 And I want to make sure you're not picking up any feedback when I hear you guys talk. No, it's all good. Good. Super. The angle's a little better. When you were on the other day, you were kind of like this. You're looking straight at your little more level than you were. I'm becoming more professional over here. I actually went to Best Buy yesterday and bought a webcam. Oh, what'd you get? I got the Logitech, I'm sorry, Logitech 920. That's the one. As far as I could tell, was identical to the 922. The 922 had the advantage of a higher number, and it was $30 more. So I went with the 920, even though it has that very unprostigious number, which is two integers lower than 922. Now the C920 is, I can't believe it's still. Like it's, what, now, six years old? Yeah. Mine is 12 hours old. It's solid. It is solid. So I'll give you a little tip. There's an app called Webcam Settings. You're on a Mac or PC? Yeah, I'm on a Mac. So on a Mac, Webcam Settings allows you to do a whole bunch of stuff like I've actually narrowed mine. One of the problems with this is it's a little too wide. Yep, it is. And you can turn off the autofocus because the one problem, you can always tell somebody using a C920 because their focus will bounce. If you move it all, it'll go zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Yeah, I try to follow them. What is the name of the app again? Webcam Settings. Yep. I don't think it's in the app store. I think it's local. All right, strike it, Rich. He's working on it. This is that. Yeah, I will get that. And you know, it's funny. Yeah, it's set up profile. I did not have any idea of what I should buy, but I just went to Bestspy. I looked at that wall of product, and it was the 920. So I'm glad that I got the spot. You made the right choice, for sure. Yeah, yeah. It is. Yeah, you can set up little profiles. So I have one that's, you know, sets the white balance and turns off the autofocus and all that. Oh, cool. You don't have to tell it every time, talk to the to the Logitech because it'll flip automatically back to talking to the eyesight. Oh, right. Yeah. No, I've gotten pretty good at like keeping up with that. So a constant battle, a constant battle. Hack five. Darren is in the chat room, saying hi from Bangkok. He's still hacking across the planet. Oh, people have been wondering where he's been on Fridays. And that's where he's in Thailand in the chat room, typically a couple hundred. Like right now it's 115. Oh, wow. Can I see the 115? Is that like an admin view thing you got? No, I just see it in my colloquy. If you're looking in the web version, I'm not sure if it shows. Yeah, I'm in the web version. All right. This is cool. So I'm about ready to start. If you guys are, we should do that. All right. You're good with your stories, Allison. I am. The only thing I gave you was Bankhouse Lamp. Yeah, it looked like maybe phonetically, I'd be OK with it. Yeah, you'd be you're pretty good unless you wanted to be all German and go bank house. But I wouldn't. Lamp. Lamp. I'm no Leo Laporte. I can't do it. All right. Here we go. Daily Tech News Show is powered by you to find out how head to Daily Tech News Show dot com slash support. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, April 11th. Windows creators update day 2017. I'm Tom Merritt. Patrick Beja is still out. He'll be back next week. But we have Allison Sheridan alongside. How's it going, Allison? Welcome back from your South America trip. It's good to be back. It's going to be back on US soil. A little hard getting here, but we made it. Well, I'm glad you made it. We'll talk to you a little bit more about that trip, specifically experiences with Project Phi and a couple other tech tips there. And also coming back on the show, we did not scare him off last week, although he scared some of you. Author Rob Reed, author of the book After On, is back to follow up on on some of people's thoughts about superintelligence. It is great to be back here. Are you more or less or no different in your level of fear of AI since we last talked with you last week? It's still just a nice steady 12 out of 10. I believe I tweeted, Tom, that Rob was intelligent, witty, interesting, and terrifying. Please never have him on the show again. So you scheduled him when I was going to be on. Thanks. I appreciate that. That's the way we do things around here. Face your fears, Allison. I will put my fright mask on later. At least expected, Allison. It's going to be terrifying. Big thanks to everybody who sent in responses and questions and comments. We're going to get to a bunch of those in a little bit. But let's start with a few tech things you should know. AMD announced the acquisition of Austin based VR startup Nitron or Niteron, which designs wireless chips for low latency room scale VR video. So you might see some AMD chips in wireless VR down the road. Oh, exciting. Nothing better than VR for me. You know, you love the VR. I know that. Yeah, I think this is really essential, you know, the the wirelessness because I think once that comes out, we're going to look at today's VR rigs, the way that we look at those old school diving apparatuses where you have a space suit and a breathing tube. I mean, they used to have to do it awkward. It is so awkward. Yeah. Remind me to send you an article from the computer chronicles from 1987 when you make that prediction. So all right. Instagram now lets you combine disappearing photos and videos with text and permanent images in the in the Instagram direct private messaging feature. I think the reason people are so excited about this today is it's the first time they're not directly copying a Snapchat. Feature in a while. Well, it's copying a Snapchat feature and putting the two pieces together into one. Smash them up. Yeah, kind of. Exactly. Well, I went in and tried to send you one. I don't know whether it worked or not. Oh, I'll have to look. But I tried it. It didn't alert me. But yeah, it probably did. That's a good thing. It was really stupid. And Nvidia posted the Mac OS drivers for its GeForce 10 series cards, AKA the Pascal architecture cards. So that ranges from the GTX 1050 all the way up to the Titan XP. I mean, probably only really helpful for people who have older Mac pros, the non-trashcan Mac pros. But now they could upgrade their video cards. I guess that's a step in the right direction. Now here are some more top stories. Facebook added the ability to send and receive money between messenger groups. If you're using Android or desktop computer, you could do this one to one on Messenger previously. But now you can do it through groups. You tap the plus sign to get more features, then choose the dollar sign when you're in the group. And that'll help you decide whether you're sending or requesting money who in the group it should apply to, then enter the amount. You can either enter an amount per person or you can enter a total and have it divided equally amongst everybody. You put a label on it for what it's for, like pizza money or whatever. And then messages will show up in the group chat as the people pay. I mean, I'm not sure what else besides splitting a restaurant check, this will be