Speaker 1: Good morning, Dan, sir.
Speaker 2: How are you doing today?
Speaker 1: I am doing very well. How you doing?
Speaker 2: Absolutely fantastic? And I'm gonna start it off and I
hope I'm not being freaky weird. But first of all,
I don't trust AI. But this this thing that happened
over the weekend in Iran, do you think AI technology
had anything to do with it?
Speaker 1: I mean, do I think AI technology had anything to
do with it? In what level?
Speaker 2: To make it so precise?
Speaker 1: You know, what I can say with more confidence is
that AI is absolutely being used to sway some decisions.
You know, people are able to generate videos that look
like it is actually of the scene people are and
it's just spam those all over the internet. So I'm
very confident saying that, regardless of you know, what is
actually happening, AI is absolutely going to be changing our
perception of what happens. And you see that all over
the news, all over the news.
Speaker 2: Well, I use said for show prep. And that's the
thing about it. I'm not stealing their words. I just
when I have a question, instead of going to eighteen
billion pages on Google, I'll just go to chat, GPT
and all of a sudden, it's all in one area.
Speaker 1: Mm hmm, yeah, you're playing with fire, my friend. Oh no,
you're playing with fire. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Because with chat GPT, I don't know if it's clickbait.
I don't know if I trust it.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, the really interesting thing about chat shabt or
any of these other large language models is from the
from the standpoint of somebody who's using it, they can
be confidently wrong. I mean, just so confidently wrong. You know.
I'll give you an example. I was thinking, you know,
it kills, which you know, I know, it sounds like
we're telling everybody don't use AI, don't use a computer,
or turn everything off. That's not what we're doing, right,
We've never advocated for that. But you know, I was
thinking about getting a new camera and I, you know,
just asked it, Hey, you know, balance, give me the
pros and cons of each of each of these models.
And it was telling me this camera has this really
important feature that I wanted, and I was thinking about
getting it. Come to find out, go look up, go
to get it. It doesn't have that extremely important feature.
It doesn't have it at all. And I almost spent
a couple thousand dollars on something that it doesn't have,
so yeah, you always have to check it and that's it.
That's on a good day that you can get away
with just checking something, and that there are people who
think of politicians even and numerous politicians have said this,
Oh yeah, I just use chat GYBT and it gives
me the answers. My friend, it does not give you
the answers. It's that's not how this stuff works good
at something's very bad.
Speaker 2: At others, you're giving us a full vision of what
we're missing. That's what I love about kill switch is
that you're saying, by the way, I'm gonna tap you
on the shoulder every time where I think you're you're
you're gonna need an education here, and you're just so
open and transparent.
Speaker 1: Dude, Well, you know we The thing is, there things
that we don't know. And when I say we, I
mean there are things that you know, society doesn't know,
you know, the non you know, technical people don't know.
But there are things, quite frankly that even the people
who make chat GPT don't fully understand why chat GPT
does some things. And if you sit them down and
you ask them why is it doing this? They don't know.
That is kind of scary, and we should all be
very open about that. That, hey, on the technology, and
there's some things we don't understand, but there's also some
open questions. You know, would we like for AI to
be helping police arrest people? That that's not necessarily a
yes or no question for everybody, but we should be
aware that it's happening, which a lot of people aren't
aware that it's happening. It's not science fiction. This is
happening right now. And okay, how should this be used?
Should AI be used in quote unquote solving crime? And
we're not the general public is not being allowed into
those conversations and a kill switch, we say, nope, we
need to be involved in those We should know what's happening.
We have the right to know.
Speaker 2: How do you feel though, when people say you've just
got to live with AI? Sometimes I feel like that
we're being dumbed and down. It's like, because I love
to do research, I love to make sure that my
spelling is correctly, but it's like, why am I having
a problem with spelling because I'm being dumbed down?
Speaker 1: You know, it's funny you mentioned that an MIT study
just came out. I think last week that said that
relying on AI can potentially reduce your ability for critical thinking.
Oh boy, I mean think about it. It's it's like,
you know, it's like doing push ups. If if you
do you know, if you do a couple push ups,
you know, a day or something like that, and then
just for a year, you never you don't lift anything
at all, and then try and then you need to
do a push up. You can have a really hard
time doing push ups. Same thing. Your brain is a muscle.
