 Yeah, Eileen's actually working more. Well, it's hard to say, but she's There's more to do on Rotten Tomatoes. It seems like then Fandango. She's working on both of them. Got it and Movie clips calm that kind of runs itself though. Yeah, you clip the movies But yeah, Rotten Tomatoes is the one where I'm like, oh, yeah, she's actually like She's doing things new things there So what is what is the because I would imagine with Fandango, obviously you want to have everything that's in first run You're gonna want to have their trailers. Those are Produced beautifully by this by the studios. What is the unique content that Rotten Tomatoes? Creates and ships to its users. Well, yeah, that's kind of what they hired Eileen to do Hey, we need to come up with some shows So the one they've been doing at panels is your opinion sucks Which is a panel of critics and a host from Rotten Tomatoes gray David gray Drake Davis the former California governor my apologies great right. Yes Gray Drake hosts and then they have people from the audience come up and Disagree with the Rotten Tomato rating and tell why they like hate this beloved movie or love this hated movie And then the critics can either agree or disagree with them And they you know and hilarity ensues I guess I love the concept of that one just because Every time there's a review or there's something that swings one direction on Rotten Tomatoes either To to high of a rating or too low of a rating There's this huge swath of people that want to argue with why critics don't know anything So literally on the platform they're arguing about it's a great idea to like hash that out. Yeah, that's awesome. I Love that Wonder how I wonder how ghosts in the show would fair Yeah, I don't know if they did that they just did one Not too long ago wasn't just at South by I think they did one at CinemaCon or WonderCon They did one at WonderCon. I don't know if they did ghost in the show last week I don't think ghost in the show was out for people to have seen at that point So so what you're saying is that Rotten Tomatoes got outbid for Thursday night football Yes Exactly. All right. You guys ready? Yeah, let's do it here. We go This show is brought to you by audience members like me not outside organizations to find out more go to dailytechnewshow.com slash support Daily tech news show for Wednesday April 5th 2017 on Tom Merritt joining me Scott Johnson as he does on Wednesdays How is it going? Mr. Johnson? Great? I love Wednesdays I'm happy to be here and I'm thrilled about our guests today because I feel a little unworthy to have such a cool dude with us Very excited and very excited to have Rob Reed author of year zero Co-founder of Rhapsody and the author of the forthcoming book after on Rob. How's it going going great? I love Wednesdays as well and Scott you are too kind And I'm not I am not the co-founder of Rhapsody. I am the founder. Oh, you're just founder by apologies I didn't by the way to be perfectly neurotic about the details the company was called listen.com and the product was Rhapsody But I was I was the one and only founder of the only founder. Well, my apologies for getting that wrong I always try to be careful not to leave out other founders and I guess I just defaulted to that Yeah, well, it was your multiple personalities that I was I was flattered because the title co-founder implies that I have friends and You I swear That's very nice. They're just spin it that way We're gonna talk to you about your upcoming book in a little bit because you did a lot of research in In advance of that book on a lot of interesting things but in particular on super intelligence and it sounds like you you learn to Respect it and I also became briefly super intelligent myself Lasted about a half a second and then I went back to normal and thank God There's the secret right there first start researching But let's start with a few tech things you should know Microsoft published a complete list of the diagnostic data collected at the basic level and its forthcoming windows 10 creators update which starts rolling out April 11th You got basic and full basically and if you want to know what they're gonna collect that you can't opt out of this I'll tell you. Oh good because I would actually really like to know what they're gonna collect the UK's transport research laboratory Now it's a trial of autonomous shuttle services in Greenwich Greenwich rent what I said green. Oh Greenwich. Yes. It says Greenwich. That's how you spell credit Greenwich, yeah, look whatever never day two things on the show one. I bring a sparkling personality in two I learned a little something Anyway operating on a preset route near London's O2 arena at speeds of up to 10 miles per hour Is it just me or does that thing look like a love child between the Challenger Space Shuttle and a toaster? Yeah Well, and it was operating at Heathrow. So that may have been the point of conception Looks like one of those Star Tours thing to get in there Canonical announced it will switch its default user interface back to GNOME as part of a boon to 18.04 LTS in April 2018 So your long national unity nightmare is over. That's great. Yeah So much Yahweh. Hey, I got that one right or Yahweh. How are we say it? The Honor Meet Pro is available for pre-order in the UK That is going to cost you or put you back 475 pounds and it ship ships on April 20th A lot of people are saying this is this is competition for Huawei's actual pro line of smart phones because it's got such good specs And it's only 475 pounds. Yeah, the other phone is without honor is my clean on it. Ah, yes Kaplah now here are some more top stories YouTube TV Launched in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Philadelphia So they're starting in just a few major markets in the US service packages in more than 40 channels Including all the major broadcast networks Some access to CW shows although not the live stream where I am plus sci-fi Disney ESPN a YouTube red Channel, although also not live just stuff you can access on demand Availability of what's in the channels does vary a little by market You can also add on Showtime and Fox soccer plus for either $11 for Showtime 15 bucks for the soccer channel The app has three tabs pretty simple live makes sense Home which is kind of your recommendations here's some cool things you could watch and then library Which is for things you've bookmarked or recorded to your unlimited DVR You can record everything unlimited to your DVR first month is free and then after that It'll cost you $35 a month and after that first free month if you stick around they send you a free chrome cast And you can watch at TV dot YouTube comm or get the app on iOS and Android I feel like we've had enough of these services now Where it's becoming clear that the the sweet spot seems to be about 35 bucks Which I think is interesting. There must be some market research around that. Yeah, they're very well might be I'm I'm curious though about whether or not this thing you mentioned We were looking at earlier in the show you're talking about how the CW seems to have a bunch of sort of on-demand programming in there But nothing live Probably some of this stuff isn't done. I mean we're talking about a pretty limited launch You know in terms of markets in the five cities and maybe they couldn't get the CW live I do love the way the live interface looks they show you these big banner ad style Graphics of what's actually on each channel and then when you hover over them It gives you a live video preview of that channel without sound So you get you get a kind of a channel surfing aspect of it and same