What did you say? AI, will it kill your parents?
AI, will it kill your parents? Yeah. You know, there was a time when that question wouldn't make any sense, but sadly it does
in the year 2023.
Because AI has been crazy. There's been a lot of tech news happening this year and we're going to talk about it
on this episode of Talk Linked With Who You! Riley Murdock.
No, that's me. Okay. Jessica Peugeot.
Jessica Peugeot, you're the WAN writer. I am the WAN writer and this is probably the first time listeners have heard how my
last name is pronounced and I'm sorry, we had to break it to you this way.
I mean, how else would you say it? Peugeot. People usually say Peugeot.
Peugeot. You're the WAN writer, but you also write TechLinked.
Yes. And GameLinked. And GameLinked.
And Tech Quicky. And Tech Quicky. Yes.
You've got your hands in all the pots now. I am multifaceted. I think there was a rumor before my name was released because I tended to jokingly put
my name in the credits as various AI.
Yes. I think there was a rumor that I was actually an AI experiment because I just kept showing
up in so many different video series. Maybe we all are.
Who knows? Brains and vats, etc. Honestly, this year has made me question absolutely everything.
We're going to go through our favorite stories of the year or sort of, we're going to talk
about Jessica's first year here at LMG and cover some of our, you know, the stories that
really got us thinking. Now this episode, we're recording it the week before, but it's going to go up on Wednesday,
December 27th, two days after our Christmas special. So if you want a proper big roundup of all the tech stories of the year and you didn't
see that we released a Christmas special, go see that. But this is more of a casual situation.
Jessica, how's it been? Had you tried to keep up with the tech news cycle in the way that you have had to this
year before? Not like this. No.
Like there was always things I kept up with. There's little trends that I would note.
But if you want to know my previous experience following the news timeline, I learned about
Bitcoin in early 2012, went, huh, that's interesting.
It didn't pay attention to it again until 2019.
There's always just been a lot of stuff that just passes me by because I wasn't specifically
interested. Yeah. I mean, crypto, that's fair, honestly.
When people missed the whole crypto hype and then crash, it was only a few years.
To me, it started here and it ended here. Everything in between that, there might have been an up, there might have been a down.
To me, it was a straight line. Yeah. Well, okay.
It's not fair to say that, sorry, I just said a second ago that it was only a few years.
But really, crypto started way back early 2010s or maybe before that anyways.
But they really started gaining hype around 2012, 13 and stuff.
Then it kind of like laid dormant and then it spiked in the last few years and just in
time for it to kind of fall out of favor. I mean, last year, I rewatched some of our Christmas specials in preparation for this
years and one of the main stories last year was how crypto basically just fell off the
map. At the beginning of 2022, a bunch of companies were still doing stuff with it.
They announced integrations with it, a lot of gaming companies in particular.
Then by the end of the year, they had all kind of canceled it. Yeah.
I remember WealthSimple sending me an email a year and a half ago about their crypto
integration. Yeah. Well, it's still integrated in a lot of things.
I don't want to say that it's dead. It's not. It's absolutely not.
But in terms of its mainstream. For the average person, crypto was fast.
Yeah. Yeah. Crypto was very fast.
It was a flash in the pan. But it was replaced by AI, which is like the hugest thing this year.
But way bigger hype. Before we get there, how was it keeping up with everything?
You said that you were aware of some things before, but was there a breakneck speed?
Because I've been doing this for 10 years, so I want to hear what it was like for you.
It was a lot of reading stuff and not knowing if it was important or not, because sometimes
you'd read something and you're like, that sounds really important.
And then Riley would go, yeah, they always do that. Yeah, this is actually the sixth time.
Or I'd read something and I'm just like, that doesn't seem important at all.
And Riley would be like, this is game changing.
And I'm like, really? Yeah. Yeah.
I just, a big part of the issue is not that I didn't understand what was happening, but
I did not have the right amount of context to understand what people considered important.
Yeah. It was always hard, especially when you're writing for WAN Show.
And with TechLink, we do our best, but WAN Show, we are preparing things.