handy for. Yeah, maybe getting money from everybody divided equally would be something you'd really want. Well, yeah, that's how it works. Exactly. Oh, I thought it was just giving money. No, it's either way. Sending or receiving. Yeah. OK, so like we're all going on a ski trip. Everybody owes me 20 bucks or 100 bucks, whatever. I feel really conflicted on these Messenger app payment things because I started using Venmo inside iMessage and it's just really easy. Is that a good thing? I mean, it could be too easy, right, Rob? Yeah, you know, the thing that's interesting to me about, like mentioning Venmo as Facebook starts taking on this kind of thing, I wonder if Venmo and things like that are going to be kind of become kind of like those. Remember the old GPS freestanding GPS devices that cost about 500 bucks in the days before smartphones? I just wonder, as as as Facebook, it's really good at this kind of thing. I just wonder if there's any reason to have all these extra things like we used to have extra devices that now are integrated with our with our phones and so forth. So, yeah, I think this I think the ease of use is a good thing. I mean, it makes it easier and easier to not carry cash unlike carrying cash. But I wonder about the future of Venmo, which I know wasn't the question, but it popped into my mind. No, it's a fair point because my reaction is I don't want Facebook to have all the operations. So I prefer Venmo partnering with iMessage to do the same sort of thing like Allison was talking about. But as soon as you compared it to GPS devices, I'm like, yeah, I'm like that one guy who is like, I don't want to use GPS in my phone. I need a dedicated device for the quality of it. And that's still true if you're an orientier or something like that. Yeah, I wondered who was still in that market. I saw that there was still, yeah, you know, in the closet right over here, Rob. Now, the other thing I'll say about Venmo is I've been using Venmo for a couple of years and, you know, it shame on me for not looking at my settings. But I was using it for probably 18 months before I realized that they had defaulted me to make all payments public. And so all of my friends on Venmo were seeing all of my transactions. Now, luckily, I didn't do anything remotely sketchy. I was just sort of paying the people who looked after the dog when I was out of town and not a whole lot else. But the fact that they, A, that there even is a notion that I want all my payments to be, you know, social. Hey, everybody gets and not only that, that's the default. I mean, I'm sure Facebook could be more evil than that. But that really, really irked me when I realized I've been broadcasting all these payments for all this. A little too much social there. A little too social. Yeah. Well, you know, the ease of use thing came to mind because I'm sure you probably talked about it yesterday. But Starbucks came out with the thing where between now and the 23rd of April, you can give someone a five dollar Starbucks gift card if you use the Starbucks app inside iMessage on an iPhone. And when you do that, you get a five dollar gift card. So they're going to let like 40,000 people do it up or up until April 23rd. And everybody I told it to did it and went, oh, man, that was way too easy. I spent $15 here, here, here, even though you only get it once. Yeah. Yeah, I like all the hoops they make you jump through. You need to get it on this platform, on this OS between these hours. It reminds me of the Lyft coupons I get. Hey, you got 20% off if you drive between four and five in the afternoon in central Manhattan on a Tuesday, et cetera. All right, well, let's see. The Qualcomm has countersued Apple claiming breach of contract, including misrepresenting performance comparisons between iPhones using Qualcomm's chips and those that did not. Qualcomm also claims Apple threatened it not to make any public comparisons of its own. Qualcomm also claimed Apple misled government regulators about Qualcomm's business practices. Apple sued Qualcomm in January for a billion dollars, claiming Qualcomm charged royalties on tech it had nothing to do with and filed two antitrust lawsuits in China. Apple began using Intel modems in some of their iPhones in 2016. So I mean, there's there's an Apple Qualcomm fight over licensing fees going on here. But the other interesting thing is is the idea that Apple. I mean, as we've heard, there was there was another story out today that one analyst believes that they're handling their own power management chip, and that that sent a poor company who's been making the power management chip for iPhones stock tumbling. We saw that happen earlier this year on a different chip. And Apple picking a fight with Qualcomm. I really do feel like Apple really just wants to bring all of this in house and the few patents that it needs to license from companies like Qualcomm to make that happen, they want to get as cheaply as possible. Well, I want my iPhone to be as cheaply as possible. I don't know that those two go together. Yeah, pass the savings along to me, aren't they, Tom? Yeah, the Windows 10 creators update started rolling out to everyone. It'll come out over the next few months. So if you didn't see it come today and you're just sitting back waiting for it, it may show up at any time. They're doing it slowly so as not to slam their servers. So as not to slam their servers. However, if you don't want to wait, you can trigger an update by going to Microsoft and downloading the update assistant. If you do that, you should know to pay close attention to your privacy options as you install it. It'll pop up a screen with them. You'll want to look at those because if you wait for the update to come to you, it preserves your existing privacy settings and they have changed some, but if you go and get the update assistant, it changes them all to default and you have to change them back. Tuesday also marks the end of support for Windows Vista pouring some out for them. What's wrong with Microsoft? Why did they mess with your privacy settings in one way to update not another? Why do that? I imagine this is an oversight where they're like, Hey, the way you're supposed to do this is wait for us to push the update to you. If you go get the update assistant yourself, you know, all bets are off. Yeah, that's why I'm selling though. They did the one of the latest critical update to the iPhone. They reset your iCloud settings to things that maybe you didn't pick. Oh, Apple did that. Yeah, right. Apple and Microsoft both doing the same thing as mine. Well, I'm still on Windows XP, so they can do what they want to Vista. I haven't fallen for that one yet. You might want to check into that. You know, that stuff you're afraid of. Yeah, be afraid of XP. No, I'm on Mac. I'm on Mac and Windows OS was XP and I stubbornly stuck to it for years after it had allegedly been retired. And every time I hear a Microsoft story about drivers being cranky and all these updates, I'm just really glad I don't do that anymore. Well, Windows 7 is the modern version of that Windows XP attitude for people. And Windows 7 has been holding its market share against Windows 