Similar thing happens on the web app as well. Yeah, Rob. What's your what's your take on this market? Do you think YouTube's got anything unique to offer in this case? It doesn't particularly feel that way I mean, it's one of the things that's maddening about this is the weird fragmentation of Videos where is the movie that I want? Where is the show that I want? Where are the channels that I want? It's so fragmented and that's the kind of thing that ultimately ends up driving people to piracy, you know It's like I tearing your hair out. Wait. I want to see that second episode of Westworld and it's not on this It's not on that. I mean this one's kind of interesting because it's it's basically mimics a basic cable offering Because it has a mix of some of those channels that a lot of folks want like ESPN and so forth I'm kind of blown away by how much because we cut our cable long long ago How much stuff we're able to get with an HD antenna right off of the air, you know Obviously, that's all your broadcast channels But it's like weirdly like dozens and dozens of channels that you don't get premium stuff like ESPN But between an HD antenna and watching the things on demand that you're willing to pay for and if you happen to be an Amazon Prime user You know, it's an awful lot of stuff you get without paying 35 bucks a month. So I don't know I Look at this and I think okay There are people who maybe the the reception where they live is not that good or maybe they just don't want to deal with the Antenna thing and a lot of people Brian brushwoods one of them just want to watch on their laptop or on their mobile device So for them, that's why PlayStation View Direct TV now Sling TV are all saying hey for cheaper than what you would pay for cable television service We'll give you the basics. We'll give you a skinny bundle and when I compare YouTube to those other ones This one's pretty compelling. It's got the major broadcast networks. It's got ESPN. It's got FX It's got What's the other one in here that I Tend to I will Disney's another big one. You're absolutely right. Yeah It's got ESPN which a lot of people want, you know, maybe you're not as big of a forest sports fan But they've got Fox Sports 1 here in LA. They've got Fox Sports West So I can watch some local games and It's It's easy to use The problem is like you say, I mean, yeah, it's got sci-fi. That's the other one. So I can watch the explain Yep, the the problem is When you say oh, but does it have AMC and then well no not yet, right? And we are at that point where For a lot of people You can get we've gone from well, you can't get everything to you can get everything But you may have to cobble together a couple of services and even then you still might save money But that becomes a mental block for a lot of people who are like, I just want the one thing, right Scott Yeah, that's kind of been my thing and also the other thing to keep in mind Despite the fact this is only in limited markets. Even those limited markets are going to be subject to local channel affiliate deals that may not be Duplicated across the board. So what you may get just like with PlayStation view or a number of other services What Tom gets in LA is not necessarily what I get from local channels in Salt Lake City in that market They may not be able to strike a deal with NBC But get a good deal with CBS and the opposite may be true in another market So that has yet to flesh out and I'm really curious What the differences will be when it does come to where I am my only big chief complaint about PlayStation view I really quite like the service. The only thing I don't like is they weren't able to strike the deals I wanted for the local channels and yeah, I could do the antenna thing and sure there's other ways But I kind of wish that was more universal and they could strike these these deals without the affiliate thing But I guess there's no way around that and the other thing I'll say is kudos to them for launching this in Giant markets. I mean oftentimes, you know, Google fiber first goes to Kansas City and parts of Spokane, Washington And nothing against those places, but it's it's gutsy to roll out something like this in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco That's kind of cool. You know, so I mean, I would personally premiere it in Spokane and parts of Kansas City Because I'd be scared to death of you know, scalability and all kinds of other issues But it's kind of it's gutsy of them to like go right out to the most visible Critical, you know snarky markets in America PlayStation view did a similar thing And I think it has a lot to do with those major markets have owned and operated channels So when you do a deal with the network you get the local channel and that just makes things a lot easier Well speaking of strange bedfellows in the TV market Amazon purchased the rights to live stream 10 Thursday night NFL games in 2017 you may remember last year. This was Twitter. They paid 10 million for that Amazon reportedly spent a 50 million dollar price tag to get to these games and It's largely the same deal in terms of what they're able to broadcast Amazon will stream the games for its prime subscribers So another prime add-on the and I shouldn't say I don't even have to pay for it Extra is just part of prime the live stream will be the same content as broadcast over the air by CBS and NBC That includes ads Amazon will have a small group of ads slotted to sell the stream itself So you'll probably see I'm guessing I'm gonna see this as bumpers and some other other original programming Like you might start an episode of man in the high castle and see and second reference to these upcoming games or something It seems like a way to do it, but it's interesting I don't know I didn't think it was worth 10 million when Twitter did it and I don't think Twitter's implementation was worth 10 million They kind of blew that maybe I'll feel differently this time, but because it's already part of prime I'm kind of more interested now than I was before I Think with Twitter and with Amazon it was both them saying well This actually doesn't solve anything, but it shows what we have it could lead to other things So yes an NFL fan isn't going to a switch over to Amazon just because of this But it could blaze the trail for Amazon to add a bunch more live sports programming once they have experience to this But to your point earlier with YouTube Rob, it's also more fragmentation It just struck me is so bizarre the Twitter deal in particular because it's like okay here We have 140 characters and the highest production value sports outside of the Olympics and not a whole lot in between So that always struck me as a bizarre deal But what I'm thinking of is it when I saw this deal was like Imagine if the NFL were a startup and was pitching on Silicon on Sandhill Road right now They'd have the $10 million revenue line then 50 million are we growing 500% next year We're gonna get 250 million dollars for Thursday night football then 1.25 billion in 2019 and 6 billion dollars in the year 2020 The National Football League that is definitely how I would pitch it I wonder if professional lacrosse could do that, but they've signed to deal with Twitter I don't know for how much but it was a couple million maybe not even right But maybe they can get Amazon to pay more for them next year and do this five times as much But you know what's left out of this press release is that the NFL has committed that the games are going to be five times as awesome Great news for NFL fans not necessarily anything other than the Thursday night games But the Thursday night games