And before you came on, the whole writing team kind of worked together on it, but I
was curating the topics. And now this is your burden.
And it is a struggle to kind of guess what Linus and Luke will particularly find interesting,
as opposed to what we think maybe the broad tech audience on YouTube will find interesting.
Sometimes I feel like I have a Ouija board, or I have a crystal ball.
And I'm just going like, okay, well, this is objectively important, but I don't know.
We have a little spreadsheet set up, and I think I've gotten a lot better at guessing,
but it's still, sometimes I will get it back from Linus, and I will be baffled by what
returns to me. I'm like, you want to talk about that? That's a main story to you.
Yeah, yeah. Okay, because I thought maybe I'd have to write three lines on that.
Yeah, we'll put something in there. We'll be like, this is the biggest news of the week.
You guys need to talk about this for half an hour. He's like, eh. World changing.
I want to talk about this final fantasy bug that's really annoying me.
But to your point a second ago about like having the context, it is tough because we
hired you and we hired Jacob close to a year ago.
Yes. You guys have been, you know, getting on the team and becoming embedded and like gaining
that kind of context that I've had for a while.
And it's, yeah, it's a whole process. Admittedly, I no longer find myself googling, what is red green team?
Yeah, exactly. Question mark?
Yeah. But I want to say honestly that the difference between you and your like kind of ambient
knowledge for some of this stuff. The difference between you now and between you, like when you started is so vast.
Like now I'll just talk about a tech thing and you'll just be like, yeah, you know.
Oh, I am a sponge. You're up on it. I am a serious sponge.
That was kind of what James said to me when he hired me was like, you obviously don't
have the background, but you're smart. You'll figure it out. I'm like, what does that mean?
Oh, hold on a second. I'm rethinking things here.
Yeah. You didn't pick up on that? Okay.
I'm like, that sounds ominous. Am I in danger? Don't worry.
You'll be fine. Swim. Yeah.
So, I mean. I do tend to have a pretty good grasp of technology.
It's just that most of the technology I'm interested in was invented before everyone was currently
alive was born. Right. Because prior to your job here, you did write blog posts.
Absolutely. About and you did deep dives. On history topics.
Yeah. Which involves technology a lot of times. Which absolutely involves technology.
Yeah, for sure. Which is I think why, I mean, I've loved your Techquickie scripts.
I think that you do a deep dive and you make them funny.
You're a stand-up comedian in case anyone doesn't know. I'm currently sitting, but you know, you just gotta imagine me like two feet up.
That's the kind of jokes we're looking for. You can look forward to.
I cannot tell the kind of jokes that I tell on stage in this context.
Jacob wrote a sit-stand joke into today's tech link, just like, they will not stand
for that. But if you want to sit for that. This just reminds me of the time when like you were, I heard you across the room, like
I was finishing up a joke for tech link and I heard you all across the room telling Jacob
off for having two jokes in one script that were about shoving objects in someone's butt.
As I was finishing a joke about shoving objects in people's butts.
I mean, hey, it's a funny place of the body.
You know, like it's a. It's inherently humorous. I mean, what do you have?
What are you supposed to do? Not make jokes about it? But simmer, right?
So on that note, yeah, let's talk about our favorite tech stories this year.
For me, it's it's definitely one of the biggest ones and one of my favorites is AI just because
I've been doing my darndest this year to make some progress on a tech longer about it.
And it's been very, very, very difficult to long road to find the to find the time to
do it. But I've been like saving so many links. It's crazy.
Yeah. How do you feel about AI? Is it is it going to be the end of humanity?
Is it going to be the bright optimistic future?
I think the truth is somewhere in between. I know, I know.
But of course, that's why you're presenting the dichotomy.
There's been a lot of both euphoria and hysteria about AI.
I think it's genuinely incredibly cool. It really is.
It's incredibly cool. But the danger is that there are people who think that in the same way as people thought
about crypto. Exactly. And I feel like a lot of people's reaction and this is I was talking earlier about
grifters, a lot of people's reaction to whatever is drawing the most attention in a
media space is just to immediately just try to like pick it up like it's a piggy bank
and try to shake money out of it. Yeah.
