency over the small moments that make
Speaker 5: you know human life human life, and just being like
Speaker 5: I would really love it if just like an artificial
Speaker 5: intelligence could pick my pants out for the day. I'll
Speaker 5: simply stand here waiting for that to happen. Yeah, just
Speaker 5: fucking grim actually, like didn't really care for it. I
Speaker 5: feel like you gotta like, what are you using that
Speaker 5: time to do?
Speaker 2: Yeah? What are you getting? What are you optimizing from
Speaker 2: yourself by not having like pieces of like the thing
Speaker 2: that a human being does, which is like pick your clothes, right? Yeah,
Speaker 2: I wonder how you feel about this because you and
Speaker 2: I have been going to cees from and I guess
Speaker 2: a broadly similar number of years. Like I've never been
Speaker 2: to CEO.
Speaker 5: Oh really this is your no, I'm a fucking sports
Speaker 5: writer man, like this is out here because Ed got
Speaker 5: me a folding head.
Speaker 2: I have like the dead eyedes veterans. Oh yeah, well
Speaker 2: I'm very tired. Yeah.
Speaker 5: This is the thing with like I think, as far
Speaker 5: as I can tell, it seems like it's a loop
Speaker 5: where you more or less like you start out it's
Speaker 5: too much, you get big I right away, and then
Speaker 5: you just sort of feel zombie fined. But then we
Speaker 5: have talked to people over the last few days that
Speaker 5: are like, you know, I remember like fourteen ces as
Speaker 5: ago that was pretty good, like and they're also tired
Speaker 5: and also deranged by this point.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the first time someone showed me a tablet computer,
Speaker 2: I was like, oh man, science has given me everything
Speaker 2: I want, like and I guess it's I don't know.
Speaker 2: Do you remember like when the last one was that
Speaker 2: you felt like even sort of that stirring Yeah, uh twenty,
Speaker 2: like eleven or twelve when they did I got to
Speaker 2: see inductive charging of a car for the first time,
Speaker 2: and it like was so big. The Las Vegas Convention
Speaker 2: Center is like as the size of a city, and
Speaker 2: seeing like the lights in that whole convention center dim
Speaker 2: as they were doing it was very inefficient because yeah,
Speaker 2: but that was just like that was like, oh wow,
Speaker 2: this is kind of like amazing that this is even possible,
Speaker 2: but yeah, not really sense, not really sense. That's why
Speaker 2: I'm really glad that there's lights in the hyper loop tunnel. Yeah,
Speaker 2: otherwise it'd be unless something goes wrong. It started to seem
Speaker 2: kind of grim otherwise. Well, I the smart home stuff
Speaker 2: is interesting because that that has been as long as
Speaker 2: I've been going to these they've been trying to sell
Speaker 2: people on smart homes, and I don't think I've ever
Speaker 2: gotten a good idea of what a smart home is
Speaker 2: that I think a person would want. I can think
Speaker 2: of two things a person would want right. One of
Speaker 2: them is, it would be nice if like I didn't
Speaker 2: have to think about playing music. I could just like
Speaker 2: tell my house to play the music I wanted and
Speaker 2: it would play the music and I could hear it
Speaker 2: everywhere and I didn't have to fuss with a bunch
Speaker 2: of shit. And the second is what a I'm coming
Speaker 2: home from vacation and my house is cold, it would
Speaker 2: be nice to turn on the heat or like an
Speaker 2: hour before I get home. And one of those things
Speaker 2: you'd use every day. And one of those things is
Speaker 2: not really a viable to base a business off of.
Speaker 2: But like they keep trying to find new ways to
Speaker 2: stick computers in my house. And I don't know, does
Speaker 2: anyone else have anything they want out of a fucking
Speaker 2: smart home? No?
Speaker 5: I mean, I like, it's not an accident that my
Speaker 5: apartment is basically going to be in the year two
Speaker 5: thousand and five forever. Like, I mean, it's it's expensive
Speaker 5: to do all this stuff. This is the bit that
Speaker 5: with so many of these demos, like just you start
Speaker 5: to notice how incredibly grandiose the residences in which all
Speaker 5: of this stuff is being sort of like postulated as
Speaker 5: being useful. Is it's like the like Lexus December to
Speaker 5: Remember sales event type.
Speaker 2: Energy just a big fuck what lives do you live? Yeah?
