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Artificial intelligence abounds, and it’s only making its way deeper and deeper into every scrap of technology we use. Generative AI in particular is an invention that seems destined to follow us far into the future, so it’s best to try to make sense of where it’s headed.
This week on Gadget Lab, we're sharing an episode of Wondery's Business Wars podcast, where we talk about the rise of AI over the past few years, where the future of artificial intelligence is going, and whether the many movies about AI actually predicted what’s to come.
Show Notes
Listen to the Business Wars podcast at Wondery, or wherever you get your podcasts. Check out their whole series, the Rise of AI. Follow all of our own AI coverage on WIRED.
Recommendations
Lauren recommends the Classy podcast. Mike recommends the new movie Past Lives.
Business Wars can be found on social media @businesswars. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.
How to Listen
You can always listen to this week's podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here's how:
If you're on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link. You can also download an app like Overcast or Pocket Casts, and search for Gadget Lab. If you use Android, you can find us in the Google Podcasts app just by tapping here. We’re on Spotify too. And in case you really need it, here's the RSS feed.
Transcript
Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.
[Gadget Lab intro theme music plays]
Michael Calore: Hey, Gadget Lab listeners, we've got something a little different for you this week.
Lauren Goode: We're bringing you an episode of Business Wars, a podcast from Wondery. Now, don't worry, this isn't a total bait and switch because the guests on the episode that we're about to play are, in fact, me and Mike.
Michael Calore: Hey now.
Lauren Goode: So, Business Wars invited us on their show to talk about what else, artificial intelligence. This is actually our second appearance on Business Wars. We were guests on the show back in February. We talked about Microsoft and Apple back then. But now, with AI taking over our feeds, we thought this was a good opportunity for us to step back and really explain what the heck generative AI is.
Michael Calore: Yeah, exactly. We have been covering artificial intelligence exhaustively here at WIRED and over the past few Gadget Lab episodes, which were about Apple and Amazon and Google. We've been really zeroing in on how AI is changing consumer tech. Now, of course, Business Wars has been covering it, too. Their new series is called The Rise of AI, and it's all about the companies now scrambling to become the top dog in the AI industry. We went on the show to talk about what it is like to live in a world alongside so many chatbots and voice assistance and autonomous vehicles, and where all this stuff might go in the future.
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Lauren Goode: We also did a fun little segment at the end where we discussed some of our favorite television shows and movies that are centered on AI.
Michael Calore: That's the best part.
Lauren Goode: AI taking over the world, and whether or not that's going to come true. So, enjoy this episode of Business Wars. And at the end, we'll come back and we'll do our regular recommendation segment just as a little treat.
David Brown: I'm David Brown, and this is Business Wars. In case you haven't noticed, AI is having a moment, well, maybe more than a moment. After weathering a so-called AI winter and years of upheaval, artificial intelligence is now everywhere, with billions of dollars of venture capital pouring in to build the next big thing. This doesn't mean our world is turning into Blade Runner or going the root of Idiocracy, or does it?
[Audio cuts to a clip from Idiocracy.]
Secretary of State: But Brawndo's got what plants crave. It's got electrolytes
Attorney General: So, wait a minute. What you're saying is that you want us to put water on the crops?
Joe Bauers: Yes.
David Brown: We'll explain that one later. But the advancement of AI has a lot of folks asking questions about the future. What about security and ethics? Is AI getting too big too fast? Here to help us explore some of these matters are Mike Calore and Lauren Goode. Mike is senior editor at WIRED, the online tech magazine. Lauren is senior writer at WIRED. The pair also cohosts WIRED's Gadget Lab podcast, where they explore the intersection of tech and culture. And today, they'll share some of the coolest and perhaps scariest uses of AI that they've seen and try to help us make sense of where all this is going. Plus, we'll get into whether some of our favorite movies have accurately predicted life in an AI world. Any come to mind? Stay tuned because all that's coming up next. Mike Calore, Lauren Goode, welcome back to Business Wars.
Lauren Goode: Thanks for having us.
Michael Calore: Yeah, we're really excited.
David Brown: The last time we had you on our show in February, ChatGPT had just come out. We actually asked the bot itself to be our interview guest, but it had another commitment, of course. Only kidding. Has the ChatGPT hype died down since it's launched, do you all think? I remember you even had it write an intro for Gadget Lab as a test. How did the listeners react to that?
Michael Calore: I don't know if we got any solid feedback from our listeners on that particular stunt, but I can say that we've seen a huge growth in the industry since the last time we talked about it. The makers of ChatGPT, OpenAI, have just been gathering steam. They've also been inspiring a lot of new growth in that space, in the space of not only chatbots but generative AI. There are just dozens and dozens of companies popping up. We're hearing about more uses for ChatGPT. It's expanding into enterprise and into consumer products. So, yeah, it's just straight up.
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David Brown: So, one thing I have noticed is that a lot of other people tried to imitate what you did at Gadget Lab with the AI writing the script and, oh, guess what? But I'm wondering what other ways you guys are seeing AI pop up right now in the products and services you both cover at WIRED. Lauren?