You know, if I can speak metaphorically, if you're used
to making decisions about what kind of camera should I buy?
Should I let my kid eat you know, these fruit
snacks or eat this cake or eat this apple? Should
I say this to my boss or not say this
to my boss? And you leave all that to the computer.
Then one day when you're not buy a computer or
something else and you need to make a decision, you're
gonna have a harder time making that decision. So these
are societal things that we don't necessarily really think about.
Where you know, this isn't is a computer? You know,
is the computer going to go full sky Net and
destroy of all of us? Okay? You know let's leave
that for a little bit in the future. This stuff
is having effects on us right now.
Speaker 2: Two major stories came out this weekend with AI technology
firmly attached to them. Number one, the book that copied
the other author and all of a sudden, people are going,
what is going on here because now it's got book
talk and TikTok can trouble. And number two, the Tesla
taxi that's not like all over the dang news, that's AI.
Speaker 1: Mm hmmm. Yeah. And again this is this is one
of those things where I think we're being told, oh, yes,
by we're being told that listen, it's here, it's always
going to be here, deal with it. And that's not
actually that's not actually the case. That's not actually the case.
We we still have the ability to make decisions about
how much involvement we want the AI to have in
our lives. You know, maybe a robotaxi is a great idea,
or maybe better wages for drivers is a great idea,
or maybe more train lines is a great idea. I
don't know, you tell me these No, I just gave
you three options. Maybe there's ten options, but the idea
and maybe those three options that I gave you all
sound great or all sound bad to you. But the
idea here is that these are all decisions that we
can make, and what's happening is be a little flipping here.
There's this As a society, we've gotten used to this
idea that there's a small group of nerds in Silicon Valley.
And you know, I'm not being mean here, me being
nerd myself. You know, growing up a nerd, you know
what I mean. I bought my first computer as soon
as I could, and I was programming, man, you know
all this other stuff. Man, that's me. But we've gotten
used to this idea that there's a small group of
nerds in Silicon Valley who handle all the computer stuff.
You do the computer stuff, I'll just look at what
you do on my phone, or when you release something,
I'll use it, Or that some politicians get to make
choices about what we do with our lives as respect
to technology, and that's not the case at all. We
get to make these decisions. We either people who use
these things or who use us for our data. We
make these decisions too. But we need to be informed
about what's happening.
Speaker 2: I'm a face to person if you can't give me
face to face time. We're not doing it. And you know,
because those things when I get on the phone and
all of a sudden, I'm talking to an AI voice,
I can't do it.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, oh, and you know, and we'd kind of
being sold that. No, No, you'll get used to it.
You'll get used to it. And that's the thing. People.
People are humans that are an amazingly adaptive species. We
will get used to almost anything. Have you been in
a way mo, No, Oh my gosh. So you know
you know what I'm talking about, right, the same thing robotaxis. Right,
I've been in one. You would be shocked. So I
didn't want to get in, you know, full disclosure. So
you know, I was in San Francisco and some friends
wanted to get in, and you know, I had to
get in with them. We're going to some bar or
something like that, and okay, I get in and it
went from in about two minutes, it went from this
is really weird to I forgot that there wasn't somebody driving.
Speaker 2: Oh my god.
Speaker 1: Humans are such an adaptive species that something that seemed
like magic five minutes ago will just seem normal to us.
That being said, the things that are being sold to us,
the things that are being pushed on us by you know, Frankly, again,
when I say pushed on us, it's a This is
not a government that is doing this, is not an
organization of like minded people. This is you know, these
are companies that stand to make some money. Is this
something we want? And if it is something we want,
how should it be used? It doesn't necessarily have to
be used in the way that Meta wants us to
use it, or Google wants us to use it, or
the makers of chat GBT open a I want us
to use it. Perhaps there's other ways to use these possibilities,
these technologies, but we should be able to make those decisions.
Speaker 2: Scary stuff here, scary stuff. We'll be back with Dexter
Thomas Junior. Coming up next. The name of the podcast
is kill Switch. We are back with Dexter Thomas Junior.