Speaker 5: This also we've talked about this on Ed's show that
Speaker 5: like there's a lot of stuff here that feels like
Speaker 5: like the first fifteen minutes of a George Romero movie,
Speaker 5: like just getting you set for eventually there's going to
Speaker 5: be a lot of like, you know, disembowelings and hideous
Speaker 5: shambling zombie. Yeah, and smart home not a bad horror
Speaker 5: movie concept. I don't think it's a great consumer concept.
Speaker 2: Yeah, speaking of great consumer concepts, the ads for this podcast,
Speaker 2: all right, we're back and I want to close this
Speaker 2: out by asking everybody a question, which is, how do
Speaker 2: you feel about where tech is going?
Speaker 6: I think we're going to hell.
Speaker 2: I think we are getting wrapped it up.
Speaker 6: Very fast into the sweet abyss. I'm worried about the
Speaker 6: fact that so much of the tech is oriented around surveillance,
Speaker 6: around precursor forms of prepping, around very soft forms of
Speaker 6: like perfection and optimization that rhyme with eugenics. I'm like,
Speaker 6: I don't like the direction that a lot of this
Speaker 6: stuff is going. But also there I don't know what
Speaker 6: to do about it because so much of it is
Speaker 6: driven by private interest, right, It's like venture capitalists, well
Speaker 6: capitalized individuals and firms that they're connected to decide what
Speaker 6: we get to get pushed and these corporations, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the nature of like you can you can really
Speaker 2: tell that a lot of like the health products are
Speaker 2: very optimized for like rich tech executives. Like there's a
Speaker 2: lot of sleep products that all relied on you being
Speaker 2: willing to like bathe yourself in speakers, playing benaural beats
Speaker 2: while you slept, and like a different devices measure you're
Speaker 2: like do an ECG And it's like I don't know.
Speaker 2: My aunt's not going to do that.
Speaker 6: Oh yeah, you know, like I was, you know, I was.
Speaker 6: I took with my partner about this. They have type
Speaker 6: one diabetes, they have a CGM, They use it constantly,
Speaker 6: and they're We've been talking about and thinking about writing
Speaker 6: about how there've been a crop of devices that are
Speaker 6: like trying to push onto this idea that you need
Speaker 6: to have close monitoring of it to preempt if you
Speaker 6: are going to be prediabetic, or to optimize what you're
Speaker 6: eating throughout the day, but that you know, when you
Speaker 6: actually dig into what they're doing, it's like part of
Speaker 6: this track of rhetoric where it's like whoa, you know,
Speaker 6: if your sugar slightly goes out, it's because you're being
Speaker 6: a bad person. It's because you're eating the way that
Speaker 6: you shouldn't. It's because there's a moral failing or character
Speaker 6: failing there that this tech can help purify you of
Speaker 6: and you can be your best self, which is really
Speaker 6: just like not large.
Speaker 3: You know, And.
Speaker 6: I feel that sort of rhetoric lurking behind a lot
Speaker 6: of the biometric surveillance stuff, even though there are applications
Speaker 6: that are not that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, it's kind of focused on like the sin,
Speaker 2: the health sins that you're committing. We spend a decent
Speaker 2: amount of this week hanging out with a Catholic priest,
Speaker 2: and I do feel like several tech companies were the
Speaker 2: ones trying to sell us indulgences.
Speaker 3: Right, yeah, yeah, all right, gare There's small improvements for
Speaker 3: consumer tech, right this is a very consumer base where
Speaker 3: it's supposed to be a consumer based tech show. There's
Speaker 3: products like these shocks, headphones, which every year get a
Speaker 3: little bit better. I try to conducting headphones last year,
Speaker 3: which are very good.
Speaker 2: They work underwater if you're deaf in an air music
Speaker 2: the way you used to be able to.
Speaker 3: Yeah, very cool stuff. This year they have what they
Speaker 3: called air conductive. I don't quite know how it works,
Speaker 3: but it does work. I can hear it if you're
Speaker 3: standing like two three feet away. There's no sound bleed,
Speaker 3: but I hear music in the middle of my head
Speaker 3: despite having to not put an earbud actually like in
Speaker 3: my ear. They're super useful. They work greatly, really good
Speaker 3: sound quality, durable.
Speaker 2: I'm on year two of the same pair that I
Speaker 2: run with every single day, like sweat rain. Great products.
Speaker 2: It's like small improvements.
Speaker 3: Right, It's not necessarily like revolutionizing hearing, but it's it's
Speaker 3: very very small improvements. Where As the other kind of big,
Speaker 3: big trend, which isn't necessarily like holly consumer based. It's
Speaker 3: kind of what these larger companies are trying to move towards.
Speaker 3: Is I feel like they're trying to replace friendship with
Speaker 3: this form of like technology and like AI enable technology.