are gonna be nail biters you really you should only watch the Thursday night games really yeah It's a highlight five times the touchdowns five times the two-point conversions I can't wait five times the fights and injuries Interceptions you're just focusing on the good stuff. There's bad stuff that happens, too NFL doesn't like to talk about concussions these days though So they're gonna they're gonna steer away from that a little bit one-fifth the concussions. Yes. There you go. There you go they said Facebook added tools Wednesday to make it easier to report sharing of sexually explicit images without the subjects consent We're talking about revenge porn The new option has an image reporting option that you can select called nude photo of me Once an image has been banned Facebook's gonna use little photo matching tech to automatically block it not just from Facebook But also messenger and Instagram So if anybody tries to post that same image again, it'll get blocked at least they say what we're seeing more and more as the platforms They exist and then people glom onto those platforms They use them to create content or to put their personal lives out there or whatever and the platforms didn't come up with the idea of hey maybe that someone will use our site for revenge porn or I They don't even say I hope nobody does it's not even a concept anyone's really thinking about in the early days But it is increasingly on the platform to come up with a way to combat this stuff and that's interesting to me I don't know what the lines of that are I think it's ambiguous and there's a lot of mitigating circumstances But it's interesting to see Them take this step and certainly this isn't the first of its kind But to take the step to say this is the platform or on our platform You're not going to be subjected to this and here are the technologies We're gonna use and here is our methodology to get get the job done and that's for whatever reason fascinating to me because It's not like it was ever designed to be a platform to send revenge porn to someone you're mad at but because people can and do they have to You know they have to work around it and I understand it's like guardrails on a cliff Or it's like a million other things where it's not the cliff fault that people can fall off of it But it makes sense and there's some prudence and putting up a fence That's what this feels like and in the digital world I find that super interesting when I think they could make the argument that they've got nothing to do with that This isn't their content. They didn't put it up there They're just the platform and I'm happy to see that changing I guess the thing that struck me is curious about it is You know, I think of the concept of revenge porn I would imagine one of the last places where somebody would post it would be on Facebook because it's so attached To your name and your identity and so forth So it's good that they're they're doing this preventive thing But it feels like it'd be a weird weird place for somebody to post it But obviously it's got to be you know bouncing through their network or they wouldn't have done this Yeah, the other thing I'll just say is like I don't know If nude photos of George Clooney exist But if they are out there and if they start rocketing through the Facebook Ecosystem I am going to click. This is a nude photo of me Yeah, see if you can get that machine vision to Really you make a really interesting point Maybe it's just a volume thing though like maybe maybe Facebook is the last place that this happens But because there's a billion people on Facebook The last place that happens means actually a larger number of incidents given their size. Yeah, that's a really good point I mean the large the law of large numbers. They are larger nowhere Yeah, I mean they are the vastest numbers and of course people have fake accounts and stuff like that I'm I could I could see people hacking Facebook to do that kind of some people do it with their name attached too Like I mean it seems ridiculous. I you know, it seems seems unthinkable But but some people are like, hey, let me just send this around to a few of my friends And then, you know, and then the way that story plays out is that a friend of a friend is in that circle and the guy thought He she would be okay with seeing this but she wasn't and then she can use this tool But it like you say when you've got a billion people those kinds of situations Not only happened but sometimes happened multiple times. Yeah I also think it's a turning point for the technology of facial recognition on these services They're actually enough now to be accurate enough to be reliable Whereas a few years ago, I may have been worried that suddenly I wouldn't I wouldn't understand why photos of mine are being banned or my face was being blurred out or whatever Because of a claim that wasn't actually me like I look too much like the person involved or something So I think we're finally at a place where I think we're confident in in this facial recognition software for as creepy as it can be sometimes and you know, they're good at it now So, I mean, that's the privacy side of it is now your name is tagged Yeah Unless you're Rob and George Clooney. Yeah, we've got the separated Even even even DeepMind can't tell us apart I want to know what the I want to see the spike in search terms for new George Clooney just now as people were listening to this show Yeah, that would be a good metric to track a twitch news again, everybody twitches begun selling PC games This is something they've talked about for a while. It's now been implemented partnered streamers. We'll have a buy now button on their channel I'm a partnered streamer. So I want to test this When showing one of the 50 games that twitch sells. I suspect that library will grow customers I'm sure we're access purchase games in the twitch app and other services like you play I've not said I haven't read anything that says that you can do any of this through steam yet I think this is attracting third-party Launchers like you play like Potentially origin and others because they don't have the same kind of reach as steam So this is a good opportunity to do something a little bit different, but this is actually a really cool I'm excited about this as a cool revenue stream across the board sort of a win win win If it's a game people want to play they win if it's the streamer who's showing it off They get a little cut That's great. The developers benefit and certainly twitch benefits. I think it's a good a good thing I don't want to have to have another thing to manage my games though No, I don't either. I mean one of the big hits against twitch lately is Their purchase of the curse app and then them reskinning that and sort of tweaking it and relaunch it which app Basically put it in direct competition of discord and slack and some of the other collaborative tools, but also you know brought along with it this mod management capability that came with the curse acquisition and Trying to make this all-in-one communication service slash way to get games and share games and all of that That's cool. I mean it's cool in the sense that You know we were talking earlier about too much static It's like here's one place where everything is instead of you know having to go to a million places to get what you want But they've got a lot to prove about that one place. It's kind of buggy. It's got problems It was down for much of last week like there's issues So I actually I'm bullish about the future of what they're planning to do with their sort of all-inclusive Plan over there at twitch. I just think