10. Windows 8, people are upgrading right right on up from Windows 8 to Windows 10. But a lot of folks on Windows 7 and a lot of these are enterprise, not not just home users are sticking with Windows 7 still. Now, to ask a moronic question, you did not mention Windows 9. Is there or was there never any such thing? No, they they they went right from 8.1 to 10. That's it is 9 an unlucky number in some large market. Kind of like they used to have no 13th floors in hotels. Like nine, we're going to lose an entire. I can't remember exactly. Alison, I don't know if you remember it had something there. Their explanation was done with a wink, but it had something to do with, you know, it was so good that we had to just skip right past nine to 10. The only my theory was that OS 10 had come out. And and so was Linux went to 10. You can't have 10, 10 and nine. Yeah, and the the other part of it is that Microsoft does not intend to put out another Windows. They are going to continuously update. This creators update is the is a rather small update, but it is the second after the anniversary update that is part of Microsoft's new plan to just continually update your operating system. Maybe they should name each update after a large predatory cat or something like that. Yeah. Well, so here's something interesting was after. So OS 10 goes 10.1, 10.2, 10.1, we're up to like 10.32. Now, they just went ahead and change it after Microsoft said, we're going to call it ours 10 and we're going to stand that forever. They said, OK, ours is Mac OS now. Yeah. Take that. Well, Tom kind of snake this story a little bit, but financial analyst, Bank House Lump, in reduced its rating on chip maker dialogue, claiming Apple is working on a battery saving chip that would replace dialogue's power management chip that's in iPhones that could happen as early as 2019. Apple accounts for around 70 percent of dialogue sales. Hey, man, they're just doing it to them. They're doing it to them again. Now, granted, this wasn't Apple making an announcement. It was a financial analyst get wind of something. But it is the second one of these where a company really is has a large part of its business dependent on one manufacturer. I think that's a business one to one thing, though, right? If you build your business 100 percent dependent on somebody else. That can. What are you going to do, though, if you're dialogue and you're making a decent living, you know, you're making a decent business out of out of making these batteries, these power management chips for for laptops and tablets and phones and then Apple comes along and says, we're going to do more than double your production. You're going to say, no, you take the money, but you also put a little plan and say, OK, about 2.5 years from now, we're going to need to lay about 70 percent off. Yeah. I mean, Rob, that's that's just part of business, I guess. Right. Yeah, I'd say so. And it really we've seen this movie many times before, and I'm reminded to just date myself of something that went on in the late 90s, which was called Intel had a big push to what they called native signal processing or NSP. And the idea with that was, you know, in the sort of like these are the salad days of the X80 chip kind of architecture, there were lots of functions on the motherboard that were done by ancillary chips made by companies that had nice little businesses and then Intel gradually said, OK, you know, now we can do all MP3 encoding on the chip rather than having like an ASIC or a specialized chip that will encode this or will play back that that will do this other function. They gradually inhaled all these functions into the chip. It's called the native signal processing, you know, initiative, I guess. This feels a lot like that. And I certainly understand that if, you know, if Apple is sitting there and they're taking in a chip from a provider that provider is obviously making margin on it and because Apple has the ability to manufacture it at least the scale or something approaching the scale of this this provider, they can just basically take whatever margin dialogue is making and knock it out of the cost of the phone. And yeah, it's just it's life in the big city of the free market. And it's it's ugly and brutal. And it sucks when you're working at a company that gets disruptive. And I know that as somebody who worked at Silicon Graphics for a number of years in the late 1990s, it sucks. But, you know, the alternative is a command economy driven by somebody in the center. And that's just we've tried that, you know, it just doesn't work. The Soviet experiment, all kinds of things. So yeah, it's it's just the way things are practiced. So long as Apple's not. Excuse me, being underhanded and cheating in some manner. And obviously Qualcomm seems to think that they are so that sometimes the brawl sometimes lands in court. But yeah, I think this is a movie we've seen many, many times before in tech and we'll continue to see. Well, Tom, last week, I think you talked about a story of one of the myriad of Android vendors who wasn't doing well. And and I posted about it in one of the Facebook communities I'm a member of and somebody said, well, what else are they supposed to do? Apple, they can't make iPhones. And they could make refrigerators, cars, you know, books. There's lots of other industries. So the answer is really diversify, right? If you see that you're going to get 70 percent from one company. That's why that's why a company like Samsung is still profitable when their phones explode. It's because they have dishwashers and all these other things. And financial services and chips and chips, they make a ton of chips. So, you know, I hope for the best for a dialogue that they that this either doesn't end up being true or they end up coming up with another another way forward. On the other hand, I think it's very interesting to see Apple bringing more of this in-house because, again, they don't build them. They design them. That's what they've done with the with the chips. And then they have more flexibility to get, say, a Foxconn to do assembly and to do manufacturing. Whereas with dialogue, it's you use our power management chip or you go find another company that that makes power management chips. What Apple seems to be wanting to do is say, well, we'll bring the design in-house and then we can just go to anybody who has a has the capacity for it. And that gives us more options, could probably save us some money. And I think another angle on this is in places like India, where Apple has to meet a certain standard of your product was made in India. This gives them more firepower for that if they can actually have their designed power management chip made at the same plant that is making the iPhones that get to be sold in their stores in India. That's a good point. That's that's really interesting. Well, after United Airlines had police forcibly remove a passenger from one of the flights yesterday. Did you guys hear about this? Lordy, did anyone not hear about this? Joking when you told me about it. Wow, video of the incident is, of course, raced across the Internet, everyone posting on Twitter. But