 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by you, the listener, thanks to every single one of you, including Adam Green, Dustin Campbell, Tim Deputy, and our lifetime supporter, David Snyder. On this episode of DTNS, Megan Moroney tells us why we shouldn't fear for our jobs, but robots might affect our pay. Plus is VR dead? Tech crunch seems to think so. And stop fubbing. It's not what you think. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, July 21st, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Secret Bunker. I'm Sarah Lane. And from Petaluma. I'm Megan Moroney. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Welcome, Megan. Hey, Megan. Thank you for having me. It's lovely. I've been doing a while, Tom, because I've been on days when you're not there. That's true. Not on the Daily Tech News show, totally different show. That one's about JFK conspiracies, I guess. I don't know what that would be about. Let's not go there. Instead, let's start with the quick hits. Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI have all voluntarily agreed to U.S. government requests about responsible development of AI going forward. The agreements include investing in security, studying discrimination in AI tools, and a watermark system to indicate when something has been generated by a machine model and not a human. In bad timing news, OpenAI's head of trust and safety, David Wildner, just stepped down, citing job pressure and a desire to spend more time with his family. He's been with OpenAI since February 2022. So just over a year for the pressure to finally say that's enough. Wildner says he will remain available for advisory work with OpenAI, and the company is seeking a replacement. They did not have one lined up. Some subreddits have made themselves private as part of a protest over Reddit's recent API pricing changes. So Reddit has begun removing some moderators from some subreddits still in private mode. Mail fashion advice was one of the largest communities impacted with over five million subs. It's now public, although in restricted mode that limits new posts. Yeah, they just have to get new clothes, I guess. Microsoft filed a motion to withdraw the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's lawsuit trying to block its acquisition of Aqua Division Blizzard, and the FTC responded with no objection to the motion. So in short, the FTC is no longer pursuing a block of the merger of Microsoft and Activision Blizzard. That leaves August 29th as the next major date in that merger's saga. That's when the UK's Competition and Market Authority has a deadline to complete its investigation into the merger. It previously objected to the deal, but it is negotiating with Microsoft over possible restructuring to address its concerns. The Wall Street Journal sources say that Google co-founder Sir Gabriel has begun visiting Google offices three to four days a week in recent months. You might say, is that weird? Well, apparently it's been mostly to work with researchers on developing its next gen Gemini multi-model, multi, multi-model model. Say that three times fast. Gemini will reportedly become available later this year. I hope somebody reports when he stops going in, because we never hear those kind of stories. Yeah, send us an anonymous tip. All right. Okay, let's talk about the future of VR. Things don't seem to be on the up and up for VR depending on who you're reading. The information sources say that earlier this year, meta-told Quest Pro suppliers, it wouldn't need new components. Gortek will reportedly build Quest Pro headsets until remaining components run out, then operations will cease. Also, meta supposedly stopped development on a second gen Quest Pro and has also scaled back components and capabilities for its upcoming Artemis AR classes. Now, that may be in part why Haya Yan Camps wrote an article for TechCrunch Plus called, VR is dead, AR ate it and has an equally murky future. The opening paragraphs point out that the Quest 2 and the Quest 3 have pass-through features, which means you can see the outside sometimes, making them a mixed reality headset with some augmented reality capability. Apple's Vision Pro does that. In fact, Apple's Vision Pro doesn't even call itself VR. It calls itself mixed reality as well. It calls itself spatial computing, actually, but VR still has not found its killer app. That is Haya's contention. Even gamers don't really totally embrace VR, and augmented reality looks like it may be supplanting it. But augmented reality also does not have a killer app unless you consider large virtual monitors to be a killer app. So, Megan, should we give VR last rights as TechCrunch implies or is it still early days? I wouldn't say it's early days. I would say that VR is not dead. VR is like a cat, has nine lives. It's been around for so long. I mean, if you go to the Air and Space Museum in D.C., they have the original VR goggles, and they're like from 1962. I mean, they're older than you, Tom. So, I thought that was going to happen. I was saying, wow, that's really old. Okay, not, not, wow. So, I think there's a lot, I think there's a lot more time for VR. And in terms of AR, I feel like you're right, there's not a killer app for either one of them. But I think computer companies probably want us to walk around with AR goggles more than they would like us to sit in our living rooms with VR goggles just because of like ubiquitous computing. Like, we just, they want us to be everywhere with their technology. And you could