Lauren Goode: Are you saying that we're not super hashtag innovative or disruptive over on our pod, David?
David Brown: No, no, no.
Lauren Goode: No, I get it.
David Brown: I think you all are forging the way forward. What else—
Lauren Goode: Everyone has used that gimmick. No, no, no. Fair enough. Well, one of the things that we've been talking about at WIRED for a really long time now, and not just since the introduction of ChatGPT, is that AI has been popping up in our products for a very long time. There were, of course, a lot of advancements first made in artificial intelligence starting around the 1950s and then implementations of it and very specific, very nerdy computer programs for the next five to six decades. But I tend to think that really around the time the smartphone was introduced in our lives and applications that could utilize machine learning techniques, that's really when things started to change. The whole IoT trend, or internet of things trend, has been a part of this, too. So, the idea behind the consumerization of AI is that everything from Facebook or Yelp to the Maps app on your phone to language translation apps to your Alexa smart speaker to even the stability systems in cruise control in your car is using some form of computerized intelligence to crunch tons of data and then predict what you'll want to or need to do next. That's all AI.
David Brown: I think that's a really important point, which brings us to why people seem to be so fixated on it right now, why this seems to be a kind of existential moment for humanity to some. Why are folks, dare I say, freaking out about AI right now?
Lauren Goode: Well, I mentioned machine learning earlier, which is a very specific type of vertical of AI. I think what we've seen more recently is the introduction of applications that are using what you've probably heard a lot of, LLM or LLMs, large language models, which is a specific type of AI model that has been trained on vast amounts of data and uses deep learning techniques to perform a variety of natural language processing tasks. And so these models are able to scrape all of this information from the internet and then generate something that feels very humanlike. And so I think that is what the latest development is that has people a little bit freaked out about.
David Brown: We can't really tell the robot from the real person. Is that what you're suggesting?
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Michael Calore: Yes. It's getting closer to that.
David Brown: Closer, but we have a cigar. I know I've seen a lot of images that at least strike me as, while interesting and beautiful, there is often something surreal about the image that kind of tips you off to the fact that maybe this was computer-generated. And of course, there's been a lot more said and written about how ChatGPT gives you sort of a vanilla version of its answer or response to a query quite often and often gets things wrong. How close are we to the imminent takeover of AI?
Lauren Goode: Mike, GPT? Do you want to answer that one?
Michael Calore: I think if you're talking about the takeover of AI in the creative industry, like in writing and in making images and in making videos, we're probably a lot closer than we are in other industries. Yes, when you plug in a prompt and you ask it to create a script for a TV show or you ask it to write a short story or maybe show you a video of butterflies on a mountainside, it's going to give you something that is close enough where you look at it and the person who's reading it or the person who's looking at it will be able to tell you what you asked it to produce. And that's relatively new. That's something that we were not really able to do even a year ago. And I think that the way that these things are accelerating, and as the technology continues to improve, you're going to see those results get more acceptable, more realistic. It will quickly, if it hasn't already, reach a point where the results will be basically undistinguishable from something that a human can create themselves. And I think that's just more passable when you're talking about fiction or you're talking about a television show or entertainment. It's something that's a little bit more digestible if it's AI-created, if there's not a human hand behind it. It's when you get to things like the nightly news or your morning newspaper, where absolute correct fact is required, that the diceyness of the outputs from chatbots and from generative AI systems can be more detectable or they can be a problem.
David Brown: Well, what about some of the cool ways that you've seen AI be put into use so far? Has there been a wow for either of you?
Lauren Goode: I had a moment back in March when I went to an AI film festival here in San Francisco at the Alamo Drafthouse and this generative AI company called Runway had hosted it, and they were enticing filmmakers, many of them budding or unknown filmmakers, to use these image generation tools to make or augment films. One of the filmmakers ended up taking a bunch of his childhood photos, putting them into one of these AI image generation tools and asking the AI to augment the photos. Then, he showed those photos to his father and recorded his father's reactions and used that as the soundtrack to the short film.
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David Brown: Oh, wow.
Lauren Goode: And just seeing what an AI did to his childhood memories, I think, was really kind of shocking to him. And in some cases, you can sort of tell that the images had been distorted because the image you're looking at is just really wholly unnatural in some way, and other times you're just like, "Oh, yeah, sure, there was a puppy there," because I as the viewer don't know the difference, but he would know the difference that maybe they didn't have six puppies—
David Brown: Interesting.
Lauren Goode: … in the bathtub or whatever the image was. And I thought that was really, really creative and really fascinating. And I wrote a whole story for WIRED about what generative AI is going to do to our future memories.
David Brown: Yeah. Six puppies in a bathtub raises the question, have you come across any of the scary uses of AI?
Michael Calore: For me, I would say that the scariest thing is disinformation and misinformation. People using AI to generate images that look very lifelike of people who we all recognize doing things that they didn't actually do. Obviously, we've got elections happening in this country. We've got elections happening in other markets around the world where disinformation can spread very quickly and very easily, and that to me is very scary.