I got to tell you how freaky this day has
been in the way that not even thirty minutes ago,
I was with George Takai, who's talking about everything Star Trek,
and all of a sudden, I'm having this conversation with you,
and I'm going, holy crap, Star Trek could actually be real.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: It's like, you know, it's so bizarre that it's It's
like on Star Trek it was always about the future,
and you're you're talking about that's where we're going, dude.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, you know, I mean, think about it. When
when George k was on, I mean, shout out to him, man,
I mean amazing you get to talk to him. You know,
the future sounded like a great place. Yeah, I mean
think about that. Think about Jetson's. I mean, Jetson's was
kind of a parody, but we got everything but except
for the flying cars now, but it sounded great. The
future sounded really cool and it was optimistic. Now, ask
almost any about the future and they're scared out of
their minds. Yep, yep. Yeah. And I can tell you why.
It's not because AI specifically, it's not because of computers
or whatever. Specifically, it's because we feel like we don't
have control, and largely it has been taken away from
us because we've allowed, again say it again, a small
group of nerds in Silicon Valley to make some decisions.
And it doesn't have to be like that.
Speaker 2: I did some research on uncertainty and The reason why
we many of us are are uncertain is because we're
trying to get back to a past that we would
like to rewrite. And so when you say that we're
afraid of the future, of course we are because we
don't know what's what's up there. We would rather live
in the past that we already know.
Speaker 1: Mm hmmm, m m. Yeah. I think that makes a
lot of sense. And I think there was there was
also a time, you know, when we were you know,
think of the night, you know, think of how we
were so into futuristic stuff. You know, there was a
little there was the Y two K thing, you know,
the Y two K, but we were a little scared
about that. But you know, think about how music videos
look back then. It's oh, everything's silver and shiny. We're
going to be in space and you know, we're gonna
be able to talk to each other using computers. We
do that now and we all kind of resent it,
you know, and yet no, but I think you're totally correct. Yeah.
Speaker 2: One of the scariest things with AI recently happened a
month ago, and that is I was at this big
retirement party and they played a song that sounded so
amazingly perfect in the way that it was very frank
Natra and I said, I went up to the person,
I said, who is that actually singing? Nobody? It's a computer.
It was AI generated And it scared the bejeebi's at
me because that I was so convinced that that was
a great piece of music.
Speaker 1: Mm hmmm, yeah, you know. And again this is somewhere
where I'm really encouraging us to think about what role
do we want technology to have our lives. For some people,
having fake AI music is totally fine, They're totally cool
with that. For other people that it's it's almost blasphemy, right,
that freaks me out. That freaks me out somebody who
loves electronic music, I love techno. I kind of still
want my techno made by a person. Yeah, you know
what I mean. I kind of still you know, I
want I want those decisions to be made by Well,
I wonder why they did this, Why did they use
that weird little, you know, squeaky sound in there, that
really buzz sound. That's really interesting. There's some human about it,
but we're I think if we look back at today,
ten years in the future, fifty years in the future,
we will think of this period right now, right now,
this period that we're living through, as a turning point,
and what decisions did we make? And you know, not
to throw the name of the podcast out here, but
are there some things that we need to throw the
kill switch on? And kill switch is you know, being
a technical term, but you know it sounds like exactly
what it is. Do we need to shut the system
down for just a second, rethink this and maybe do
something else. Again, I'm not telling people don't use AI ands.
As a matter of fact, I've interviewed plenty of people
about AI and none of them have said AI is
universally bad, don't ever use it. Nobody's saying that just
maybe we need to pause, maybe we need to hit
you know, maybe reset and think about this.
Speaker 2: Would you say that we're living in a beatless moment
when it comes to AI?
Speaker 1: Ooh Beatles' moment? What sense?
Speaker 2: Maaning? Our lives are going to change, just like they
changed when the Beatles came out? I mean everything changed?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Oh, I mean, you know this is one of
those things where I think Beatles plus Michael Jackson plus
James Brown plus I mean, you know, the Beethoven at
all of it, right, and not necessarily because we are
it's going to advance our ability to solve certain diseases,
which is possible, very possible. Actually, not just because it
will take jobs, which is possible. That's also possible, but
also because it's kind of starting to warp our perception
of reality any news event. I mean, I'll just put
it like this, I would. I'm in Los Angeles, as
you know. There have been a lot of protests here, yep.