only do that if you can walk around without bumping into stuff. I mean, I know that I'm sort of the VR apologist of the group, but I like immersive VR. I like it. The whole idea that there isn't a killer app is like, well, it depends on what you're looking for. Don't do a lot of gaming besides, you know, Tetris on VR. But I do a lot of exercise stuff. I've talked about it ad nauseam. Don't need to go through it again. But I'm telling you, that's the killer app. That is the app where you go, oh, this is amazing. I don't even need to go to a gym anymore, that kind of thing. Like that for me was like, okay, let's see what else they've got going on here. But this is the future. AR is different. I don't think it's better or worse. It's just different. I don't want to see the real world when I'm, you know, doing my, you know, you know, lightsaber VR workouts that no one should ever see because they're very embarrassing. But that's sort of the point, you know, I'm alone. I'm I've gone somewhere. And then I will come back to the real world when I'm done. And I don't think there's anything wrong with both of those two existing. Yeah, I, I think the VR is dead as a on the premise that it has become a function of augmented reality headsets is overstating the case. VR is available in the quest, even with the pastor, VR is available in Apple vision pro. If you want it, if you want to have immersive view. So I think less VR becoming dead, more VR is becoming a function of a headset. The headset can do multiple things. It can do augmented reality can do virtual reality. I look at this to be more like tablets. For the longest time, people like tablets, they're interesting. Microsoft makes one bunch of other people make one. But what are they good for Apple came along, made one with its amazing touchscreen technology, and suddenly people found uses for them. A lot of people are expecting Apple to do that trick again. We'll see in January whether that's actually going to happen with the vision pro. But I feel like headsets are not dying. We just are still in the bulky tablet stage. We haven't got to the nice, thin touchscreen tablet stage of headsets. The fancy glasses where the AR is right in our like, yeah, where the glasses Megan and I are wearing right now could be mixed reality headsets. You just wouldn't know because they're so stylish. And I mean, and I would love that to be the case. You know, I think, you know, just based on Google being a little early to the game and some other contenders from Snap and Meta, kind of being like, interesting, but this is not what everybody's going to wear. You know, we're still in that sense of, okay, well, how does it work? How does augmented reality make life better rather than stranger? And I think that's why we get conversations that we're having right now is like, where are we going with this? And we're still in those like, it's like, it's like the second cycle of the early days. We were working on a top five that's going to come out on the YouTube channel shortly about 80s home computer flops. But the point isn't to be like, ah, home computers, what a flop. The point is, here are the failures that made the successes happen later. They this is how we learned what home computers were good at. We're going through that with these headsets right now. All right, well, let's talk a little bit about psychology, shall we? Psychologists at the Nick Day Omar Hallestimer University in Turkey. And I apologize if I've butchered that pronunciation, but I did my best have found evidence showing that married couples who regularly engage in phone snubbing, also known as fubbing, phone snubbing, fubbing, get it, have lower marriage satisfaction than couples who do not engage in such activities. The study pulled data from questionnaires specifically to married couples in Turkey. So specific, right? The description of fubbing is when people cut off conversations with others in real life to talk or text on their phone. I think many of us have either engaged in that or have been frustrated by the person maybe on the other side of the dinner table doing such things. If two people are doing it at the same time, it's called double fubbing. All right. So I mean, I'm going to keep going. More on this research. The psychologists created surveys to measure closeness in a marriage with phone use. So they sent out hundreds of phones to married people in Turkey. They sent out hundreds of surveys, not hundreds of phones. Yeah. Can you imagine? Just do it and see if you fub. Married people in Turkey and received back 712 completed surveys, nearly half and half male to female. The pattern seems to be, at least in this selected study, seem to be couples who reported more fubbing in their home also reported less satisfaction in their marriage. One of the solutions, and this might be obvious to some of you, is that married couples can try turning off their phones more often. Megan, what say you? Well, this is sort of, I mean, this feels like if you're ignoring each other, then it's not going to be good for your relationship. And one thing you've said that was interesting is you've either done this or you've had this done to you. And I feel like we're all always doing this to each other. Like I know within my family, like my kids and I, it's like they're ignoring me. I'm ignoring them. Like, you know, you just sort of the phone sucks you in if you're not careful. And they don't point it out. So like it's good to like point it out all the time. Like kids like to call me a screenager whenever