Speaker 3: You used to have friends to get recommended new music.
Speaker 3: You used to have like friends to like tell you
Speaker 3: about new stuff that they're interested in.
Speaker 2: No longer.
Speaker 3: Now now you have an AI agent that.
Speaker 2: Can do that for you.
Speaker 3: You you don't need you don't need friends to help
Speaker 3: kind of talk about you know, you had you had
Speaker 3: a rough breakup. Instead, you can have a short term replacement.
Speaker 3: Using AI, you can have a friend replacement of a
Speaker 3: girlfriend replacement. It's all these things that are trying to
Speaker 3: like replace the core concept of friendship, even as like
Speaker 3: an as even as like a baby, even as a toddler.
Speaker 3: Your first friend doesn't need to be people you meet outside.
Speaker 3: It can be this little hovering robot you have in
Speaker 3: the living room that can also organize your fridge, tell
Speaker 3: you what to tell you what you'll roll around your
Speaker 3: house the middle of the night with with cameras and
Speaker 3: that could be your first friend. It's replacing the core
Speaker 3: concept of friendship. It's this move towards complete optimization of
Speaker 3: every aspect of human life, because as smooth as possible,
Speaker 3: that completely ignores like what it means to be human.
Speaker 2: It's the fast saying difference between that elder care robot
Speaker 2: el e Q, which was clearly a man with a
Speaker 2: tremendous amount of empathy trying to design a device to
Speaker 2: help people, and what I usually see with AI, which
Speaker 2: is trying to design a device to remove the need
Speaker 2: for human empathy. Like I went to a there was
Speaker 2: a VET app called Laika that's like chat GPT for veterinarians,
Speaker 2: and they were like, yeah, you know what, most of
Speaker 2: it we focused initially on like technical questions, so like
Speaker 2: if I have these symptoms, what can that mean? But
Speaker 2: what Vet's kept asking us is like, we would really
Speaker 2: like advice on how to talk to people that their
Speaker 2: pets are going to die. And I was like, do
Speaker 2: you are vetts not getting out of vet school because
Speaker 2: that's like that's a big part of being a vet,
Speaker 2: Like do they need chat GPT for this.
Speaker 3: I saw this other company that was like it was
Speaker 3: designed to help you get over the loss of your pet,
Speaker 3: where you could you could pump tons of photos of
Speaker 3: your pet AI into this AI generator and it will
Speaker 3: generate new images and this is proven to help you
Speaker 3: move on from loss. Which is literally a Nathan Fielder
Speaker 3: from like seven years ago, seven years ago, and like, no,
Speaker 3: you should talk with your friends about that. That's why
Speaker 3: you are a human. That's how you can move on
Speaker 3: from loss. You have to make new connections. Poorly AI
Speaker 3: generated images of your cat aren't going to help you
Speaker 3: move on, Like what why? Anyway, Replacing friendship is the
Speaker 3: thing that I see a lot of the tech world
Speaker 3: wanting to do, maybe because they don't really understand real
Speaker 3: human relationships that aren't like innately transactional. I'm not sure,
Speaker 3: but that is like a huge trend that I've seen
Speaker 3: multiple multiple people mention.
Speaker 7: All right, Zi, So I've worked in this industry for
Speaker 7: like three years now, and this is my first big convention,
Speaker 7: and I would say this is just affirmed pretty much
Speaker 7: all of my disillusions with the tech world, and most
Speaker 7: of it's just nonsense. And maybe the postive people are
Speaker 7: onto some stuff.
Speaker 2: Well you say that, but I really do think vera
Speaker 2: dox is gonna revolutionize the way in which mysterious fogs
Speaker 2: kill large numbers of Maybe, but don't name it something
Speaker 2: so sinister. Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, if you were to be like, this is the
Speaker 5: thing that keeps your apples fresh for a long time,
Speaker 5: that would be great.
Speaker 2: I would just don't call it apple fresh. Yes, but
Speaker 2: call it apple fresh.
Speaker 3: By the way, you should listen to You should listen
Speaker 3: to Better Offline to hear context for veradox, which we
Speaker 3: discussed in the last episode of our daily Cees coverage
Speaker 3: over there with the wonderful Edixitron. But essentially, evera dox
Speaker 3: is this missed. They get sprayed on produce, which allegedly
Speaker 3: helps it stay shelf stable for a few more days exactly.
Speaker 2: So maybe that shelf stable myst will also translate to
Speaker 2: waking up the dead.
Speaker 5: Possibly, But you don't know that it's gonna do. You
Speaker 5: don't know that it's not going to do right right areas.