And I've I've been out there with the camera every
day as a journalist documenting it, and I have seen
and I've posted videos, Hey, here's what I saw, Here's
what I saw, and look at this. But I've also
seen people posting videos that look very realistic. They're also
much more dramatic than my videos, you know, showing police
and protesters beating each other up, fires in the background,
really dramatic stuff didn't happen AI generated. But it's more exciting.
And there are a lot of people who believe that
or want to believe it, and those images are the
ones that travel further. Is this okay? I don't know.
Speaker 2: You tell me, don't you think that you're lifting the
game of journalism in what you're doing today, because I mean,
there's so many Edward R. Morrow. I mean, it's like,
this is like I would love to see what his
reaction would be if he were here today to find
out what people like yourself are doing. You're heading to
the soul of a story.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, I mean again, the real big thing
here and the thing that frustrates me about tech reporting
and technology reporting in general, is we again we've allowed
ourselves to feel like we're not allowed to participate. And
I'm just trying to bring the audience. You don't bring
people back into it. You understand what I mean. I mean,
I'll put it like this. My grandma just turned ninety yesterday.
Called her on her birthday, and if I make an
episode that she doesn't understand, she will call me and
yell at meh. And so my grandma understands everything. You know.
Let me give you my grandma some credit, like she's
very sharp, super smart. But I fully expect anybody to
be able to understand what we make because I think
that's a duty that we have. I think, you know,
it's my duty as a host of the show, but
I think also it's a duty as people and I
just want to make sure that we are all involved,
we all understand. So just in the way that you
read about the economy, and if you read an article
about the economy and you think, ah, there's something wrong here,
I don't understand it. Part of that is, you know,
on the reporting, or part of that is you should
be able to understand it. You should be able to
understand the article about politics. We shouldn't allow people to
tell us you don't understand technology, leave it alone. No,
we all, we all have the right to understand. And
that same approach that's taken in every other angle of journalism,
every other place. Technology is no exception. We all have
the right to understand how this affects our lives.
Speaker 2: So when you're out there getting the story, how do
you put it in line? In because I mean, the
one thing that that aka come to you as a
brilliant idea today and then and you're going, oh my god,
I still have seven or eight episodes before this one.
How do you have you can relate with me? Can't
you that you? Yes, I mean I could bust the
door open right now, but it has to wait.
Speaker 1: Mm hmm. You know, I mean for this at least
for kill switch, right. We we actually we focus somewhat
on being timely, but not as much as some other places.
My hope is for people to be able to come
back to an episode in a year even and it
still feels relevant.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it does.
Speaker 1: For an example, I mean the most recent one. Again,
speaking of the protests, a lot of people were not
aware that there were predator drones flying over Los Angeles.
And predator drones if you've for your audiences, who's heard
this before, if you've heard of a predator drone, those
are the same things that are used for military strikes
in the Middle East, and the same technology. Now, granted
we have no reason to believe that these things were
actually armed or carrying missiles. Very probably unarmed, but the
same technology was was flying over and watching the protests.
But the government and you know, border patrolled home security
were not telling anybody that they were flying these things.
Some independent researchers had to figure this out by looking
at you know, they were flying the strange hexagonal pattern
over two areas of Los Angeles where the protests were. Now,
maybe you think it's a great idea for these things
to be monitored, or maybe you feel a little bit
weird that military hardware is being used to watch again, everybody.
This includes protesters, this includes business owners, This includes somebody
who says, you know what, I don't believe the news.
I want to go and just watch for myself. I
met lots of those people. Everybody was being watched. Are
you comfortable with that? For some people this is great.
For other people, they feel a little odd. We should know, though, Yeah,
this is going to be this is going to be
a story in six months, in a year, and so
I try to make something where okay, what can I
make that is still going to feel relevant in a
little while. That add to the conversation.
Speaker 2: You've got to come back to this show anytime in
the future. I love where your heart is, dude.
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, I would love to. I can talk
about this stuff all day because again, it's you know,
it sounds like technology, but really at the heart of
it it is it's about people, and it's about our
decisions and our right to make these decisions. I'd love to.
Speaker 2: Will you'd be brilliant today.
Speaker 1: Okay, hey you as well. Thank you so much.