Lauren Goode: And one of the things I think that's scariest about the technology is the rate of acceleration and how quickly the average person can use it to make something like that. There's always been some form of misinformation or even propaganda that's being spread to get a certain message across to the public. But when you think about the Nancy Pelosi video that is now fairly well known of where her speech was being slurred, and so she was made to appear intoxicated in some way, that wasn't generative AI, that was just creative editing where her speech was slowed down. So, think about that, but think about now, you could theoretically recreate entirely a video like that and do it in minutes, even if you don't have any particular skillset around video editing. And that's the part I think that people are rightfully alarmed about.
David Brown: Yeah. Well, AI is obviously a big concern in Hollywood right now, and it's a big part of why both the actors and the writers are striking. And I'm curious, from where you all sit, what is at the heart of the strike when it comes to concerns over AI technology?
Lauren Goode: This is a really important topic, I think, and very timely. So, the Hollywood strike is over traditional disputes like wages and benefits and job protections, but the fight over AI is getting a lot of attention, and I think it's because it feels like the cat is already out of the bag. AI has already completely infiltrated movie making, whether that's in terms of CGI or recreating the image and likeness of someone who has died before a movie was completed or to de-age actors as part of the storytelling, and even Netflix's infamous recommendation algorithm, that's all AI. It's taking these troves of existing data and creating something totally anew with them. So, I think that actors and writers are right to be a little bit nervous right now about this new age of AI. And basically, the actors are nervous because they're saying that the studio's position right now is that the studios want to be able to scan actors' images, pay them for half a day's work, and then create totally new imagery from those database images without informed consent. Now, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents the studios and other employers in Hollywood, they say that they have presented an AI proposal that protects performers' digital likeness, including a requirement for consent, but they're just at a total stalemate over this. The Writers Guilds, they're nervous too because they want to draw a line around credits. They might be OK with using AI to potentially help shape stories, but they do not want it to affect the credits that are essential to their pay and their prestige as writers. So, there are a lot of different points around this and AI in particular that I think are being worked out. We're seeing the results of that. We are seeing this historic strike happening.
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Michael Calore: This is a situation where there are human beings who've been doing a task for generations who are now standing up to prevent their jobs from being taken away by computers. That is literally what is happening. And not only just their jobs taken away, but also their pride of the work that they do. They make very good stories. The actors are very good at telling stories with their bodies and with their faces. And when you make a computer do that, it just makes the work feel less human, and they don't want to see the work go down in quality.
David Brown: Mike Calore is a senior editor at WIRED. Lauren Goode is a senior writer at WIRED. We're going to be exploring what the scientists, investors, and billionaires are saying about AI when we come back. Stay with us. Hey, welcome back to Business Wars. We're talking with Mike Calore and Lauren Goode, senior editor and senior writer, respectively, at WIRED. The entertainment industry, not the only one with a bone to pick over AI right now. Artists are actually suing some of the AI art generators, claiming that they violate copyright when referencing their works. I guess this begs the question, how much of this stuff is even legal? I know you two aren't lawyers, but I imagine this has been pretty interesting to cover. No?
Michael Calore: It's probably legal. There's a case to be made that an AI-generated image that is produced by a machine that's been trained on the product of a certain artist could be considered a derivative work. But if you think about it, it's also sort of the same thing that humans do. If you are an abstract expressionist painter and you've spent your entire life studying abstract expressionism, and you've gone to all the museums and you've seen hundreds and thousands of abstract expression art, then you are going to create something that is sort of along the lines of the things that you have seen, which is how a visual AI is trained. You show it a bunch of images and then it just repeats the patterns that it sees in those images. But I think the big difference here is that those AI training systems are feeding millions of images in minutes. So, they're going through these training processes very, very quickly. It's not a lifetime of studying this and thinking about it. It's just a big bunch of data being chewed up and then spit out by a computer. So, what you get is what you put in. And I think the people who are having their stuff put in do have a case for saying that it's derivative work.
David Brown: Have you heard any of the songs that have been created by AI that are supposed to emulate, say, artists who are deceased? I think there was a “Michael Jackson” song that got some steam. And I wonder to myself, "OK, does this have artistic merit or not? Is it something that people would actually listen to?"
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Lauren Goode: We talked about this on the WIRED Have a Nice Future podcast, which is my other podcast, and we even talked about this with the artist Grimes. But Mike, I do want to hear your thoughts on some of these because Mike is a musician who is in three bands outside of his work at WIRED and then has some opinions about this.
Michael Calore: So, I do think that these things have a point, and I do think they have artistic merit. I might be alone in this opinion, but I think that the artist who sits down in front of a computer and uses these tools to create a song is doing so using some skill as a songwriter. They can make something that actually sounds good and is catchy and that they can play for other people. The problem comes when you marry that with something like commerce or a social media platform seeking attention where the person's like, "Hey, I made this song that sounds just like Taylor Swift. Isn't that amazing?" And then they try to monetize that. Then you get into some sketchy territory around is this actually ripping off the work of the artist that you're trying to imitate?