some people are noticing that their posts about the incident have disappeared or even just posts about United Airlines in any way. The next web collected several reports led mostly by Jay Beecher, whose deleted tweet joked that United Airlines was using a training video from the late eighties and then had a gift of Indiana Jones. Or, you know, they throw the guy out the window. Another person claimed they were just asking United about their flight for next week and their post disappeared. So I feel like this isn't a conspiracy. One person told the next web that a post about United was removed, but then later posts in a similar vein were not removed. So I'm sort of fascinated not on the conspiracy theory. Like a lot of people are like, see United and Twitter are conspiring to stop us talking about this, because the worst posts about this incident are not being removed. But I do wonder, like, what algorithm is going wrong that's causing these things to disappear? It's the British soccer team. Actually, it's a funny little glitch. Manchester United is actually the Borg-like power behind all this. And they mistook some of these things as being denunciatory statements about their prospects of winning in the UEFA Cup. I obviously don't know what I'm talking about. No, I mean, it makes as much sense as anything else I've seen. It does. It does. I'm like, we did joke over the very beginning where you never told anybody what story we're talking about, just in case somebody didn't see it. You might want to tell them what it actually was. Oh, I mean, no, I don't. I don't want to go into it. There's so, so many people have gone over it. A passenger was forcibly removed from a flight yesterday. OK, I mean, that's that's that's all. That's the only amount. You can go elsewhere if you want to get into that conversation. I just want to make sure because I've been that guy who's like, what are you talking about? Oh, go look it up. Go look it up if you haven't heard about it. But it was a you know, the passenger was forcibly removed. There's a whole thing about him being a doctor and overbooking and all of that. But what what what does fascinate me is that United posts are disappearing. That's not that's that's not untrue. And I'm wondering, is this a thing that's been happening without us noticing in other topics, but they weren't as big as this one. I actually like the theory that Max Trollbot has come up with in the chat room. Max Trollbot suggests that perhaps Twitter overbooked. That does happen. Then they're just bumping tweets. They're like, you know, we just don't have the ability. They're physically ripping them off of the Internet and the tweets are squirming and yelling and screaming. But there are need to get back to their patience. That's how they want to do. I think there's some other tweets they should have kicked off the plane first. Yeah, well, that's probably true. You know, I think it's an algorithm weirdness, but I can't I can't think of a reason why. It could be a spam filter where there's so many people posting about United suddenly that that it trips some spam filter. But if you have theories on the mystery of the disappearing tweets, by all means, send them to us feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. And folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in around five minutes, be sure to subscribe to our sister's show, which actually appeared in this feed today. That was my fault, not on purpose, but now you have a sample. DailyTechHeadlines.com is that show. And let's move on to our main topic. All right, after on is Rob's book. We talked about it a little bit last week. We talked a lot about bio hazards and a little bit about AI and the dangers of AI. And before we get to the various points that people sent in for Rob to follow up on, Allison, you were you didn't want to leave your house after you heard Rob's interview. Why was that? Well, because there just seemed no hope. He didn't leave a little door open of, but if we only blah, blah, blah, then we our lives won't be doomed. And, you know, this sounds like a funny old lady thing to say. But in general, I've been kind of like, well, my life's been pretty good. You know, it's going to suck for you. But I have a little grandson. And now I'm thinking, oh, man, it's going to be horrible. Rob, before we get into the feedback, do you have any hope for Allison's grandson? Yes, Allison's grandson should read my new book after on, which is available on Amazon. Chapter 36 is full of sweetness and light. No, I think the part of the issue was the talk that started this. I did this talk at the shift conference in San Francisco. It was in this very artificially constrained format, which is called Ignite. And the Ignite format is interesting and it forces people to be very concise in what they say. But they're also these sort of artificial boundaries. It must be a five minute talk. It must have 20 slides. Each slide must have 15 seconds. And as the speaker, you don't even have the remote control in your hand to advance the slides. So as a result, a certain amount of nuance exited the discussion. And I think when we start talking about things like synthetic biology and artificial intelligence, because the topics are so complex and the scenarios get very, very hairy, very quickly, it's hard to discuss them in really crisply in just a couple of few moments. And so the the the very short answer is, yes, I think there are a lot of survival scenarios for us. But we need to think very carefully about what synthetic biology and what super AI could mean for us in the 15, 20, 25 year scenario. Now, because these scenarios are so complex and there is so much realm for unintended consequences with them. But yes, I do think that your grandson will live to see at least his freshman year of high school and quite possibly college, maybe. I feel a lot better now. All right, let's get to Sunil wrote in and apologies to everyone to save a little time and get to as many of these as possible. I'm going to be summarizing the emails. But Sunil thinks super intelligence will be a gradual evolution, achieving consciousness, he thinks, by the end of the century. At that point, we can become AI ourselves. He posits that would make it easier for space travel because you just bring the hard drives with us on. You don't have to bring our bodies. You can download us into new bodies at the end of the trip. And he's like, don't you don't have to worry about job loss, Rob, because we are the AIs taking our own jobs. Yeah, and that is there is certainly a dominant thread or a thread out there that says we will become the super and intelligences and will merge with our machines. And Ray Kurzweil is a big proponent of that. So I don't take issue with that possibility. It would be fabulous for space travel because forget about hard drives. You'll be able to travel the speed of light. Just being my bits, you know, to Alpha Centauri or wherever I'm going. And I think Sunil's time frame may be entirely correct. He says end of the century. That sounds entirely plausible to me. And I, you know, Ray Kurzweil has done the calculations. He thinks 2045 other people think sooner