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 uh because AI has been crazy
there's been a lot of tech news happening this year and we're gonna talk about it on this episode of talk link
with who murd no that's me okay Jessica
P Jessica P You're the WAN writer I am
the W 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 pigo people usually say pigo pigo you're the WAN
writer but you also uh write TechLinked
yes and you also and game link and Tech quick and Tech Wick yes you're you're
got your hands in all the pots now I multifaceted I think there was a rumor
before my my name was released because I
I tended to jokingly put my name in the credits as various Ai and uh there there
was a rumor that I was actually an AI
experiment I just kept showing up in so many different video series maybe we all
are who knows brains and Vats Etc I've
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 uh got got us thinking now this episode we're
recording it the week before but it's going to go up on Wednesday December
27th 2 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 um but if you want to know my previous experience following the news
time line uh I learned about Bitcoin in
early 2012 when huh that's interesting
and didn't pay attention to it again until
2019 there are there's always just been a lot of stuff that just passes Me by
because I wasn't specifically interested um yeah I mean crypto that's fair
honestly if if if people missed the whole crypto kind of hype and then crash
uh it's like well to me it few years to me it started here and it ended here so
and everything in between that like there 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 I
mean you know crypto started way back you know early 2000 early 2010s or maybe
before that anyways but the really started gaining hype around 2012 13 and
stuff that 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 was I rewatched some of our Christmas specials in preparation for
this year's 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 at a lot of gaming
companies in particular and then by the end of the year they had all kind of
canceled it yeah like I remember like wealth simple sending me an email like a
year and a half ago about their crypto integration yeah well and 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 mhm um 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 kind of like were aware of some
things before but like was there a break neck speed cuz I've been doing this for
10 years so I I you I want to hear what
it was like for you uh it was a lot of
reading stuff and not knowing if it was important or
not cuz 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 I don't that
don't seem important at all and Riley would be like this is
gamechanging 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's always hard especially because
especially when you're writing for w show and like with TechLink it's you
know we we do our best but WAN Show it's
we are preparing things and before you came on uh the the whole writing team
kind of worked together on it but I was like curating the topics and now this is
your burden and uh it is a struggle to kind of guess what lonus and Luke will
particularly find interesting it is as opposed to what we think maybe the the
the Broad tech audience on YouTube will find interesting I sometimes I feel like
like I have a Ouija board or I have a crystal ball and I'm just going like I'm
like okay well like this is objectively important but like I don't no we have
like a little spreadsheet set up and like I I think I've gotten a lot better
at guessing but still sometimes I will
get it back from lus 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 I thought maybe I'd have to write three lines on that yeah we'll put
something in there we 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 he's like 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 uh close to a year ago yes and you guys have been
you know getting on the team and becoming embedded in like gaining that
kind of context that that I've had for a
while and it's uh yeah it's it's 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 differ 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 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 I am a serious
sponge uh 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 uh hold on a second I'm
rethinking here 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 current who's currently alive was born right because PRI 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 time absolutely involves techn 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 you're a standup comedian in
case anyone doesn't know I'm currently sitting but you know you just got to
imagine me like two feet up that's the kind of jokes we're looking for you can
look forward to I 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 asang like they will not stand for that but if you want to
sit for that see this just reminds me of the time when like you were like I heard
you across the room like I was finishing up a joke for TechLink 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 at 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 you what
are you supposed to do not make jokes about it um but all right and now it's
not time for quick bits because there aren't any today nonetheless this video
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so on that note yeah let's talk about our favorite tech stories this year uh
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 darnest this year to make some progress
on a tech longer about it and it's been
very very very difficult a long road to find the to find the time uh to do it
but I've been like saving so many links it's it's crazy so uh 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 you're that's why
you're presenting the dichotomy there's been a lot of
both Euphoria and H hyy about AI I think
it's genuinely incredibly cool it really is it's incred 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 regard 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 a an advanced
auto correct well like I'm worried about people you know just filling 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 the people trying to commercialize it is what could lead to
the extension I mean we it's so interesting we're doing it to ourselves
I'm not worried about the AI I'm worried about the people using it what's what's
a tool is a Tool's a hammer is a hammer I mean yeah and and thankfully they're
not at the level of like being actual autonomous agents right now they are
just tools and it's 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 yeah we don't know if the H 9,000 thing is
currently possible yeah I mean there are there are some things that 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 uh
chat Bots that kind of like you give it an overarching goal and then it self-
prompts itself along towards that goal but I think that and more recently it
being able to create other smaller
versions of itself that that was crazy that was a crazy recent story where like
AI 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 more
context but yeah what's so what one of the most interesting things to me about
the AI thing about the AI whole
spectacle is the fact that open
aai uh 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 will 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 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 uh 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 in going on
in the open source Community I mean mistol is is is pretty close to like