I'm on the phone when they're trying to talk to me, which works, shaming works in this case. Yeah, I think it is screenager means you can't get off your screen. You're acting like a teenager because you're looking at the screen, right? Got it. Well, they make fun of it. It's because like, you know, there was like, I don't know, a couple years ago, there's some like PBS documentary, it's like screenagers, you know, it's like they always make fun of like everyone saying teenagers can never get off their phones. And they're like, have you seen my mom? And so yeah, things like that. I am a kind of a screenager. But yeah, I think, you know, it's interesting. And I think, I think some of this, I know we're talking about mobile devices in general. But you know, I happen to be, you know, I have a mobile device, but if at all possible, and I don't take my laptop with me everywhere, but I prefer to be on my laptop. And I have had people say to me, what are you doing over there? Like, why are you on your computer all day? And I'm like, why are you on your phone all day? We're doing the same thing. For the most part, we're doing the same thing. Checking Gmail, maybe some Instagram, looking at photos, that sort of thing. So yeah, I mean, I have definitely been on both sides of this. And I agree that sometimes just, you know, saying, let's look at each other human to human, or whatever, you know, maybe human to robot, I'm not judging. But, but you know, something that, you know, takes the internet out of it is not always the worst idea in the world. At the same time, I, I, I was today years old when I heard that flubbing was the term. Yeah, I've got, I've got three, three thoughts on this. First is, I never want to say flubbing intentionally ever again in my life. Second is, I think we do, we are learning the etiquette, because there's the opposite problem of you're actually doing something important on your phone. But because you're on your phone, someone thinks, Oh, well, they're just looking at Facebook, and they interrupt you, and you're like, actually, I was writing an email. So there's a whole etiquette that still needs to be worked out with, with use of these devices. But third and most important to me is this is an annoying thing. And in relationships that aren't going well, annoying things tend to get magnified. So it feels correlative to me, like the people who also are having problems are more likely to think of the problems and one of the problems could be this kind of phone snubbing that they're talking about. Yeah, the whole sort of like, you don't hear me when I tell you how I feel. Exactly. Right. It's going to be exacerbated if that person then is, you know, sometimes looking at the phone during the times where you feel most frustrated. Now what really upsets people about their phones is when they update, when you need to use an app, how many times have you tried to start an app, maybe even on your laptop, where you're like, I got to update this thing again. I have to wait for a download again. That's why today's episode of Tom's top five answers the age old question. Why do my apps always need updating? You can catch that at youtube.com slash daily tech news show. A lot of folks talking these days about the robots and the AI taking our jobs, but it seems like most experts don't think robots will take our jobs, but automation might affect our pay. Megan wrote an article for the BBC called will workers be paid differently in the age of AI? Megan, what's the concern with pay? Well, I think it's, it is the concern is that it's going to go down. I mean, that's all of our concerns, right, especially as like inflation is going up. But, you know, it's like, like we've been joking for years and years, robots are going to steal your jobs. And, you know, in the past year or so, there's been a lot of like, oh, no, we're going to work in concert with AI. We're going, you know, and especially there's going to be some great jobs for people who really under, you know, like understand chat GPT, like prompt engineers, for example, are going to be like paid lots of money for understanding how this technology works. And, and where there's not so much talk about just like what's going to happen to pay in general, like it would, you would assume and hope that if you were upskilled and you understood chat GPT or, you know, you learned how to work with AI skills that you didn't have previously that you would get paid more for that. But that's not necessarily true. And I talked to a bunch of economists and experts in the fields. It was just fascinating because no one really knows with the one thing that everyone does know is that like, it's going to be a really confusing decade where we figure this all out. Yeah, so a worker might not lose their job, but the extra productivity that the robot brings isn't going into their pocket. Basically, right? I mean, not necessarily, like, you know, a lot of places are experimenting with like the four day work week, right? So, you know, you work four days, and you get paid your same salary. And some for some companies, that works great. And for some, it's been, you know, terrible. And if you talk to workers who've, who've experimented with it, a lot of them are just working more during those four days, like they're working, you know, 10 hour days or 12 hour days and still working 40 hours just squeezed into four days. Right, exactly. I'm talking about salaried workers, you know, necessary, you know, salary workers who get this, like they just, they just have to be