they're having some growing pains and that's to be expected Yeah, I think it's an intriguing thing. I mean I think this immediate proximity You know anything that tightens up the loop between demand You know generation and demand fulfillment is intriguing to me and it's something that the internet is uniquely good at And I've found this fascinating since you know 20 years ago when the first affiliate programs came out You could read a book review and click and buy the book through Amazon and that kind of thing And I think it'll be interesting to see what second-order effects come from this It seems to me that like if there's a game that you know There's 20 million copies out there and everybody already has it There won't be as overwhelming of an incentive for somebody to just stream that whereas if a new game comes out Particularly something that's fairly undiscovered There might become a whole Ecosystem of folks on twitch who really try to break new games because if they're playing something that a lot of their followers are watching Them play and say wow, that's cool I don't have that yet and that's intriguing. I kind of want to play that game You know that's going to be when you start getting a lot of those 5% royalties because that's when a lot of people Nobody has the game. You're breaking it. They're seeing it for the first time Why wouldn't they buy it with a simple click through your channel? So there could be a pretty intriguing second-order effect that will help more obscure games new games indie games That kind of thing to really get a lot of distribution through twitch. I think that's kind of fun It'll be it'll be fun to see if that actually happens. Yeah, it's also I mean do not underestimate the power of a successful twitch streamer Those guys have real in the nail sale of copies the nice thing is I think developers will be less inclined to make Twitch bait games. I call them games that are goofy and weird and has explode and why well because it plays well on twitch We'll sell more copies instead. Maybe they can focus on the game They really want to make the streamer still get involved in a way that gets the word out And they still sell a ton of copies without having to be gimmicky Yeah, and and twitch hopes that you guys are right because that means that all the people who make games We'll want to do deals with twitch together Yeah, no, there's a funny there's a funny second-order thing. So like twitch bait games I'll bet streamers are gonna be a lot a lot more reluctant to play them because if somebody sees that exploding head and says Wow cool and clicks it and discovers that the game sucks and in the back of the mind They're like that guy sold me this so he could get his 5% It'd be a lot more bitterness, you know because now you're part of the transaction And so it might create sort of funky market incentives to you know, cut down on the twitch bait games Because you know if you're in on that deal as the streamer who quote-unquote sold it You're gonna probably get a lot more bitterness than if you just sort of put it on your you know You kind of streamed it for a while for laughs. Yeah, you're touching your name to it. That's true Finally Zunum Aero out of Kirkland, Washington launched out of stealth today They have a plan to create a regional hybrid electric aircraft network by 2020 Zunum hopes it could take advantage of underused airport inventory 95% of US air traffic comes from 2% of its airport So we have all these regional airports probably see signs and you're like yeah But nobody flies out of there unless you fly your own airplanes They want to take advantage of that use those local airports and promise 80% lower emissions because they're using hybrid electric 80% cheaper fares because they're using these smaller airports that don't have the Infrastructure but also these planes don't need all of this refueling and everything and faster door-to-door travel time because you don't have to Drive all the way to that big airport. The planes have 10 to 50 seats. They can fly 700 miles They expect to raise that to a thousand by the year 2030 Zunum has been working with the FAA since 2014 on certification standards for electric aircraft And they expect that approval next year loads of question marks loads of question marks on this But I am fascinated by the idea of somebody coming in and saying hey if we can fly without the need for the Huge complex infrastructure required for these large jets. There's a huge Opportunity of capacity out there. Yeah, plus you've got you know all sorts of commuter Possibilities here people that are doing small puddle jumper stuff means municipal airports does you know as adjacent state or whatever You could well if I just need to go to San Jose right now I have to drive to LAX not that far from where I live, but I'm right next to Santa Monica Airport I could walk there get on a plane You know and fly fly to a regional airport that might be closer to my relatives in San Jose Plus any excuse you can have to not hang around LAX the better I say so here's my thinking this reminds me of Weird disruption coming reminds me. I mean like you said millions of questions, but it's like Elon Musk and electric cars It's like you know Space flight and SpaceX. I don't these are all Elon Musk plans, but but that's kind of thing That's what this feels like. Let's let's cease and disruption in the airline market. I would love that I'm gonna be the naysayer here on this one I mean when I when I read this I there's probably more to it than was revealed in this article because there's got to Be some arguments that go beyond this but there have been regional jets in the market since the 60s You know the puddle jumpers that we're talking about They can already land at these regional airports the reason that 95% of traffic goes out of 5% of the airports is that 5% of the airports is 100 airports I don't know what the 101st most busy airport is in the United States, but it probably doesn't have quite as many people living around it as LAX So that's kind of one thing and you know if Santa Monica Airport wanted to have regional jets landing there They'd be landing there already. I know a couple folks who work for surf air Which is kind of a private airport airline a really really intriguing That's a fairly disruptive model itself that flies between the Bay Area and Los Angeles And they said there isn't they have tried very very hard to get into Santa Monica Airport And they're just not allowed there because Santa Monica the community and also trying to shut down the airport So that's yeah, the community is anti Santa Monica Airport. They perhaps a horrible example But yeah, yeah, but they they don't want any 50 person planes coming in and out And so there has to be a notion that like there's this big body of airports That are not open to puddle jumpers and 50 seat commuter jets, but would be were they only electric Well, I just don't know what the Electricness gets you that the small jetness or the puddle jumperness doesn't get you lower cost quicker turn around time Because no free fuel and quieter now Yeah, so they say I mean the biggest problem with Santa Monica is the noise from the jets So are they saying because it's running on electricity. It's gonna be far quiet I mean, I that's kind of like a you know, a show me thing like airframe manufacturers Difficult airframe manufacturers probably the most capital intensive business, you know in the world or one of them certainly and It you know, the lead times on creating an aerodynamic jet are many many many years So, you know, it's easy to create a PowerPoint and say we're gonna be 