Regardless of why, regardless of there's no real thought behind it.
And I feel like that's a lot of the current danger about AI.
Like I'm not really worried about human extinction at this point.
I am worried about people throwing away people's jobs because they think they can
replace them with what is essentially an advanced auto correct.
Well, I'm worried about people, you know, just
feeling like flooding the zone of conversation with like AI slurry and that causing
like downstream problems for basic communication.
Yeah. I mean, that's the issue, though, is that you just compared like the risk of extension.
Like you're not worried about that. You're worried about the money thing.
And I think that unfortunately the people trying to commercialize it is what could
lead to the extension. I mean, it's so interesting because we're doing it to ourselves.
Yeah. I'm not worried about the AI. I'm worried about the people using it.
What's what's a tool is a tool. What's a hammer is a hammer.
I mean, yeah. And thankfully, they're not at the level of like being actual autonomous agents
right now. They are just tools and it's unclear if they will ever get to the point where
they could be described as like an autonomous agent in the in the way you
think of like a sci-fi robot being like we don't know if the Hal 9000 thing.
Is currently possible. Yeah. I mean, there are no, there are some things that have been made.
We reported on auto GPT at some point in the middle of the year where they could
string along a few chatbots that kind of like you give it an overarching goal and
then it self prompts itself along towards that goal.
But I think that recently it being able to create other smaller versions of
itself, that was crazy. That was a crazy reason story where like AIs can give birth to other AIs.
Yeah. And then we put them in our shoes. We'll link to the episode for that so you have more context.
But yeah, what's so one of the most interesting things to me about the AI
thing about the AI whole spectacle is the fact that open AI, their whole mission
statement from the beginning was to not be a commercial entity.
Exactly. They were like, we're not going to go down the commercial route.
We're just going to do research. Science. Yeah.
And we're going to do research so that we can stop the bad commercial people who
are going to screw up the world and then we'll be able to stop them.
They are the people who put this thing out into the, like chat GPT was the
impetus for all of this. And it was open AI, the company who has said that they would protect the world.
But, you know, and you could make an argument that like, okay, AI is too
powerful for one company to control. So they had to get it out there so that people could like see what's happening
and do stuff with it and all this, all this stuff. But open AI is not doing it open source.
They're doing it proprietary. Exactly. Meta is doing open source stuff.
There's a lot of good, interesting stuff going on in the open source community.
I mean, Mistral is, is, is pretty close to, like it's behind Claude, which is
just behind chat GPT. But like, I don't know.
That, so like to your point about the, the, the conflict between those two
drives, there is that conflict, but it's also so complicated because the, the
companies that are saying that they're here to protect us are the companies who are trying to commercialize it.
So, and commercial interests, they, it's kind of like a whirlpool.
Like it has its own gravity. It has its own momentum.
It sucks you towards it, whether you like it or not, whatever your original
intentions were. Yeah. Let's talk about the sort of the details of AI a little bit.
Like how, how long did it take you, it took me a long time to wrap my head
around the idea that this is like a neural network.
Like do you, let's, let's, let's get into the deep stuff.
Do you think it'll ever be conscious? I like to think that that's plausible.
Like there's a part of me that finds that very compelling as an idea.
I think because of how important like sci-fi writers have been writing about
the idea of autonomous agents, like iRobot, like all of this, these ideas,
this grand cultural weight of the idea of like, what if we could create life?
What if human beings could create a consciousness that is analogous to ourselves?
Right. Now, to be clear, I don't actually think it's that plausible that we will
create something that is like human beings. No, I, I don't think that's, I think I agree.
I think it's fundamentally different.
Yeah. We might create like a super intelligent, crazy, like a thousand years from now.
Possible, plausible even, but it's not going to be like us.
Yes. It's not going to be analogous to us. The thing is, I would never feel comfortable saying no, it will never happen.
Right. I think that is a fundamentally arrogant, like intellectually dishonest position to take.
Yeah. You can say that it's unlikely. Honestly, that it's nowhere near in the near future, but not no.