more efficient. And if they can't be that much more efficient, they're just working the same amount of hours. They need that's bad. Yeah, well, not that that's bad, but it's sort of like showing that, like, increased, like, you're not necessarily going to get paid the same for working less, like some people point out, like, look, the four day work week, you know, we're only working four days. Now, like, you know, it's like, we're going work the, it's going to be the end of work, and robots are going to do all our work, and we're going to sit around and relax and get paid the same. Well, that's not going to happen. You know, for anybody, myself included being like, well, okay, if I work four days instead of five in a typical work week, but I work the same amount of hours, does that really matter all that much? Obviously, totally depends on where you work and what you're doing. Do you think that widens pay disparity? Oh, yes. I mean, definitely, because they're going to, well, I mean, it could and it could not. So there's some of the experts I talked to you said, like, definitely, because there's just going to be, it's going to be very hard for people to, like, well, first of all, like automation comes to service jobs, it's already come to lots of service jobs first. So, like, those people might lose their jobs or they might have fewer shifts for those jobs, like fewer full time service jobs because of the automation. And so that means overall lower salary. But another expert I talked to you said that it's possible that this because of all this automation, you know, there was that sort of gatekeeping of these higher level jobs, like you had to go to MIT or Stanford or you, you know, you maybe law school, medical school. Yeah, right. Exactly. Yes, all those things where, like, you know, we know we've heard chachi BT can pass the bar exam, it can, you know, do surgery, maybe not that. But so that those skills might be easier for someone to have access. So it might, like, close the gap, the skills gap for people that didn't have access to that higher education. Okay, so there would be less of a barrier to entry to someone who hasn't gone to higher education to be able to get some higher paying jobs maybe. Interesting. So one of, oh, sorry. Yeah, go ahead. I was going to talk about the algorithms are also not necessarily our friends in a lot of ways. One of the experts I talked to, Vina Dubal, she is a professor at UC California Irvine. And she's done she's written like done a ton of research on algorithmic wage discrimination. And, and it's connection to monitoring. So there's a lot, you know, obviously, like workers are being surveilled more about their their productivity in general. So keystrokes and whatnot. And so like, there's this idea that you will be judged by how many, you know, how long your fingers are on the keyboard or whatever it is you're doing, as opposed to like, the time you're just sitting there like thinking about something that's work related. And so what she says is like the more that we, these algorithms will determine people's wages. So they'll have, like, very specific wages. And then what we also see is that there'll be that sort of black box that we've seen in all kind of algorithms where people don't understand. So like to be said, oh, here's your pay based on your productivity, but not to really understand what that means and what that means in comparison to someone else is like super frustrating for workers. And they're already doing it. I think they were doing it in Japan at IBM to computer scientists. And there were workers there, the unions actually said like, no, you can't do this. This is wrong. Although how different is it from the current system of we're going to pay you based on whatever the manager decided about you with no, there's there's even less transparency into that process. Well, I mean, we're sort of there was like traditionally, but we have been kind of moving more into pay transparency and pay equity and like a lot of companies are doing like, you know, just pay audits, like a lot of big companies will do pay. So I think the solution is we should we should have a similar transparency and audit requirements on algorithms. What are you using and why? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, which is more I mean, that's the big that's the big algorithm argument, right? Like how do we audit it when most of us don't understand how they work? Yeah, when there's a little bit of a black box going on. Well, we talked about subreddits earlier in the show. And here's a new one folks on the world of wordcraft subreddit. Notice that sites from Z league seem to be scraping Reddit threads to create stories. They seem to be automated because of the speed and the number of those stories. For instance, an author called Lucy read had about 80 posts per day. You're pretty, you know, you're, you're doing stuff at that level. So K for Kerrigan, another user posted about how excited they were that world of Warcraft finally introduced Glorbo and how it was hinted at in Hearthstone back in 1994. You might say, gosh, I don't remember that happening. Well, there is no such thing as Glorbo in Warcraft and Hearthstone came out in 2014. Not in fact 1994. Lot of folks picked up the idea ran with it commenting on how excited they were about Glorbo as well. And shortly after that Lucy read had an article up on Z leagues, the portal blog about how excited folks were about Glorbo. Z league has not commented or said more one way or another, whether or not the