others later. I don't have an opinion on that. The one thing that will disagree with Sunil on is gradually. And I use the analogy of flight. Did flight have gradually happened gradually? And I'd say that there are three milestone moments in the history of flight. First is the first century AD. That was the heyday of what they called tower jumping. Now, if you were going to fly by tower jumping, you would put feathers on your arms and try to make them as aerodynamic as possible and then jump off a tower or in some cases, I believe it was cliffs. So that's milestone number one. December 17th, 1903, Orville Wright flies 120 feet. And then it wasn't another 2000 years and obviously being playful. Sunil, I'm not meaning to be pejorative. I'm meaning to be totally playful. But it clearly wasn't 2000 years before Wilbur Wright flew 240 feet. In fact, it was 1969 and we go from tower jumping 2000 years later, 120 feet. Roughly 70 years later, we're walking on the moon. And so things once they get to a certain point, there is nothing gradual about them, especially if you're riding an exponential curve, which we definitely ride when it comes to technology. We're riding down the Moore's Law curve, right? And so things start mounting very, very rapidly. Flight never really actually mounted an exponential curve. It got very efficient very quickly and then it plateaued a couple of times. But even with a non-exponential curve with flight, look at what happened. And so the question about whether artificial intelligence or what's called artificial general intelligence, which is kind of thinking like a person and thinking creatively and out of the box and all those things, will it slowly creep up on our level of intelligence and then slowly surpass it in a way that we can see it coming by many years and then hang out with it as a peer for many years and then watch it slowly recede, it could happen that way. But what I think is far more likely is that once that exponential curve starts mounting, we could see an artificial intelligence go from turtle or tortoise level intelligence to human level intelligence in a matter of perhaps even ours. And our level of intelligence, there's nothing magical about it. It's just where we happen to be. It's not like a very precise astronomical unit or something where there's a natural quitting point. Once it gets going, it's going to blow past us as quickly as, you know, whatever flight it was that first made it to 100 miles blew past the 120 foot milestone. It's going to go blow past us without even thinking, without even noticing. And so I believe I think most of Cineal's points were spot on and very well taken. I don't think when or if and there is an if. I don't think it's necessarily going to happen. But when or if this emerges, I think it's going to happen so quickly that where we stand on that path is just a completely arbitrary point that gets passed with extreme rapidity. It does feel like climbing the roller coaster. Like right now we're climbing the roller coaster and we're about to come right over the top. Tipping point in that one. Yeah. Lots of folks hit on very similar points here. So I'll try to summarize several of them. Merrill asked if two organizations develop an AI with different algorithms, will they compete or cooperate? Alan Char further imagined a world where we had many AIs with shifting alliances, complex political relationships, not only with each other, but with humans as well. And then Robbo even brought up the idea of AIs with varying levels of intelligence, some less intelligent AIs than others that might even use humanity to control humanity. So not even having to be as super intelligent if they wanted to stay in control. So this is a really interesting question that is debated a ton by super intelligence theorists and I particularly point to a book that I'd recommend to anybody who's interested in these issues. It was a book that came out in 2014 by a guy named Nicholas Bostrom, B-O-S-T-R-O-M, which is called Super Intelligence Paths, Dangers and Strategies. And one notion that Nicholas or Nick developed extensively in his book is a notion called Decisive Strategic Advantage. And that's something that I actually, not to shill for my book, but the novel that I wrote after on, this notion of Decisive Strategic Advantage is quite central to the storyline. Now we don't know if this is going to happen, but this actually ties very closely to what we were just talking about. If in fact intelligence expands exponentially once the ball gets rolling. The notion of there being a really smart super intelligence and a less smart one and an average one kind of flies out the window because the one that's ahead isn't just ahead by five or 10 or 15 percent. It's ahead by a degree that, you know, compounds exponentially. And the advantage that you get by just being a day or two ahead might be so overwhelming that there simply is absolutely no room for a second super intelligence, like there is no silver medal. The first one gets there and then its lead grows so quickly that if it has any reason to want to be a monopolist and it has any reason to not want there to be competition in this world, it will simply preclude the rise of any other super intelligence or if it's non diabolical and it just kind of does its thing and ignores them, any other super intelligence is going to be irrelevant because it's going to be orders and orders and orders of magnitude behind. So that term Decisive Strategic Intelligence is what Bostrom and now others use for this notion that perhaps we don't know there could be a multipolar world, but it seems like the momentum of things will take us to a point where the first one across the finish line is also the last one across the finish line. This makes me think and maybe I'm not really understanding what super intelligence is, but when you've got somebody who's really, really smart, they don't want to spend their time and energy figuring out menial things. So why wouldn't a super intelligence want a minor super intelligence to, you know, okay, you just go deal with cryptography for me because I, you know, I could do that my sleep. I don't want to waste my energy on it. I'm over here making bio nuclear weapons. Well, that super intelligence could very quickly go so far beyond what we're able to do. We don't want to do menial stuff because we can only focus on one thing at a time. So now let's imagine the super intelligence very crack, very quickly gets great. It's at multitasking and that's super intelligence says, okay, fine. I'm going to clone a girl super intelligence then it could be it could be gathering rather than hunting, you know, we don't know. And maybe it creates sort of like essentially very specialized intelligence that yeah, it's like I got my email responder. I've got my this, that and the other thing, but I'm going to be the one sitting on top and those are essentially like little functions that I'm so bloody intelligent. They just sort of run underneath me like, you know, little minions or something. Yeah. And that's part of the thing is the super intelligence, something that is intelligent in relation to us as we are to bacteria