Speaker 2: We as a journalist, that's sorry job to ask these questions.
Speaker 3: And we discussed that way more in depth on Better Offline.
Speaker 5: Yeah, we do discuss whether the ability to bring leaf
Speaker 5: led us back to life does have any repercussions in
Speaker 5: a pet cemetery sort of way for your possibly dead
Speaker 5: loved ones.
Speaker 2: David, it's me sorry. A lot of good points.
Speaker 5: I mean, I think Gary never both made the point
Speaker 5: about the sort of sociopathic like thread of a lot
Speaker 5: of this just sort of like an inability to understand
Speaker 5: not just what people might want from a technology, I think,
Speaker 5: which is to feel not I mean, there probably are
Speaker 5: people I imagine that. It's like if you were the guy,
Speaker 5: the dude that's like trying to age himself backwards. You know,
Speaker 5: he's like Brian Johnson, Brian Johnson, we love Brian, Yeah,
Speaker 5: but he like I feel like he would have been
Speaker 5: walking through this clapping his hands with delight.
Speaker 2: Day king his son's blood yeah, time for Yeah, it's
Speaker 2: a it's I drink his son's blood pretty Ray's And
Speaker 2: it's not bad the.
Speaker 5: High quality plot, but that it felt like it was
Speaker 5: that that there was a lot of this sort of
Speaker 5: like an optimization unto like trans sending being human at all.
Speaker 5: And I don't think I mean again, there probably are
Speaker 5: people that want that. They certainly have money. I don't
Speaker 5: imagine that I think what most people would like. I mean,
Speaker 5: then you don't expect technology to make you feel more human.
Speaker 5: But something I've been thinking.
Speaker 2: About a lot.
Speaker 5: We're talking about this a lot on a better offline,
Speaker 5: but there's a passivity that a lot of this sort
Speaker 5: of seems to be forcing onto people where you're just like,
Speaker 5: sort of things are happening to you that make your
Speaker 5: life more efficient and convenient. And I don't think that
Speaker 5: I want that. I mean, I'm older than and poorer
Speaker 5: than the you know, market that I think they're aiming
Speaker 5: for with this, But it's certainly old enough to remember,
Speaker 5: as you said, like finding music, like that's a thing
Speaker 5: that yeah, you know, your friends tell you about it.
Speaker 5: And in my case, I mean again just being in
Speaker 5: my middle age, you like go to a store and
Speaker 5: you flip through shit, like there's a distinction between finding
Speaker 5: something and being given something or being fed to something
Speaker 5: like you're a foa grag goose and it's just getting
Speaker 5: sort of piped into your brain and life and being.
Speaker 5: And I think it's an important distinction. I think that
Speaker 5: little bit of agency of having some sense of doing
Speaker 5: the things that you want to do, like I would
Speaker 5: imagine that well, I don't have to imagine technology that
Speaker 5: helps you do that as opposed to doing it for you.
Speaker 5: I think that I don't want stuff that makes me
Speaker 5: feel less human. I don't want stuff that makes me
Speaker 5: feel more like I'm in a fucking matrix pod. And
Speaker 5: I think that a lot of the stuff that was
Speaker 5: out there seemed targeted towards the matrix pod dwelling community.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I think that's that's about the best line we could
Speaker 2: go out on, Like, that's that's yeah, enailed it. Thanks.
Speaker 2: I thought I crushed that one. Yeah you did. You did,
Speaker 2: great job, Dave.
Speaker 3: Where can people find your work day?
Speaker 2: Defector dot com? Why let me do that without crushing
Speaker 2: my want? No, no, no, no, that's okay.
Speaker 3: Let me.
Speaker 2: That's a load bearing piece of content. Defector dot com
Speaker 2: is the website, and at.
Speaker 6: Big black Jack a bit on Twitter and blue Sky.
Speaker 6: This Machine Kills is my podcast. Tech Bubble dot com
Speaker 6: dot com is the newsletter.
Speaker 2: Hell yeah, do you want to tell people how to
Speaker 2: find you?
Speaker 4: Zi at New Old Woman on Twitter with okay zeros
Speaker 4: zeros for.
Speaker 2: Neo zeros All right, everybody, Well, uh, that's going to
Speaker 2: do it for us here at it could happen here
Speaker 2: and our week at CES. You know, just try to hug,
Speaker 2: hug your loved ones until the Vieried ox sweeps through
Speaker 2: all of their homes neighborhoods. Yeah, oh no, it's in
Speaker 2: the room. It's in the room.
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