Yeah. Honestly, I completely go back and forth. I'm like, I think at the beginning, I was like, it's not conscious.
It's just the whatever. And then like, I saw some stuff and I was like, whoa, this is actually pretty crazy.
And I look at it structurally, you're like, this is structurally very, very similar
to the way that neurons work in the human brain. But then it's like, oh, there's all these levels of complexities that, you know,
it's like this is a computer. It's not like a physical like neuron with a myelin sheath and everything.
Like there's so many complex interactions that we don't even understand the brain.
And now we're suddenly doing psychology on computers. See, that was exactly what I was thinking.
I would like to just thank you just now. It's just like, we don't even understand why we are conscious.
Yeah, exactly. We like, that's an emergent property of our brains.
Yeah. We like, you cannot point to the spot in the brain where consciousness lives.
Right. You don't know. We don't know where our personalities are. It's right up front here.
We know where our sight is. It's in the back. We do not know why we have a sense of self.
Exactly. We may never. We may never. Like we are trying to understand something that is exactly as complicated as our own
brains with our own brains. Yeah.
Yeah. So in terms of like, I think, I think the thing that was easiest for, because like
it was wild at first, looking at some of this stuff, I think the kinds of comparisons
that helped me the most was like, like it's, it's using it.
This is a very advanced form of pattern recognition.
Oh yeah. Like that's what this thing is doing. And like, it kind of reminds me a lot of like the hallucinations and like odd behavior.
Oh my gosh. Yeah. That like Sydney coming out, it just, it's just so obvious that we trained AI on like
LLMs on the internet because it just got so emotional.
It's just like, we've created life and given it a personality disorder.
Immediately. I was trying to find the articles from the, the contemporary discussion of it.
I'm not sure what you mean by that. The, the articles that came out at the time.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I was, I was trying to find articles from the time when like people found out about
Sydney, the code name that like Bing Chat had.
And I was trying to find the articles where they, or where Sydney came up with other
personalities. Yes. There were like multiple personas.
Yeah. Somebody asked Sydney like, who else is in there with you or whatever.
And they, she, he, it's, I don't know, described all these different personalities.
And I'm like, what? That was wild. That was in the early days.
Very early days. And part of the issue, it reminds me. And by early days, I mean like March.
March. It's a, this has moved so fast. It's wild.
It's just a whole new reality. And part of the issue is it reminds me of the problem you get when you are like,
this is a problem with children trying to like discuss like crimes when they're
witnesses to something, because you can end up in a situation where the adult is
just kind of like trying to get a specific answer out of the kid.
And like the kid just doesn't know what they want. So just starts responding to what's getting a reaction.
Yeah. That's what I feel like a lot of the weirdest stuff that AI does.
Comes out where it's just, it's a mirror.
Yeah. Yeah. It is feeding us back what we're responding to.
Yeah. I think a turning point for me thinking about AI and what it means and how it works
and stuff was when people started, like there was the initial wave of hype.
And obviously, you know, I didn't get fully swept into all this.
I think like I keep kind of a more detached like skeptical stance on it.
But I have to follow the story as it's like developing.
So there were people who were like, it's alive.
And then sometime after that, sentiments that got more prevalent were people
saying this kind of thing where it's like the AI is saying crazy stuff because
we're asking it to say crazy stuff. We're like, we're it's a mirror.
Yes. And so, you know, we are responding most to when it is craziest.
Yeah. Yeah. Now I want to, I would love for this whole thing to be about AI, but we
should probably mention some other stories that we enjoyed this year.
I have so many, but they're all very odd. Yeah.
Well, I mean, those are the perfect ones. I love the really odd ones.
What's what's an odd one? I absolutely lost my mind when there was a proton port of ChexQuest.
Do you mean that like it was hilarious to you that someone went out of their way
to like ensure that the ChexQuest had support for proton?
Yes. The emulation layer between Linux and Windows games.
Absolutely. That was magical to me.
I love people's odd little projects. Yeah, you did a whole segment and WAN recently.
Yeah. And it went over pretty well with the branded retro branded games.