is so inaccessible to us that we're kind of struggling with analogies and philosophy and we try to think of what it would really be like to be inside that head. That's that's why we truly don't know. Are you sure we're not already there? No, I'm not sure of that. And Elon Musk for one seems to be quite convinced that we are already there and that we're living in a simulation that may be the pet of a super intelligence or a lazy 15 year old with a science experiment or who knows. So there's right back to Nick Bostrom who has calculated the possibility is greater than 50% that we are living in a simulation. I like that because if we're already there, then I don't have anything to worry about. Yeah, you don't. And there's probably if there's probably an afterlife when you think about it because if we're in a simulation, there's no reason for, you know, right when you're at the pinnacle of your powers and your creativity and your, you know, your relationships and everything. There's no reason for that to shut off merely because you die. Now, there isn't a physical world in which we're all materialists and we don't believe in spooky stuff. But man, if we're in a, if we're in a simulation, all that's are off. We better hope for good game design. I want lots of end game content. There may be, you may still be in the cut scene at the very beginning of the game, Tom. Yeah, this could all just be preamble. Yes. Last one, Colin Tennyson pointed out that there have been a lot of research about how important emotion is for decision making described Oliver Sacks and his writings about and findings that, you know, if the emotion centers are damaged, sometimes people are incapable of making decisions. And Colin says, is it possible to create technological intelligence that does have steady and persistent emotions, but not volatile emotions? So this is a really interesting issue and it has a companion issue. So there, Sacks and others have written on this notion that our emotions are kind of like hardware acceleration for decisions. We end up coming to conclusions much, much faster than we could if we analyzed everything because we have our guts to sort of guide us. There's another theory out there that's kind of tangential to this, but it's related. That suggests that there's something about encountering the physical limitations and constraints of a physical body that helps boot up consciousness. And so these are both ways of saying that maybe there's something about this sort of meat space that we live in and the constraints that it involves that enables us to make decisions much faster than perhaps something digital ever could and allows us to attain consciousness. And those are interesting ideas we really, really won't know until we boot up in digital consciousness, if we ever do, if those things are right. There are actually two things. Again, I'm not, I'm sorry to sound like I'm shilling for the book, but those are two things that I get into deep in my novel. And then I therefore got deep into with folks when I was doing research. My feeling is that emotions are in fact hardware acceleration for decision making for a lot of reasons. And Sacks went into a lot of it. Stephen Pinker has talked about some of that stuff as well. I'm less sure if a physical body is necessary for consciousness. All right. And our final question, and I know we got more and I apologize we can't get to all of them, but Big Jim in our analysts slack said, when are we getting a sequel to year zero? That was a great book. That is very kind of to say that. So speaking, okay, so a brief thing, year zero was my first novel came out a few years ago, as it happens, that novel is on sale, digital sale this week because the next novel is coming. So this week it is a buck 99 on Kindles and Nooks and any other digital platform. So that's just a little bit of a of a, I don't know, a plug in Big Jim. Big Jim, thanks for bringing it up. The new book is called after now, after on it comes out August 1st, it's not a sequel per se, but there is it does exist in a in a related universe because there are two characters in the book who appear in year zero. The diabolical cousin of year zero's narrator, the author of the book, Pugwash, I love that name, is also in after on, as is the terrifying lawyer, Judy Sherman. So it's kind of a sequel ish and the date is August 1st. Thanks for asking. So I think what big what he's trying to say, Big Jim is once everyone has bought year zero at a price, work on a direct sequel. All right, let's get to Allison with sort of our pick of the day today. Thanks to everybody who participates that are subreddit, by the way, dailytechnewshow.reddit.com definitely helps us figure out what to put in the show. And and for our pick of the day, Allison's going to talk a little bit about the text she used on her recent trip to South America. Mostly you wanted to use Project Five because of the good international rate. Yeah, so Tom and a few others, Mike Elgin in particular was on my podcast talking about how he uses the Project Five SIM card to get cheap data on travel. So this stuff is the Project Five SIM card is only $10 a gigabyte. And so for for one gigabyte from AT&T, it would have cost me $240. So, you know, not quite what I wanted to pay. Now, in order to do this, though, I had to buy an Android phone. This is Allison and her Android phone with my ever so slight Macadosh bias. And so I bought the five X and put the Google Five SIM card in here, formatted it, and then I was able to put it into my iPhone. So actually, Stephen, I brought two iPhones on travel and you can get one with a phone number and a data SIM card and data and a second one that shares the data plan. So you don't have to be going, OK, well, you get 100 megabytes and I get 200 megabytes and you have leftover and I don't have any. You don't have to mess around with that. And it worked flawlessly and I know a lot of people are yelling, oh, T-Mobile is unlimited international calls. Well, the regular T-Mobile plan, I think it's called T-Mobile One, something like that. It's only 2G access and if you get the one plus it's 3G access. This was LTE in a lot of places in the big cities. Yeah. We hiked Machu Picchu and we had 3G on the top of Machu Picchu at like nine thousand. Yeah. So Steve's up there, Facebooking video off to. So we spent we spent a lot of day where we sent almost seven gigabytes and that was only 70 bucks for almost three week trip. And like I said, we didn't we didn't watch a lot of video unless it was a video of our grandson. Then we watched it. But everything else was just, you know, us sending pictures and stuff. So that was the number one thing. And then that turned out to be a really important accessory when Steve's backpack was stolen. Oh, no. So I hate it when somebody steals your anything on a trip. But a whole backpack, it sounds awful. And I can just say, I hope they fed their family for a year on what was in his backpack because we are way too smart to pack in our luggage, his laptop, two GoPros, a camcorder. Let's see, he had his Kindle in there, a Mofi juice pack. And and we had travel insurance, but that didn't pay for more. It only it