it's behind claw 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're are here to protect us or the companies who are trying to commercialize it mhm 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 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 iroot 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 the cas I think I agree I think it's fundamentally different um
yeah we might create like a uh super intelligent uh crazy like a thousand
years from now Poss plausibly even but
it's not going to be like us yes it's not going to be analogist 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 honest you can
say that it's nowhere near in the near future but not no yeah honestly I I
completely go back and forth I'm like I think at the beginning I was like it's
not conscious it's just a whatever and then like I saw some stuff and I was
like whoa that's this is actually pretty crazy and 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 milein 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 like just thinking just now it's just
like we don't even understand why we're conscious yeah exactly we like that's an
emergent property of our brains we like
you cannot point to the the spot in the brain where Consciousness lives right
you don't know we 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 in terms of
like I think I think the thing that was easiest for cuz 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 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 that like Sydney coming out it
just it's just so obvious that we trained AI on like llms on the internet
because it got just got so emotional it's just like we've created life and
given it a personality disorder like
immediately immediately I was trying to find the Articles from the the um the
the the the Contemporary uh dis discussion of it uh uh 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 there
were like multiple personas yeah somebody asked Sydney like who else is
in there with you or whatever and they she she he it 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 of and by early
days I mean like March March this has moved so fast it's wild fast 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 this
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 weird weirdest stuff that AI does comes out where it's just it's a
mirror 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 uh um
sentiments that got more prevalent where 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 uh enjoyed this year um 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 um what's what
what's an odd one I absolutely lost my mind when there was a proton Port of
cheex quest do you mean that like it was hilarious to you that someone went out
of their way to like ensure that the
check's Quest had support for Bron yes the uh 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 in W recently yeah and it went over pretty
well with the uh branded retr 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 glimps into like this is what we were making 20 years ago oh
man yeah I I love adver 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 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 CET started like like deleting their
old articles off randomly 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 it's
like a weird experience going on a forum uh 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 years ago you're just in there
like Indiana Jones snooping on their little Forum posts trying to grab a an
interesting snippet and then run away before 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 earlys and and
the late '90s wowow 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 2000s
silly concerns they had at the time I got to say one of my favorite stories
this year was uh you know okay 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 I don't know
if this is a good thing all the antitrust uh action by governments
obviously we had the epic games uh suit against Apple uh couple years ago and
now Google this year that happened as well but like EU put a lot of their uh
legislation into effect I Apple actually
launched an iPhone with USBC this year
uh 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 hm 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 ET yeah and I'm worried that there's
going to be a Tipping Point where the EU like their regulations start rubbing us
the wrong way yeah well because keep going M and part of the problem is that
like I think we've seen through a lot of our reporting or a lot of people's
reporting is just like often Regulators
don't understand technology ology very well mhm and off like this this is often
we're very skeptical about like apple
jumping on and support of like right to repair legislation me 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 will they I mean I you I don't know
that's a hard thing but like it's 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 5 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 MH 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
wor democracy is the worst possible form of government except all the other ones
that have been yeah yeah like I I do want well hold on you're not taking a
stance here I mean uh I'm just imagining
comments that's all yeah my stance is
that I would prefer no one to have
complete sovereignity 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 hyper intelligence Supreme AI Overlord who knows what's
best for you I for one welcome our new Sydney overlords Sydney I just I don't
like anybody having too much power so I I would like a little bit of of back and
forth one of the big things for me uh was um YouTube okay both uh the
Crackdown on ad blockers and the early ier I feel like at this point mostly in
the background um crackdowns on vulgarity
yeah within 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 that was really
interesting that whole uh changing their their uh terms and or not ter terms and
conditions but their their guidelines their 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 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
frontloading 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 completely
forgot about this until I started looking through the stories for the Christmas special do you remember the
Chinese spy balloon yeah a while I was
like what that was this year that was this year they forgot about it the world
was going nuts for a second yeah we were we were losing our minds like they shot
down one they shot yeah they shot it down they there was a couple oh yeah
there was one that got shot down over Canada really yes oh yeah yeah like the
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 a whole
proper Roundup in the TechLink 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 yeah what do you mean I forget 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 Netflix will no longer be sending DVDs in the mail oh no which is just
devastating for me yeah I I actually was one of the
original users of the the Netflix uh
mailing system I remember that from way back wow no I never I never used that I
heard about it I had OG Netflix wow
where they sent it through the mail yeah I used Blockbuster right it up until it
died I wasn't about to use that new fangled DVD mailing yeah well I always
lived in the woods so and don't you live in the woods
WS watch techlinked and GameLinked Etc
that are going to keep happening that's the end of this episode because they're going to start the W show soon and we
suddenly have to abruptly end uh will AI
kill your kids yes jeez 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 Robo grandma and and make peace with the fact
that this episode is over that's outro transition number two uh subscribe to
TechLink say bye-bye to Jessica okay
subscribe and I'll see you on the next time
Jess bye