posts were automated, but the posting question has been removed. We should get Roger to try to book Lucy read to come on to the show. See what Z league says. No, clearly. Don't make me do that. Whether there is or is not a Lucy read that that is an automated post, right? They might be using a human's name, but the Lucy read, there might be a Lucy read who looks over those posts, but Lucy read is not writing any posts today. Clearly this is automated. I don't know that this is meaningful. It's funny. But it's, you know, yes, low quality blog writes low quality posts isn't exactly dog bites man, or actually it is dog bites man. It's not bad. It's funny. It's pretty funny. Very familiar with. Yeah. It's, it's a, I love that they used Glorbo as that. I don't know why that just entertains me. You like to say Glorbo, but you won't say fubbing. Definitely. In fact, when you said Glorbo, I started to smile. And when you said the other word, I cringed a little just involuntary reaction. Yeah. All right. Let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. This one comes in from Josh wanting to share some anecdotal evidence of Apple's improvement of their maps data. We've been talking all week really about Apple maps, Google maps, other maps, who's better, who's gotten better. Josh writes, I live in a small town north of Seattle and a few weeks ago, a couple of traffic intersections were replaced with roundabouts. Apple had them updated in less than two days. Google still doesn't have it. Waze got it only last week. But I understand that Apple Maps only works in a few Western countries when compared to Google Maps, at least in Josh's experience. He says, for example, my wife is in India right now and said Apple Maps is clueless. Google Maps is literally miles ahead. Get it? Yeah. There is, there is not just one map app that works around the world. No, it definitely depends on where you are. Yeah, the roundabout thing, that's interesting, that Apple was on top of that super quick, probably has to do with the fact that you're near Seattle. But I don't know. It could be just random chance that their mapping service happened to hit that neighborhood at the time that the roundabouts were done. It could be total chance. Maybe they have some data pipeline into city construction that the Google Maps isn't using. I don't know why that would happen. But these things vary from location to location and from time to time, too. I know we're going to Korea at the beginning of September and everyone says, don't use Google Maps or Apple Maps, use Naver Maps because Naver Maps is the only one that has useful data in the country. So it just depends on where you're going. Yeah, yeah. Megan, do you have a strong feeling about a certain Maps app? Yeah, I have a really strong feeling about Apple Maps and I always have. And I feel like people just they criticize it and it's not fair to Apple Maps. Also, I like it because I get notifications on my Apple Watch when I'm driving. Google Maps just started doing that too. Yeah, you can. You can do it. You can do it with a watch. But these things are changing every day. Well, Megan Maroney, thank you so much for being with us today. We know you're a very busy bee when you're not doing daily tech headlines or with us on this show. What else, where else can people find you? Well, they can find me everywhere that someone will let me write for them, basically. And I'm at MeganMaroney.com, but I'm also at MeganMaroney.JournalPortfolio.com. So yeah, that's it. That's where all my pieces are. So mostly writing about AI, but happy to write about other technology stuff or about my dog or about my personal life or anything anyone will pay me to write essentially. In fact, one of your recent pieces on Fast Company was about your experience trying to use ChatGPT and Bard as a life coach. And we're going to talk about that in the extended show, Good Day Internet. So if you're not a patron, become one so you can get that conversation. Find out how that went for Megan. Plus, it's Friday. So we've got a quiz because it's Fun Friday. We're going to test everybody's knowledge of the French, specifically their inventors and inventions. Just a reminder, you can catch our show live Monday through Friday, 4pm Eastern, 200 UTC and you can find out more at DailyTechNewShow.com slash live. We hope you all have a wonderful weekend. We are back on Monday with Justin Robert Young. Bring in the knowledge. This week's episodes of Daily Tech News show were created by the following people, host producer and writer Tom Merritt, host producer and writer Sarah Lane, executive producer and Booker Roger Trang, producer, writer and host Rich Strafilino, video producer and Twitch producer Joe Koontz, technical producer Anthony Lamos, Spanish language host, writer and producer Dan Campos, science correspondent Dr. Nicky Ackermans, social media producer and moderator Zoe Deterding, our mods, Fate Master, W.S. Goddus 1, BioCal, Captain Kipper, Steve Guadirama, Paul Reese, Matthew J. Stevens, a.k.a. Gadget Virtuoso and J.D. Galloway, mod and video hosting by Dan Christensen, music and art provided by Martin Bell, Dan Looters, Mustafa A., A-Cast and Len Peralta, A-Cast ad support from Tatiana Matias. Contributors for this week's shows included Chris Christensen, Scott Johnson, Justin Robert Young and Megan Maroney. If you're watching us live today, stick around for the patron version and thanks to all our patrons who make the show possible. This show is part of the Frogpants Network. Get more at Frogpants.com.