Yeah, retro branded games. I feel like there's a lot of culture and this is coming from me as someone
who really loves history. A lot of the cult like we get this idea that past cultures were far more serious
than we are, but the problem is it's a survivorship bias thing.
There's a lot of garbage that we just threw out because it was garbage.
But it's kind of magical when some of that stuff survives into the present
and you get to get a glimpse into like this is what we were making 20 years ago.
Oh, man. Yeah. I love ad for games for that reason.
Like really, really old advertisements. Like I don't like modern ads at all, but like really old quirky advertisements
are hilarious to me. That's what that's one thing that's amazing about the Internet is the fact
that you can find that stuff. And yeah, sometimes when I'm researching a story, I'll go and look for stuff
that happened, you know, early 2000s or whatever. And all the a lot of the time, I mean, some of it's being deleted.
There was a whole story about, what was it? CNET started like deleting their old articles off the Internet.
Deleting their old articles because for SEO reasons.
And like every SEO expert was like, no, don't do that.
Yeah. For the most part, a lot of the old stuff is still there.
So you can go and do a Google search and it's like a weird experience
going on a forum, you know, chat boards or whatever from like early 2000s
and seeing how people wrote. It's like you can tell cultural differences.
It's like digging into the archives, you know, in like one of these movies
where they do research or whatever. I feel like I'm I feel like I'm in another world or it's like it's 20 years ago.
You're just in there like Indiana Jones snooping on their little forum posts.
Yeah. Trying to grab an interesting snippet and then run away.
And then run away. Yeah. Well, that's how I felt when I was digging through like I found a huge archive
of like like stuff that had never originally been on the Internet.
It was uploaded in January 2002.
And it was news articles from the early aughts and and the late 90s.
Wow. And I thought that stuff was amazing. Apparently Amazon was engaging in union busting.
So weird. Wild. What a different time than today.
Microsoft was being investigated for antitrust. Oh, man, I got to say one of my favorite stories.
Will technology kill us all? It was very fun in early 2000.
Silly concerns they had at the time. I got to say one of my favorite stories this year was, you know, I OK.
I'll say it's my favorite. It's one of my favorite stories, but it's also one where I'm starting to kind of
be like, hmm, I don't know if this is a good thing. All the antitrust action by governments.
Obviously, we had the Epic Games sued against Apple a couple of years ago.
And now Google this year, that happened as well. But like EU put a lot of their legislation into effect.
Apple actually launched an iPhone with USBC this year.
They announced plans to allow side loading and other app stores.
I think that's I think they have to do that by next year. I have to look it up, but they'll be doing it at some point.
We got this whole beeper versus Apple with the iMessage compatibility thing
that's kind of opening up just now. But the reason it makes me be like, hmm, hold on a second.
Is is the fact that like a lot of this is happening because of government regulation.
Yes. And I think that I think that I'm wary of a turning point in which
we've been reporting on all this EU stuff happening. We're like, yeah, get Apple, make Apple open up their platform, et cetera, et cetera.
Yeah. And I'm worried that there's going to be a tipping point where the EU's
like their regulations start rubbing us the wrong way. Yeah, well, because they just keep going.
And part of the problem is that like I think we've seen through a lot of our
reporting where a lot of people's reporting is just like
often regulators don't understand technology very well.
And often this is often we're very skeptical about like Apple
jumping on and support of like right to repair legislation.
May personally, I find that very optimistic. One, it shows a turning point.
It shows that they see that as the winning team. But also I do want Apple to actually be at that table.
I do want them to be at that table because they will know when it starts going too far.
You know, will they? I mean, I don't know. That's a hard thing.
But like it's one of those things where you can never really predict like at this
moment, you can never really predict at this moment what things are going to look
like in five years, what's going to go too far, what's going to have these
unintended consequences. So what I would prefer is a balance between different powers.
Like this kind of like shaky back and forth, I feel is mostly a good thing.
It's like that Churchill quote, you know, it's the work.
Democracy is the worst possible form of government, except all the other ones
that have tried. Yeah, yeah. Like I do.
Well, hold on. You're not taking a stance here. I mean, I'm just imagining comments.