80% quieter But actually doing that man is tricky and I also feel like this is kind of neither fission or foul I mean, it still feels very plain like companies that was mentioned this article like Zee which Larry Larry pages backing and there are others like that though. These are things that have a vertical takeoff and landing So when you go from, you know, the hundred and first to the five thousandth airport I don't really know what you gain There's probably reasons why those airports aren't being commercially served just yet They've been around for decades But when you get to vertical takeoff and landing suddenly you open up the range of places where aircraft can can operate by Ten orders of magnitude or maybe five but like so much that feels like true disruption And that's why I think you know and Zee is probably the highest profile one But there are a number of people who are trying to create sort of very very small footprint You know slow passenger count point-to-point aircraft, I mean, it'll be like You know uber black car times five in terms of the price point But we know that there's people who live there That's where I feel like the real disruption is and this feels kind of like a a quarter step in that direction The and that's the problem is they can't do a thousand miles till 2030 the development on this may be too long To make use if this could launch today And it and all those questions we have like well, can you really be quieter? Can you really turn around faster if all those were yes? I think this this does do some really interesting stuff to air travel because it starts to work like a bus station Where you don't have to drive downtown in order to take a bus But they're like say they're a super huge number of questions here. Yeah Hey folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in less than five minutes Subscribe to daily tech headlines.com. You can do that and listen to this both All right, uh Rob gave a talk at the new co shift forum earlier this year where you talked about some of the research You did for your book after on uh looking into quantum computing neuroscience synthetic biology And you started to find a couple of things one was Wow, we're getting wider access to doomsday technology And then that led to to some some thoughts about super intelligence But let's let's start with that. Hey, you had some really interesting points in this talk about How we have way greater access to things that could cause wide amounts of damage We we will soon I guess I'd say um, and so we are in the The the twilight of the time I believe and this is a very unfortunate thing I think we were in the twilight of a time When a lone nut can kill dozens of people We have lots of lone nuts. We have them in every society every year Roughly a million humans kill themselves and a tiny tiny tiny fraction of them Are determined to take as many people with them as possible And in societies where the most deadly weapon they have access to is a knife like china The body count is much lower than when the the most powerful weapon they have access to is an you know Essentially a machine gun, which is the case here in the united states, but still You know the lone person who is suicidal and determined to take as many people with them as possible They have a relatively small group of people they can take And so what what I ended up researching in the so in the course of researching my book It's a novel forever on i'm sorry after on which comes out in august as you mentioned and thank you um I started looking at some of the kind of intermediate future to even nourish future trends that we have And i'm intrigued by something that's called the carlson curve, which i'm sure a lot of people are familiar with that That's basically the speed with which We move forward in in synthetic biology and carlson curve was specifically applied to the speed with which Genetic sequencing gets cheaper and the thing that's intriguing about it. It is way steeper than moore's law The moore's law curve is we know how transformative that is the carlson curve is way way way steeper And you know sequencing which is to say reading genomes, you know, it was three billion dollars And 13 years to sequence the first human genome and now you can do it for a thousand bucks And this is not very many years later We're about to go through a similar compression on dna synthesis, which is creating dna sequences that do not exist in nature And there have been plenty of horror stories and and and you know kind of ghost stories and horror movies Based on you know bad dna run amok but We're entering a time when things that would take a wildly sophisticated laboratory They go from that wildly sophisticated laboratory To simple machines where any of us can hit a print button Far far quicker than they ever have before and when that happens with synthetic biology I do start getting concerned about how widespread You know certain tools and certain techniques that are only the provenance of geniuses right now You know, we can't even keep civil war era technology out of people running amok I mean gatling guns back go back to the civil war How are we going to defend against some of this other stuff that's coming down the relatively near term pipeline? Yeah, now that is scary enough, right scott. Yeah, I was going to say that I mean that alone is scary I I'm I'm curious how Like you say you think we're at the cusp of it. We're at the the infancy of it Like what's the timeline? I mean not to predict this exactly, but I'm curious what you think the how soon are we going to go from Where we're at where we're at now to where anybody with an internet account can Internet account access to the internet can cause real mayhem and real destruction Luckily, I believe in the case of synthetic biology I believe it's in the in the range of decades rather than single digit years But it is in our lifetimes if we all exercise and eat right and take care of ourselves And you know, it's and the the thing that is you know, amazing So when you look at this, it's it's really all about The yawning gap that separates the genius required by true innovation and you know The mere competence required By replication once the tools get more and more sophisticated and um, you know, so yes I do think luckily it's in the realm of decades But once a sequence has been put together I mean they've been a couple of instances Of what's called gain of function research and what gain of function research means is basically You're taking it's usually a pathogen for whatever reason. It's usually, you know a bug that we don't like Um that somebody gets hold of and they add capabilities to it. They make it more virulent or they make it You know something that's a little bit more robust out in nature They these are and and you know, so you can have you know, for instance um a bird flu microbe that is as As contagious as chicken pox and that was actually created in a lab and the people who do that have Goodish reasons for doing it reasonable scientific reasons and they know that they're good guys But the trouble is once that DNA sequence exists Um, that is like, you know, that is less data than you have in one percent of your latest selfie You know, we we do have that somebody did Create the Spanish flu Virus they basically did very very tricky Back engineering and figured out what that DNA sequence is and now that's everywhere Now nobody has a print button right now that can print up the Spanish flu virus Nothing nobody can print a sequence is long Even the the top end labs would have an incredibly hard time doing that But we're all going to have those print buttons