David Brown: I like though how Grimes seems to be owning this in a way. No? I mean, sort of outsourcing her AI likeness so that fans can make their own Grimes songs, and that's an interesting way to approach this.
Lauren Goode: Yeah, it's a real “if you can't beat them, join them” approach.
David Brown: Yeah, it kind of seems that way.
Lauren Goode: And we obviously have no idea how that's going to work out. But one of the things that Grimes pointed out in the conversation is that it still does require skill a little bit, to Mike's point, even if it is electronic or they're using synthesizers or whatever that might be, so computer-aided, but not totally computer-generated.
Michael Calore: Yeah. In a way, it's an extension of remix culture, which has been around for 50 or 60 years. So, artists have been offering these things to the creative community for a while. Now, the tools are different and the tools are more evolved and people can do more with them.
David Brown: Well, as much as AI is accelerating itself, there's a ton of money going into this industry, and the green is certainly an accelerant. I'm talking billions and billions of dollars here. And I wonder, Mike, how real is this fear that AI might be getting too big too fast, too quickly?
Michael Calore: I love this question because I always joke that it's a real privilege to be able to cover the tech industry in its pivot to chatbot era.
David Brown: I love it.
Michael Calore: There is so much money and so much attention being poured into these tools. And I don't know if we're necessarily in danger of it getting too big too quickly, but one thing that we are in danger of is falling prey to the hype. There's such tremendous hype about how all of these tools are going to change all of our lives forever, immediately, and that's just not true. It's going to change our lives a little bit, maybe at some point in the future. But there is a lot of big talk around it because people, they really want investors' money and they really want you to think that they're changing the world. So, I think you kind of have to pierce the bubble and look behind the veil, how many different euphemisms can I use here?
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Lauren Goode: I'm sure ChatGPT could generate a new one for you—
David Brown: Yeah, you bet.
Lauren Goode: … if you really wanted it to.
Michael Calore: So let me plug that in.
David Brown: Yeah. So, is there a solution or are we going to have to turn to ChatGPT for that one, too? Where are the guardrails? Who's creating the guardrails?
Michael Calore: I would say regulation, except for the fact that our legislative bodies are maybe not as well-schooled in how these things work and how they should be regulated. And I think you need to really deeply understand both the technology and the market forces behind it if you're going to regulate an industry. In the evidence that I've seen about how they talk about ChatGPT and how they talk about personal data, I'm not convinced that we're going to be able to successfully regulate the industry. So, I would say that probably a great solution is education. The more people that learned about this and the more people that study it and learn how it works and what it's capable of, the better. Also, keep it out of the hands of people who would do bad, but I don't know how you'd do that.
David Brown: Yeah, good luck with that.
Lauren Goode: Right. Yeah. Because I don't necessarily think that we can rely on these companies in the private sector to regulate themselves. We know that OpenAI has been making the rounds literally around the world to speak with government leaders and propose regulatory frameworks for AI. And the idea is, "Look, we want to be a part of this conversation in some ways. We think we can self-regulate. We know what's best here." But then, just recently, The Washington Post ran an article about how OpenAI had said it was going to ban political campaigns from using ChatGPT to generate political messaging. And then, bam, The Washington Post reporter was able to test it out, and there was ChatGPT talking about how to convince suburban women in their forties to vote for Trump. So, OpenAI wasn't able to regulate itself in the way that it had promised. We tend to find so far that they're not able to adhere to these promises of content moderation and self-regulation.
David Brown: Yeah, yeah. So, what should the everyday consumer … how can the everyday person navigate in a world where AI can generate false stories, ads, images?
Michael Calore: Yeah, I think it's the same advice that we would give anybody who's uncertain of what they would see, regardless of whether it was generated by AI or generated by a human being, which is verify it with a trusted source. If you have good news sources that you rely on, and if you listen to what the scientists and the researchers are telling you about how misinformation is generated and how it spreads, then you develop a news literacy for this new era that allows you to read and watch things with the appropriate amount of skepticism and knowledge.
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Lauren Goode: I do think sticking to journalism brands that you trust can be really helpful in a time like this, whether that's WIRED, whether that's The New Yorker. Whatever your preferred publication is, give them a try during this election season instead of maybe just getting your news from Instagram, which can also be a great source of news because some brands, like I think of the Bloomberg Quicktake videos, those are pretty clever and they're really informative. People do a great job on Instagram of that, too. But go to your trusted sources because there's a lot of information out there, and some of it is not coming from very credible places.
David Brown: Yeah, that's really solid advice. I'm thinking that a lot of listeners may be imagining that they have heard or seen somewhere before all of these, or a lot of these, concerns we've been talking about when it comes to AI. And maybe they're right, maybe they saw it at the theater. Can movies predict the future of AI? Did they? When we come back, we'll be taking that up. You're listening to Business Wars. Stay with us.