That's all my stance is that I would prefer no one to have complete
sovereignty over me. Oh, yeah. And I feel like most people would agree with that.
Regardless of like where they specifically fall, hot take, unless,
unless it's a, you know, hyperintelligence supreme AI overlord who knows what's best
for you. I for one, welcome our new Sydney overlords.
I just, I don't like anybody having too much power. So I would like a little bit of back and forth.
One of the big things for me was YouTube.
Okay, both the crackdown on ad blockers and the earlier, I feel like at this
point, mostly in the background, um, crackdowns on vulgarity, yeah, and like
there's always that uncomfortable relationship between advertisers,
like the people who are mostly financing these platforms and the basic
reality that vulgarity is a normal part of human communication.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's how it is. Yeah, that was really interesting.
That whole, uh, changing their, their, uh, terms or not terms and conditions,
but their, their guidelines, their ad friendly guidelines, um, at the end of,
yeah, at the end of 2022, but that story kind of like broke more, uh, like it
happened in, in November, 2022. And then it broke more early this year.
And yeah, that was only the start. YouTube had a crazy year.
As you say, they, they're like fighting ad block, many ad blockers are broken,
although now many of them are working again, but that war has gotten more
intense than ever this year. And they also added tests like that.
Well, actually 1080p premium, 10, 1080p premium on YouTube is not a test anymore.
It's just a, it's a thing. They launched it. I guess their test went okay.
People didn't really complain about it. They said specifically that it's not degrading the non premium experience.
It's only that the premium people get better, which I guess you have to take
your word for it unless you do some crazy testing. I haven't heard any complaints.
So maybe it's fine. Um, shorts started getting revenue this year.
They did. Uh, what else? Oh, there was one more. The ads, they started doing these experiments.
Another test they were doing was that like front loading, like 10 ads in front
of a video instead of like spacing it out. People did not like that.
So they haven't launched that, but yeah, YouTube has changed a lot.
I think one thing that I want to, I want to end on this, um, because I've
completely forgot about this until I started looking through the stories for the Christmas special.
Do you remember the Chinese spy balloon? Yeah.
Yeah, right? I was like, what? That was this year. That was this year.
I completely forgot about it. The world was going nuts for a second.
Yeah, we were, we were losing our minds. Yeah. They shot down one.
They shot, yeah, they shot it down. They, yeah, there was a couple.
Oh yeah. Yeah. That got shot out down over Canada.
Really? Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. Like the Canadian government had to give them permission to fly into our
airspace in case you couldn't tell. I haven't finished the Techland Christmas special.
So we're like reacting to finding out about this stuff for the second time, you
know, for the first time, if that makes sense. Uh, so this will be a, uh, whole proper roundup in the Techland Christmas
special, which you probably have already seen maybe if, if that came out on a Monday.
Anyways, it's also been a rough year for physical media.
Oh yeah. Wait, what do you mean? Oh, the dropping of DVDs and CDs and various stores.
Well, best, yeah, they best buy announced plans to drop it next year.
Yes. Uh, and, uh, Netflix will no longer be sending DVDs in the mail, which is
just devastating for me.
I actually was one of the original users of the, uh, the Netflix, uh, mailing
system. I remember that way back. Wow. No, I never, I never used that.
I heard about it. Oh, gee, Netflix, where they sent it to the mail.
Yeah. I used Blockbuster right up until it died.
I wasn't about to use that newfangled DVD and mailing.
Yeah. Well, I always lived in the woods. So.
And don't you live in the woods, watch Techlington, GameLink, etc.
that are going to keep you happening. That's the end of this episode because they're going to start the
WAN Show soon and we suddenly have to abruptly end.
Uh, will AI kill your kids? Yes.
Louise, honestly, we're weighing the parents and kids thing right now, but
one of them's going to go. Yep. And you're going to be forced to adopt AI robot children or parents.
So just, you know, make peace with that. Robogramma.
And make peace with the fact that this episode is over. That's outro transition number two.
Uh, they subscribe to Techlinked and say bye-bye to Jessica.
Okay. Subscribe and I'll see you on the next time.
Jessica. Bye.