in you know a single digit number of decades And once that's out there and these these codes have been cracked and they become widely distributed By people who know that they're good guys and know that there's only three other people in the world who can do this That's just a matter of a separation of time more than anything else And so I think it's it's it's a cause for intermediate future alarm And it's something that we need to think about now That's one aspect that you use in your book to good effect Another ties into this in my opinion, which is you you also did some research on AI and machine intelligence and super intelligence and What I found fascinating was the idea like okay, let's say We get everyone on a good mental health program and we identify the loan nuts before they can press the print button and And we put in practice Humanity that that guards against that sort of thing I I think that's a tall order, but let's say we do it But then we create a super intelligence That goes off on its own and has its own ideas about what's good for humanity and can simultaneously press I don't know thousands to millions of print buttons at the same time Tell us a little bit about what you found as far as the reality of of AI and some of the I don't know if dangers is the right word or just respect for what it could do to us Yeah, so let's we'll start with that scenario that you said like what if we get to a point we will inevitably get to a point Um in again in a single digit number of decades. Thank god not a single digit number of years But we will inevitably get to a point where Lots of people maybe it's just lab techs, but there's a hundred thousand lab techs in the world We're lots of people will be able to unleash really really outsized mayhem on the world And so you put forth that notion of like well What if we've got something that's very person of interesty and it can really predict exactly who's going to do what And it's got the level of ubiquity and social omniscience to really figure that stuff out Well now look none of us are comfortable with the things that Edward Snowden revealed And what you just described as maybe our diving save This is the one thing that could get us out there is a wildly wildly intrusive intelligence regime And so that is a and like wow you described that and you have just you know You've described a nightmare for a lot of us, you know, you know, kind of techie idealists And the intelligence that it would take to operate in that domain to keep an eye on everybody Do we really want this panopticon? I think a lot of people would jump up and say absolutely not But if the alternative is to have this wildly Unstable situation which we're counting on an enormous number of people not to do anything wrong Well, that becomes a very very very sort of tense choice So you ask, you know, what about the super intelligence? Well that you know as you start going a couple Moves into the table and you think about oh man We have these widespread weapons of total destruction which we could have at some point in our lifetimes And oh we could have this intelligence regime. That's really really intrusive You start getting to the point where gosh Maybe we need something like a super intelligence to keep an eye on everybody And then the tension that you get to with that is you know, the the famous risk But a lot of the smartest folks out there elan musk bill gates even hawking and so forth are very much on the record in the last 24 months of saying Super intelligence is a terrifying prospect because if you have a super intelligence that's willful that has its own set of goals The odds of that those goals Being aligned with ours Probably diverge the smarter and smarter it gets and if it gets to the point where it is a smart in relation to us as We are to bacteria How can bacteria have the faintest idea what I want to do? And how can a bacteria align its incentives and its interests? My interests with its interests, which is kind of like where we would be stuck with the super ai the hypothetical super ai so this this is obviously um A towering question from the science fiction canon and a fascinating one of you one that people have been grappling with for years Whether it's 2001 a space odyssey or terminator or eagle eye or lots and lots of other things But when you start looking at those two end points A lot of mayhem with a lot of people with you know Incredible ability to unleash terrible destructiveness on the one hand, which feels terrifically unstable And this very frightening idea of an alien super intelligence not alien from another planet But alien to us in terms of its intellectual capacity. It's coming from inside the planet Yeah, and it's kind of door number one or door number two. I wish there was a door number three But I can't see one You know, so it's it's um, and that's actually something that You know, if I can say if I can anthropomorphize my own novel That's something that the book really wrestles with that question of which is the greater or lester evil That we are going to someday have to choose between and you know, the book quote unquote does not have an opinion It presents the two sides And I think it leaves the question with the reader because I I don't have the answer Do you be excited as as a creator of this fiction that you have this format to do this? And I feel like this is how we as humans Grapple with potential human foibles and future stuff We can't predict and human fears and survival fears as we throw a bunch of fiction at it I guess I guess that's good, right? Do you feel like that's cathartic? Will that lead us in a better place the fact that we can wrestle with these things in a safe book format? Before we have to be faced with the real thing Well, I think that storytelling is actually it's one of our one of humanity's superpowers as an intelligent species Is the fact that we story tell to take one example Um, you know when george orwell wrote 1984 back in 1948 He made concrete and real to people who were many many time zones away from any totalitarian regime How awful totalitarianism is where can be and made a lot of people very very fearful of A plausible dystopian future and I think in sort of sounding that alarm bell He I wouldn't say he inoculated the free world against totalitarianism But he certainly made people Much much reddier to be alarmed about it and to try to fight it when they saw it on the rise Uh, similarly, I mean this notion of a runaway art artificial intelligence We can talk about it very very quickly with anybody at almost any level of society because we all have been exposed since 2001 a space odyssey in some cases even earlier To the notion of a super ai and how dangerous it is and so I think when storytellers You know get in there and they think about plausible Dangerous scenarios whether it's an asteroid hitting the planet We fretted about that in the 90s and we have increasingly good early warning systems about that now I don't know if there's an a to b relationship, but I kind of think there is so I think wrestling with these issues Hopefully while there's still decades off in a storytelling format can be really really productive Especially if the storytelling is trying to wrap itself around the constraints Of technology in the real world as we inhabit it. Um, so yeah, and yeah as a science fiction writer It's a blast talking about these things Well beef in our chat room says I think a truly intelligent ai will pity us. I hope he's right And I hope that you all are being very good to your pets because what comes around goes around You guys really need to check out After on once it's