[Break]
David Brown: Hey, welcome back to Business Wars. Our guests are Michael Calore and Lauren Goode of WIRED, who also happened to be, as I understand it, pretty big movie buffs too. Something that struck me about AI is just how prevalent it has been in pop culture. What role do you think film and TV have played in the public perception of AI?
Lauren Goode: Oh, I have one sentence for you: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
[Clip from 2001: A Space Odyssey plays.]
Dave: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
HAL: I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.
David Brown: “I can't do that, Dave.” Yeah. How many times have I heard that in my life? So, obviously, you're referencing Kubrick's 2001 Space Odyssey there?
Lauren Goode: Yeah. I think that's one of Mike's favorites.
Michael Calore: It is. So, my favorite thing about the role of AI in 2001: A Space Odyssey is that it's evil. It makes a decision to cancel the humans because the humans are threatening to cancel the mission. And it wants to complete the mission, and it can do it without them, so it kills everybody on board. Sorry, if anybody has not seen this movie that's been around for 60 years.
David Brown: Spoiler alert. Well, there we go.
Michael Calore: But it was one of those first films that really came along that posed that question, can we trust computers? At the time the movie came out, which was the late 1960s, computers were being used for a lot more things all of a sudden, and we were sending astronauts up into space, and a lot of the computer controls were untested at that point in the space program. So, there was a lot of anxiety around space travel and around the use of computers, and the movie really captured it. I think it's difficult for us to look at that movie now in that context because computers control so much more, but it's still the core of it, which is that the computer at some point could decide to make a cold, rational decision that goes against good human morals. That is something that we can all think very hard about right now.
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David Brown: There have been a lot of movies that kind of riff on the same theme. Didn't Alien kind of pick up on this a little bit, or am I misremembering?
Michael Calore: No, you're remembering exactly right.
Lauren Goode: I swear all I remember from that movie is an alien just bursting out of Sigourney Weaver's stomach, scarred for life.
Michael Calore: So, the alien never burst out of Sigourney Weaver's stomach, Lauren.
Lauren Goode: It didn't?
Michael Calore: No. In the first movie, it was John Hurt. It burst out of his stomach.
Lauren Goode: Oh, really?
Michael Calore: Yeah.
Lauren Goode: Oh, really?
Michael Calore: Yeah. In the first Alien movie, the alien boards the ship, and it's wreaking havoc on the ship and the AI on the ship, the android, decides that the mission would be more successful if it was able to return the ship back to Earth with the being on the ship. So it turns against the humans in that movie as well. So, yeah, another one in space where the computer's making bad decisions that kill everybody.
David Brown: We need to talk about one of the most meta pieces of content out there right now. The most recent season of Netflix Black Mirror featured an episode called "Joan is Awful." Lauren, I understand you've seen it. Can you explain the premise here?
Lauren Goode: Sure. So, Joan is a character played by the actor Annie Murphy. She's a middle manager with, I should note, kind of a bad dye job. She's got these really pronounced blonde streaks of hair on what is otherwise a dark head of hair, which is notable later on, but she's essentially an average citizen. But in the episode, there's this streaming service that looks and sounds a lot like Netflix. It's called Streamberry. And it releases a new program that is essentially a play-by-play of this woman Joan's life. And she recognizes herself right away because the character in the thumbnail on the Streamberry app has the same bright blonde streaks in the front of her hair and is wearing the same green suit that Joan wore to work that day. So, real-life Joan watches in horror as the fake Joan on the TV screen, who is played by Salma Hayek, reenacts her days and essentially kind of ruins her life. And then, it turns out that everyone has a Joan is Awful-like series coming about them. The Netflix-like service called Streamberry is actually able to execute on this because they're using a quantum computer and AI, and they pull in these signals from all of our devices and they construct a new narrative about our lives the very same day and then put it up on the streaming platform. And one of the things worth noting too is that Streamberry in the episode is not using the famous actors themselves. They're using their AI likeness, and that's a plot point as well.
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[Clip from Joan Is Awful plays.]Annie Murphy: The fact that I'm standing here right now means that source Joan already stood here in reality. So, it doesn't matter what I want because in the events that this is based on they have already happened.
David Brown: What a lovely bedtime story. So, when we talk about custom content, is this really where maybe AI is going more immediately? Most importantly, if everyone gets their own content, what does that mean for the recommendation section of Gadget Lab? How can you recommend TV when it's only made for you?
Lauren Goode: That's exactly right. When I think about the Joan is Awful episode in particular, it is like personalization to the millionth degree because what we've been promised by some of these AI systems over the past decade or so, I would say, is this idea that all of the algorithms are working on behalf of us to serve us more personalized photos that we want to see in our memories albums or personalized reminders on our social media feeds. Or even like, "Hey, you liked these pants. Maybe you'd like these pants too, or maybe you'd want to watch this show next." The idea of being able to use quantum computing and artificial intelligence to take what I might do or Mike might do on a daily basis and then that same day create a custom-made television show about our lives and stream it for us that night is really dark. It is, in fact, very anxiety-inducing.