capped out at $500 for electronics. Real real happy with that company. But anyway, the most important accessory I bought on brought on the trip was a small flash drive. I brought a 250 60 or 120. I forget what it is, SSD. Before we got on that point before we went to that airport, I downloaded. Oh, yeah, Steve's Rico Theta S was also in there. Another hundred and fifty bucks. So that was nice. I so I brought this this SSD I took. Steve had all of his photos had been downloaded to his Mac. I backed up his Mac to the SSD. I put the SSD in my backpack. And then I had all of my photos on my camera and on my Mac. I took my memory card out of my camera and I put it in his backpack. So when we got back, we lost three thousand dollars worth of stuff, but we did not lose our photos of the blue footed boobies in in Galapagos or our hike to Machu Picchu. So if I have one bit of advice, it is bring a backup drive and put it in the opposite bag of whatever wherever the other data is. Now, that is such a good tip because I think people always, you know, we talk about backing up from the point of view of your house. But when you're traveling, you know, you've just taken those pictures and you may not have thought about whether they've synced up to your online backup. And did you even have an internet connection? And so that's that is an excellent tip. And we turned off those syncing features. Yeah, a long purpose, right? Because you don't want to use all that data. Right. Well, if you want to read more about Allison's travels, go to podfeat.com and check out her blog post. You go into a lot more detail there if you want to follow exactly what that that system was. Yeah. And don't forget the photo. Yeah. Oh, yes. If you're watching the video and we'll have the link in the show notes as well. Allison took a great picture. Is that on the Galapagos Islands, actually? Yeah. Because I'm one of the islands. I don't I don't remember which one we went to like seven of them. But I purposely packed a DTNS shirt and had Steve take a picture of me in the Galapagos so I could send it back to you guys. And I put it in the I think in the boss's slack. I'm not sure. One of one of the slacks, it took me like 12 tries to get slack to obey me to put a picture up. But that picture was just for you guys. That's great. And I know our listenership among Galapagos turtles has skyrocketed since then. So thank you very much. I mean, Guanas, the Guanas love the Guanas are huge fans. Yeah. Send your pics to us, folks, feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com and you can find more pics at DailyTechNewShow.com slash pics. Once again, thank you, Rob Reed for coming back on the show so quickly. This is great. It was great. Thank you for having me. And if people want to keep and keep on top of all of your projects and when after on comes out and any other new stuff that you may have in the works, where should they go? I guess three places. I am at underscore. I am Rob underscore read on Twitter. I am slash at Rob Reed and it's REID in both cases in all cases at medium. And today I launched my website. It's after hyphen on put in the hyphen really. I love having punctuation and it may suck. I just mentioned in the chat room, it may be broken. I put it up today. There is a contact form which also may be broken. But I think the contact form is working. So if anybody feels like banging on the thing, if you see typos, if I embarrass myself with my long-winded bio, anything like that, I would love to hear from any of your listeners. I hope the site doesn't crash anybody's browser. But it went up just hours ago actually. After dash on dot com. You got cool quotes from people like Hugh Howie and Chris Anderson and stuff up there as well. It's awesome. Go check it out. Allison, anything else to tell people about before we're out of here? Well, I actually want to give a shout out to Alistair Jenks from New Zealand and Barbu Shots from Ireland who kept the Nocella cast running while I was gone. They both did episodes. It was even a chit chat across the pond because we're coming up on 12 years of the Nocella cast without ever missing an episode. There's never been a hiatus. Never missed a show since there was a couple of weeks right after I started the show where I pod faded and then I came right back and we haven't missed a show since. So a big shout out to both those guys. They did great shows. It was really, really cool. Check it out. Podfeet.com. We were going to get Bart on the show. We are going to get Bart on the show. We were going to do it tomorrow, but something came up. And so we're rescheduling him, but but definitely going to have Bart on to talk about password hygiene one of these days. Excellent. He's going to be awesome. Thanks to everybody who gives a little value back to this show. If you get value, if you enjoy this show, all we ask is that you give a little value back. And there's loads of ways to do it at DailyTechNewShow.com slash support. We tell you all the ways. And of course, the main way we're funded is patreon.com slash DTNS. Thanks to Chris Seddon, Frederick Nordgren, Kathy Greenwood, and many, many more at patreon.com slash DTNS. Our email address is feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. We're live Monday through Friday, 4.30 p.m. Eastern at AlphankeekRadio.com and DiamondClub.tv. And our website is DailyTechNewShow.com. We will be back tomorrow with Scott Johnson. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at FrogPants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program. I think that's wrong. I don't think we are having Scott Johnson on tomorrow. Oh, no. Oh, I think you're not, too, because I think you said that. Oh, you're right. Yeah. Sorry about that. That's. Scott's going to panic when he hears that. What? He's he's on his way to Vegas for like a family trip or something. All right. So I will. OK, I'm sorry. I've got to give a plug to Steve's title. He just wrote, sign up today. It may be broken. Oh, that's a title idea. I was I thought they were just teasing me for urging them to look at my quite possibly broken site. Yeah. If you go to showbot.tv, you can see the titles that people submit through the chat room and then you can even vote on the ones that you like. No, I'm sorry. I totally spaced on the whole thing with Bart kind of threw me off. Nuts, nuts, nuts. All right. Titles. Yes. Nuts. Just to be my bits is at the top. Sign up today hyphen. It may be broken. It's really easy. And that's a good thing. Question mark. It's really easy. Is that a good thing? Is that a good thing? Nine is a magical number. Google FIFO fun. Your grandson, you see his freshman year. That was too easy. I like the Twitter reaccommodating. Commodating to the United Airlines. Going to hell in a simulation. And that's showbot.tv. S H O W B O T dot TV. Tom, did you see United came out with a new version of their app today and the only line they had in it was improve drag and drop? Wow. Bad timing. I mean, I'm sure that was in the works for a long, you know, I had nothing to do, but just the accidents of timing. Or was it? Google FIFO fun is pretty funny. Yeah. I mean, I'm partial to sign up