out if you if you like thinking about this sort of thing it's you're you're gonna absolutely love it Thanks to everybody who participate in our subreddit You can submit stories and vote on those at daily tech news show dot reddit.com real quick before we wrap up some good news from Preston Grisham Who works for comp tia? He said it's another killer year for the us tech industry adding 182,000 tech jobs to the us tech workforce Up 6.9 million good news for geeks out there Anyone that is interested can visit cyber states dot org to get a state by state breakdown of tech jobs and wages Now, I know if you're having a hard time finding a job That doesn't make feel too much better because it's not all roses out there But at least the trend up and up until this report has been good So thank you Preston for sending that along cyber states dot org to take a look And rob reed. Thank you for chatting with us This is one of the best conversations ever when you can talk about, you know doomsday and super ai's all at the same time Let folks know What's going on where they can find out more about what you're doing? I am uh on twitter. I'm at rob underscore reed. Um, I'm also on medium basically slash rob reed rob reid And um, I'm going to have a website finally and probably a matter of about 48 hours But it's not up yet. No and it's going to be one of two URLs So i'm not going to talk about my website right now But i'm on twitter and i'm on medium and those are the main plan i've got a I've got a facebook feed too as an author But I don't keep it very lively because facebook is just hard to work with Well, the best thing to do just follow your twitter and and you'll be announcing when stuff is available, right? You got it Absolutely Scott johnson, what's going on with you? Oh, not a whole ton of stuff other than just the usual i'm going to vegas next week So there's a lot of cramming and you try to get everything in and done but um If you are a fan of esports and you like the video games that blizzard makes you might like this little show I do called core. It's all about heroes of the storm that airs on tuesdays live on my twitch channel Which you can find at frogpants.tv Of course everything we have going on at frogpants is at frogpants.com and you can follow me on twitter at Scott johnson Thanks to everybody who gives a little value back to this show for the value they get from the show including liz Michael tomorrow and daniel a cog garrum and many many more at patreon.com slash dts We just sent out our monthly update Thanking people giving you a little look at the schedule ahead. So check patreon.com slash dts for that Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com live Monday through friday 4 30 p.m Eastern alpha geek radio.com and diamondclub.tv and our website is dailytechnewshow.com back tomorrow with justin yet robert young Talk to you then Who is part of the frog pants network? Get more at frogpants.com I hope you have enjoyed this program Well, rob w scuttus one in our chat room is already saying this should go in the best of so I think I think it was a good episode Really? Yeah, for sure. Thank you. That's wonderful. I that was a blast. Thanks for having me guys. Oh, yeah, absolutely Thank you for being here As I think I mentioned we we hang out, you know for the next 15 or so minutes while I publish the show If you're if you've got time you're welcome to stay you don't need to be delighted to hang out Oh, excellent excellent. Yeah, we also pick our show titles now Uh with people which people submit through the chat room and they show up at showbot.tv If you want to take a look at them roger usually pops back in here and reads them I think he might be back shortly are people nominating them as we speak. Yeah, they are There's roger. You can actually vote there too if you want showbot.tv. Yeah showbot.tv Just click on the line you like and it'll pump it up Top of the heap is goodbye world instead of hello world It's coming from the inside. Oh, it's coming from inside the planet Unity no more get it no more. Yeah. Yeah, I like relaxed. Don't re la x It's moving. It's rocketing up the charts too. I'll add Although I'm curious to know what the FFA would I mean Basically because the airspace around lax is already congested I'm wondering if there would be any kind of conflicts or would you have to stack All of our regional airports that already have uh empty capacity So they the the whole premise is built on the idea that these airports have The ability to put more planes in the air. They just don't have enough planes It reminds me of like dark fiber weirdly. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good analogy Yeah, the plane bandwidth needs to be bumped up Well, that's part of the um, that's part of what's terrific about uh, sir fair And I didn't want to like go off on too much of a tangent because that's you know, that's like a kind of a nishi service Are you are either of you guys familiar with sir fair? No, but we have a similar thing and I can't remember what it's called Uh, well, it is because you're in la like sir fair It you're kind of a plausible customer particularly when you were going up and down Yeah, luma a lot What it is is it's a private airline literally they run regularly scheduled flights Out of private airports and so they're they're flying out of like, um, san carlos up in the bay area They're running out of uh, hawthorne in la Carl's bad, you know a few places like that and and then they also have some commercial airports So there's I think burbank and oakland, uh, they also fly in and out of and the idea is you pay x dollars a month And I don't know what x is anymore because we don't live in the in in california anymore But you pay x dollars a month and when we were doing it it basically worked out that if you were flying up and down Three or four times a month or more and I was it was very competitive with southwest Um, and but you were sliding into a private airport, which was very underutilized relatively speaking seven minutes before your flight Hopping on to this sort of eight person propeller plane actually is a propeller plane So it's a lot quieter because it wasn't jets and going on your merry way and um, it was it's a pretty neat thing I mean, it's got thousands of members in california. So it's not Scaling up to like google numbers your facebook number Wasn't the whole impetus for that was for travelers who traveled a lot But just wanted to avoid doing tsa and security because it was such a well, you still have to do security, right? It's just super fast. No no security. Oh really? Yeah, you're going you're going through private terminals And so it's a mix of benefits. Um, if you really travel a ton Then you actually are either breaking even or saving money The experience is actually really really there's so much less wear and tear because I was thinking about jet suite Which is a little bit of a different thing. Yes jet suite. It's very different very very different. Yeah Surfer is just is just california short hop Very frequent and they got like probably a dozen maybe even two dozen flights a day between the bay area and la already regularly scheduled, etc Pretty cool. Yeah, jet suite is short hops on private jets that have extra capacity And they their routes are pretty limited. You can go to la to las vegas. You can go to bozeman from sacramento I think and there's a weirdness. I understand too like if there aren't enough people then the plane's not going to go Yeah, and and so forth. Surfer is a very very regularly scheduled thing and they're running it like an airline sounds like Yeah, it's like it's literally