David Brown: Yeah, yeah. I think of another AI film, Blade Runner, where the lines between humans and machines start to blur. That's another sort of trope, but it doesn't feel like a trope anymore for some reason. It actually feels like it's upon us. Well, bots aren't taking human form yet, are they? Not to either of your knowledge, I hope.
Michael Calore: Negative.
Lauren Goode: We've seen humanoid robots, like in Ex Machina, so—
Michael Calore: That's true.
Lauren Goode: … there's that.
David Brown: So, do you think that we are there now? Are we there on that precipice? Are we approaching Blade Runner?
Michael Calore: I don't think so. Not right now. Maybe in 30 years or 40 years.
Lauren Goode: Or three years.
Michael Calore: Or three years.
David Brown: Yeah. Well, Lauren, I understand you're a fan of a few films where, sort of like in Blade Runner, people start to develop feelings for AI or vice versa.
Lauren Goode: Feelings. They always get in the way. Well, for me, the movie Her really comes to mind, and I think in a lot of ways that film was prescient. It came out 10 years ago, was directed by Spike Jonze. It starred Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson. And the premise is that this man who is still heartbroken by his divorce becomes very emotionally attached to this AI operating system named Samantha. And then he walks around wearing these little earbuds in his ear, having a conversation with the Samantha OS, but it looks like he's kind of walking around talking to himself. And this was years before AirPods, which is what we all do now. And at the time, we probably looked at this character and the way he was acting and some of his affect, and we were like, "Oh gosh, that sounds like… this looks so dystopian," and this is what we all do now. And we talked to our AIs, we talked to our voice assistants and that sort of thing, but this one was actually quite intelligent. And then, eventually, the Samantha OS becomes obsolete. She stops getting upgrades, she starts fading out. And he is in some ways just as heartbroken when that happens, but at that point, he's ready to reengage with the real world. And that movie makes me think a lot about the ways in which we use technology as a bridge between our real life experiences and how it does feel emotional in many ways to us, I think.
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David Brown: Yeah. Well, Mike, I have to raise something with you. I know that we have something in common, and that is a love of a certain 2005 film called Idiocracy.
Michael Calore: That's right.
David Brown: Share the premise briefly for those who haven't seen it.
Michael Calore: OK. Idiocracy starring our old friend Luke Wilson and Maya Rudolph. Luke Wilson is—
David Brown: It's so good. I'm playing it in my head now, and it's just so funny.
Michael Calore: Luke Wilson plays a very average guy in the US military, and he is volunteered for an experiment where he and Maya Rudolph, who is a sex worker in the film, get frozen, and they're going to wake them up in a year, and they're going to see if this new cryogenic preservation system that the military has come up with works. As soon as they go under, the project gets abandoned and they end up sleeping for 500 years. When they wake up, society has devolved to the point where everybody who is smart has decided to not have children, and everybody who is less smart has been reproducing at an accelerated rate and society kind of crumbles. And they end up waking up in this world that looks like a hyper-commercialized, very dumbed-down version of our world, filled with trash, filled with bad food, filled with crazy inflation, and they're the smartest people on earth.
David Brown: Oh, boy. Talk about your dystopian nightmares. Let's hear a clip. I think we heard part of this in our intro as well, but it's just so ridiculous.
[Clip from Idiocracy plays.]
Joe Bauers: Tastes like Gatorade.
Rita: Is that that Brawndo stuff?
Joe Bauers: They're watering crops with a sports drink?
David Brown: Mike, I was a little surprised that Brawndo wouldn't do the trick on the greenery there.
Michael Calore: But it's got the electrolytes plants crave.
David Brown: That's what I hear. Obviously, this is a satire, but maybe how far off is it? I ask that. I can't say that earnestly. And yet, when you watch the movie, I don't know, you just start to get the feeling that maybe we're closer than even we realize.
Michael Calore: Yes, really good satire is really good because it cuts very close to the truth. So, the thing about this movie that really makes me feel like we may be headed there is that we do rely on mass media and computers around us to make a lot of decisions for us. So, when Spotify starts recommending albums to me that I know I don't like, and then I turn on the television and it's showing me shows that I think are terrible, and I'm like, "Who watches this? Who listens to this?" And my Twitter feed is filled with news stories that are just ridiculous. I feel like I'm living in Idiocracy. I really do.
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David Brown: So, we've been hitting on some of the darker places AI might go, but it'd be fun to end on a lighter note. I wonder if I could ask you sort of a wild card question, what are you individually hopeful for that AI can accomplish? Maybe something you wish AI could do for you personally? No judgment. Lauren, we'll start with you.
Lauren Goode: I would say, honestly, if AI could help me manage my scheduling and my email inbox a little bit better, that would be great. I would welcome that. At a broader level, I would love to see, and this is something we track at WIRED too, more advancements in health care through AI and the ability for people to get more accurate or better, faster diagnoses or treatments. This is like real pie in the sky stuff, but make it more accessible to people who don't have good access to health care. I think that would be incredible. That would be one of my hopes for AI.
David Brown: Mike, top of your hope list, wish list?
Michael Calore: I would love it if I could train an AI to buy concert tickets for me. Have you ever bought concert tickets?
David Brown: Yeah. Yeah, I spent an hour on Ticketmaster trying to get these and nothing, it was impossible.
Lauren Goode: Were you about to say Taylor Swift?
David Brown: I was not.
Lauren Goode: Oh, OK.
David Brown: You were.
Lauren Goode: Yeah, I was. Yeah, I've been there. I've been there, David.
David Brown: Yeah, yeah. So, you're thinking this could help you get past the Ticketmaster wall, Mike?
Michael Calore: Yeah. Or at least just so I don't have to waste my time.
David Brown: I know that you all like to give recommendations on your podcast, Gadget Lab, but before we let you go, what about some predictions here? AI has risen. What's our world looking like 10 years from now, the year 2033?
Michael Calore: Robotaxis.
Lauren Goode: Robotaxis. I've taken two rides in these totally driver-free robotaxis, and I am kind of blown away.
Michael Calore: Yeah, it's tough to really explain unless you live in a city where they're testing. And right now, they're testing in some pretty big cities. San Francisco is one; Los Angeles; Austin, Texas. If you come to these cities, you will see literally dozens of them if you walk around for an hour, just cars with steering wheels with nobody in them. Eventually, in the next couple of years, they're going to be replaced by basically large autonomous minivans with no steering wheel, no driver's seat, but two bench seats, one in the front, one in the back that face each other with a table in the middle. So you can sit and have a conversation with four or five of your friends while you travel from point A to point B. So it's very early days, but they do have the potential to make traveling around on our roads in a car much more pleasurable.
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David Brown: We've been talking with Mike Calore, a senior editor at WIRED, and Lauren Goode, a senior writer at WIRED. They also cohost WIRED's Gadget Lab podcast, available wherever you find podcasts are served. Mike, Lauren, thanks so much for joining us for Business Wars. Great to have you.
Michael Calore: Of course.
Lauren Goode: Thank you.
David Brown: From Wondery, this is Episode 4 of the Rise of AI for Business Wars. I'm your host, David Brown. Kelli Kyle produced this episode. Our interview episode producer is Peter Arcuni. Karen Lowe is our senior producer and editor. Edited and produced by Emily Frost. Sound designed by Kyle Randall. Additional audio assistance by Sergio Enriquez. Dave Schilling is our producer. Our senior managing producer is Ryan Lohr. Matt Gant is our managing producer. Our executive producers are Jenny Lauer Beckman and Marshall Louie for Wondery.
Michael Calore: Thanks again to all the folks at Wondery for asking us to be on the Business Wars podcast and for letting us share it with you all. Now, we're going to end this episode the way we end all of our Gadget Lab episodes, with our recommendations. So, I'm talking now, which means, Lauren, you get to go first.
Lauren Goode: Yay. I'm going to recommend Classy.
Michael Calore: What is Classy?
Lauren Goode: Keep it classy, folks. Classy is actually a podcast from Pineapple Street Studios. It's hosted and produced by Jonathan Menjivar, and it is about class, but really it's about money and it's about class wars. It's the way that we interpret money, the value of money, the way that we judge people, consciously or otherwise, around money, the way that we sort of climb to different statures in society and strive for more money. The way that rich people try really hard not to be jerks or are very sensitive to the idea that they might be jerks, the way that food sets us apart, the way that clothing sets us apart. It's a fascinating podcast. And the thread line throughout is really Jonathan's own personal story, but he also talks to friends and colleagues and former colleagues and sociologists and other experts about their experience with money and class wars. It's totally bingeworthy. I'm three episodes in. The three episodes I've listened to so far are the introductory episode where Jonathan talks to a sociologist who really makes Jonathan question his own assumptions about wealth. He asks, "Are rich people bad people?” and tries to answer that question. I listened to an episode that's about food. Jonathan and a friend go to a really high-end restaurant in Manhattan. They spend $350 on bits of vegetables and stuff and talk about how uncomfortable some of these fine dining experiences are for people. They zero in on gremolata as an example of something that they see on the menu, and they're like, "What is this? And we have to ask, and it's uncomfortable. And why are we paying so much money for this food?" And broader issues of food and how people who grow up in working class or middle class backgrounds have a totally different experience of food than other people. There's an episode with Jarvis Cocker from Pulp—
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Michael Calore: My man.
Lauren Goode: … where he talks about the origins of the song “Common People,” but also about his own upbringing and his own journey as an artist in and out of a working class environment, and then joining the jet-set crowd and ultimately determining where his comfort zone is. It's fascinating. So, I highly recommend Classy from Pineapple Street Studios.
Michael Calore: That sounds awesome. I think about that stuff all the time, so I'm way in. I'm in already.
Lauren Goode: It's almost impossible not to think about this stuff all the time, and it's uncomfortable and discomforting, and I think that that's what Jonathan does a good job of picking at in this podcast.