it's like a gym membership You pay one price and you go as often as you want in the course of a month and if you do travel enough And then I guess it's really I also understand it's particularly popular in santa barba because There's not a lot of commercial inventory down there There's like united has like two flights a day and there's a lot of companies tech companies that have santa barba operations And need to bring people up and down from san francisco. And so they've done very very well there from what I do All right, so we're going with goodbye world it's the runaway Bye world I still think I still stand by my assertion that any intelligent any super supreme intelligence that rolls out One of our labs eventually will just get so depressed It will like why am I around I'm just done you need to read rob's book then Yeah, I don't think because I can't say any I can't say why I'm saying that because I don't want to spoil anything but It made me think of Something something I bet I know what you made you think What one of the intriguing things this is a little bit like fermi's paradox Is if you imagine what a super intelligence would do if it woke up and was self aware and had a good sense of how The world was put together probably the first thing it wants to do is hide Right, it doesn't necessarily want the government to know that it's there or hackers or other people And so it's like as with fermi's paradox like You know a super intelligent alien civilization that was actually here And didn't care for us to know about it. We wouldn't know about it because they're smarter than us They got across the galaxy The same thing could be thought of for a super intelligence. And so for all we know google's already wide awake And playing checkers with watt watson, you know Could be I mean i'm wondering if it would succumb to the same i mean i should rather read your book The same frail like you know it for all intensive purposes It's you know as long as your storage capacity it's going to survive right You you wouldn't be able to Like if there was a genius next to me And I felt that his knowledge Would threaten the fate of humanity on this planet. I could just take my car and run over right it's done I could do that with google right like what am I going to hit how many things of what that did How many backup copies does it have exactly like would it have the same level of philosophical Debate oh is this replication of me actually me You know like if if you know I mean there's all these things that that stem for the fact that we're a very mortal You know species we we know our end is at some point in the future regardless of who you are how rich you are You're gonna get to it But it would probably I'm sure that intelligence wouldn't have any of those same You know qualms is like it's a very black mirror, isn't it? It's like what if I just sit here Under the ground for for for millennia just let whatever is on Infesting that the crust of the planet just go over and wait for the next asteroid and I'll just start over I'll just have everything waiting No conflict of conscience and that you you would you would also you you wouldn't have the same sense as timescale, right? It's time. It's it's for us. What would be an hour could be like a geologic era Yeah to it I kind of feel plenty of time to out with us right that wanted to oh, definitely It'd be great. I mean like at some point it just turned into a giant transformer and the planet You know it starts cracking and you get a giant robot out of it. Which should be kind of cool, but you know It's a little bit like frankenstein Yeah, and I think part of it is I don't want to say that rob reed is the mary shelly of our age necessarily But There's something there. Well, it's also a little bit like young frankenstein. I hope Yes, that's a marriage of the two You know, it's funny because I don't think I don't see it as both either malevolent or benevolent. I mean it is You know what it would be But I'm curious because like all these things like we we tend to focus things from our perspective, but No, and I think this is one of the this is one of the fascinating things. I really love about Ai and and all that it's like it's in many ways. It's familiar to us But in any other ways, it's not it wouldn't have the same Number of concerns. I mean would it have emotions and if those emotions You know would it would have to worry about things like oh, am I going to find a Spouse, you know, am I going to have to you know, when am I going to get around to having kids and You know, all that's definitely going to be smart enough to talk to us as if it does understand those things though Yeah And one of one of the certainly I think the most sophisticated book about Artificial superintelligence risk For now and it's been out for a couple of years, but it's brilliant and it's very methodical as Nicholas Boestrom b-o-s-t-r-o-m Wrote a book with the with the The the the trips off your tongue title. I think it's simply called artificial superintelligence More syllables in the leading brand, but you know, Nicholas is a very deep thinker He's a sort of philosopher. He's either Cambridge Roxford. I've forgotten which he's Swedish himself And he really really goes through these issues and one of the things that fascinated me in the book Is he said one of the most promising but also dangerous vectors of research is what they call neuromorphic programming What neuromorphic programming is is it basically says Let's look at brain processes and brain structures because the human brain is the you know You know got the greatest processing power of anything that we know of and replicate that in code Not because we know what it's doing, but precisely because we don't but we know it works So let's start replicating this stuff And he says it's very promising because of course we do know that the human brain works But it's dangerous because then you can start unleashing things that you don't understand because you did not design them Now one of the things not to spoil anything about my book But one of the intriguing things to me about neuromorphic programming is if you go down that path It becomes to me a lot at least plausible that the super intelligence or the digital intelligence Will inherit certain human foibles strengths and weaknesses traits and interests And that makes it more accessible to us or at least it definitely makes for a much more fun story Yeah Yeah What if we had we had a supreme intelligence that was that the emotional state of like woody allen when he made Right made out of the 80s I'm not going to spoil anything But I will say that one of the four people talking right now may have written a 560 page book based on that very premise Oh interesting And it's scott johnson Wait a minute. Is this book called annie hall by any chance? Uh Yeah, yeah, no, this is good Uh, I can't I can't wait for your book to be out rob and scott, uh, and roger I'd be very happy to get you guys copies if you're interested It doesn't come out until august 1 but if you guys would dig reading this thing, um, we'll have galleys next week Oh bellies wait, where? Uh galleys galleys, uh beautiful Vegas I was gonna be in vegas next week and I'd come get a signed copy, but Oh, i'm not going to be in vegas myself not bellies. No galleys We'll be at bellies casino where we we're all we're all sprawling science fiction novels are launched All right. Well, we are all updated. Thanks everybody, uh for hanging out for watching us We will be back tomorrow with jesson robert young. Thanks again rob Thank you guys. That was a lot of fun. That was awesome. Thank you. It was awesome