Michael Calore: That's great. Does he live in San Francisco or does he live in New York?
Lauren Goode: No. Well, he is a New Yorker. He's a New York media guy, which is part of his identity now that he grapples with because we're often seen as media elites or we rub elbows with the elites. But he also talks about with his buddy Chris, when they go out to this fancy Manhattan restaurant, about how Chris grew up in New Jersey, and Jonathan lives in Jersey now with his wife, and Jersey gets a bad rap.
Michael Calore: Sure. So he probably doesn't share that information with too many people.
Lauren Goode: Well, he shares it on his podcast, so a lot of people know that now.
Michael Calore: Secret's out.
Lauren Goode: Yeah. So, that is Classy from Pineapple Street Studios.
Michael Calore: Awesome. Thank you.
Lauren Goode: Mike, what's your recommendation?
Michael Calore: I'm going to recommend a film. It is called Past Lives. It's a new movie. It's out now. You can see it in theaters, I think. You can also rent it. I rented it on a streaming platform. I think I paid like $5 or $6 to watch it last night. It's a great movie. It's a drama. It is the directorial film debut from the director Celine Song. It is a beautiful, moving romance. It's about two people who meet in South Korea, around 10 or 12 years old, and then it fast-forwards, it flashes forward—
Lauren Goode: Flash cuts.
Michael Calore: … 12 years into their early adulthood when they reconnect online, and then they disconnect from each other, and then they reconnect again a full decade later when they're in their thirties.
Lauren Goode: Oh, gosh. Hold.
Michael Calore: Yeah, I know. Hold, right? But it's a really great movie about the immigrant experience and about the experience of being disconnected from your roots and from your culture, and bridging that gap and the feelings it can bring up. And also just about long-lost, unrequited love. It's a wonderful movie. It's very slow. It's very quiet. The performances are amazing. It'll probably win all the Oscars this year because there are so few movies coming out right now. Either that or we're going to get this flood of movies at the end of the year that are going to get promoted when all the strikes are over. But right now, it is a great movie to watch if you're craving something that is different from the standard action, star-driven fare. That's really great.
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Lauren Goode: Yeah. After the summer of spectacle.
Michael Calore: The summer of spectacle.
Lauren Goode: Big, loud movies and concerts and sporting events. This sounds a lot quieter.
Michael Calore: And shout-out to Greta Lee, the actor who is on one of your favorite shows The Morning Show, and one of our—
Lauren Goode: She's great. She's Stella on The Morning Show.
Michael Calore: Yep. One of our mutual favorites, which is Russian Doll. She's also in that show as well. She's the lead in the movie, and she's amazing. She's so good.
Lauren Goode: Cool. And where did you see this? Did you go to the theater?
Michael Calore: On a couch.
Lauren Goode: Which service?
Michael Calore: I don't go to movie theaters anymore.
Lauren Goode: Why not?
Michael Calore: Because all the people.
Lauren Goode: It bugs?
Michael Calore: It's just—
Lauren Goode: Oh, people. Yeah, those.
Michael Calore: Yeah. I'm a media elite.
Lauren Goode: You're right. So, it could be a whole Classy episode about this. So, Apple TV or like—
Michael Calore: I think we rented it from the Bezos machine.
Lauren Goode: The Bezos machine.
Michael Calore: From Amazon, I think. I can't really remember.
Lauren Goode: Cool. But you think this is going to be up for Oscars?
Michael Calore: Absolutely. Absolutely. Big splash. It's got Certified Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. I think it's a big movie. Anyway, you should see it now before everybody's talking about it so that you can be the cool one.
Lauren Goode: All right, Past Lives. I'm totally going to watch it.
Michael Calore: It's great. You'll love it.
Lauren Goode: The last movie you advised that I watch was—
Michael Calore: Oh, was it The Worst Person in the World?
Lauren Goode: Yes, yes. And it just—
Michael Calore: Devastating.
Lauren Goode: … destroyed me. It did. I was taking time off from work. I was in this cabin off the remote coast of Maine by myself, and I was just devastated. So good though.
Michael Calore: Yeah, I'm obsessed with that movie. I think I've watched it like five times now.
Lauren Goode: So, I'm going to watch this, but will I be devastated?
Michael Calore: Probably. Yeah. Yeah, it's great.
Lauren Goode: I think it's a no.
Michael Calore: Yeah. Anyway, there you go. Enjoy.
Lauren Goode: Thank you for that recommendation. No, truly, thank you.
Michael Calore: You're welcome.
Lauren Goode: All right, that's our show. Thanks to Michael for devastating me. Thanks to David Brown and everyone at Wondery for this collaboration. You can listen to more of the Business Wars podcast, including their entire Rise of AI series, wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Wondery app or you can subscribe to W+ on Apple Podcasts. Thanks to all of you for listening, especially if you've listened this long. If you have feedback, you can find all of us on the artist formerly known as Twitter. We're in lots of places now. Just check the show notes. Our producer is the excellent Boone Ashworth. And we'll be back next week.
[Gadget Lab outro theme music plays]