today. It may be broken because that's obviously taunting me and I think it's fun. Your grandson should see his freshman years. All right, that didn't. What do you lean towards? I actually like I like a bunch of these. Yeah, Allison, which one do you like? Oh, I'm sorry. I know it's Steve's, but sign up today. It might be broken. That's what I'm still levelating. So we could we could let it cook for a minute here and see. But yeah. So Rob, I'm going to say, like I said, I'm going to send you the the computer Chronicles was a show in the 80s and 90s. The guy named Stuart Chaffet and it's a really, really cool series of shows that's on archive.org still. And they're their computer shows, but they're it's not funny and comical, like it's so old kind of thing. They're actually really insightful, but there's there's one of them from 1992, where he's at an A.I. show and I'm sorry, not A.I. VR, VR show. I first did VR in 1992 myself, literally. Yeah. It's it's exactly what we're saying right now. We have made almost no progress. Every single sentence is like, well, you know, the graphics are getting really good, but you know, it's sort of weird when you turn your head or the audio isn't quite there. The head thing is too clunky. Man, in 10 years, we're going to have a smaller headset and it's not going to have wires and everything. And it's exactly what we're still saying. But I'll tell you, I first put on an HMD, I first put on a head mounted display in 1992 in Boston. And I'll tell you, they sucked a lot worse than they were really stuck in the same way. Yeah, yeah. Not as badly. But you talk about this exponential growth. Yeah, it's been barely linear. Well, I don't know. I mean, it's it's one of those funny things that like I kind of think of exponential growth as being like that old puzzle of would you rather have a million dollars or a penny that doubles every day for a month? And if you take door number two, you're still feeling pretty smart on the twenty third of the month. And as you start getting into the mid to late 20s, suddenly that doubling is like, holy cow. And I feel like that's how exponential stuff goes because it's really, really subtle at first, you know, and it's late in the curve where all of a sudden you're harvesting all this immense benefit because things are doubling and it's getting huge. I think I stole that from Nicholas Negropani. I think he made that point back in being digital, which had to be like what, 1992, 93 itself. Yeah, I guess so. But I kind of feel like that the 1992 HMD is a little bit like Pong. And maybe what we got now is like kind of like Mortal Kombat 3. Like it's come a long way, but you still it's so far. I will say that I think part of it is that when people especially talk about VR, there's a lot of the stuff that you visually reference, right? It's it's how realistic or the objects are how the fidelity of how things track. But a lot of the stuff is actually behind the scenes, right? It's the sensors. It's the processing capability. Like originally when they did those original head mounted VR displays, I mean, they needed like two or three forty six computers. Well, they needed a silicon graphics Onyx supercomputer. Ninety two, the ones I was testing. I worked at Silicon Graphics with the Onyx was a half million dollar supercomputer. And that was kind of cranking out these graphics. I had four. My Silicon Graphics workstation was $12,000. Oh, yeah, that was the low. That was that was the Indian. There was the Indigo to and then the Onyx was the super high end. And you would the Onyx was what they would use for a single user in VR back in those days. And, you know, so I'll tell you what I think will be really breakthrough. There's a thing in Salt Lake City. I'd recommend to anybody who finds themselves in Salt Lake City. It's called the Void is the name of the company or the product. I forget which. And what they've done is they've set up a few VR environments that are kind of, you know, typical state of the art of what we have today, you know, probably quite expensive hardware, really careful software engineering, beautiful graphics. But what they've added to their few hundred thousand dollars worth of kit is about three hundred dollars worth of plywood. And so what happens is you go through one of their experiences and I they had one on the road. I haven't been to Salt Lake City for their show myself, but I tested one out at a conference that I was at. And it was a temple of doom like layout. And so you go into this sort of like Mayan temple. And what happens is when you come up to a wall and put your hand on the wall, there's a wall there. Yes, it's a cheap piece of plywood. It's not chiseled stone from 3000 B.C. But that haptic feedback of being in that environment and having the 3D graphics and everything and then suddenly boom, up goes your hand and there's a wall or you trigger something that causes heat and a heat lamp goes off and there was fans and other subtleties like that. Those tiny little, you know, junior high school haunted house simulation tricks add so much power. So I think like things like haptics and so forth, they're going to be a major, major thing. And those are pretty far off. I'm going to laugh at this, though. What you're saying is what makes VR amazing is when there's R. Yeah, yeah, that's a big reality makes it amazingly realistic. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's the visual is what we think of. But yes, haptics and other elements have got to be a big part of that. It's like this smell of vision stuff when you have spells and spit on your Disney at California Adventure, right? Oh, yeah, I had that too. Me flight simulators only really became super effective when you could actually start when they actually started moving the entire cockpit, right? I mean, if you looked at the weird like the weird flights, I mean, they just concocted during World War Two. I mean, they look like a kid's ride, right? You just sat in it, you close the little door and then then you would just pull the stick and they would just do these little, like, you know, motions, not not just similar to the like the little rides you get in front of a supermarket stick of corn. You put your kid in it kind of thing. I'm just still surprised, though, that that we aren't farther along or further. I think I think part of it is that compared to everything else in technology, the speed of improvement has been so fast and it isn't in this category. You know, I mean, some things some things need a demand and maybe the demand really isn't there, right? I mean, put it this way, we've how long have people been digging holes with shovels? I'm sure by now we were going to use something sonic based to start blown away, you know, giant mounds of dirt. But, you know, all we've done is put bigger buckets and shovels on the end of the machine, but still a shovel. And so I think you have to watch that video. What's that? I'll be curious what you what you're after. I'll look forward to seeing it. It may even be that the HMDI used in 92 was a company called Leap Systems. Then there was also Jerry Lanier had his company called VPL, I think. Those were kind of about the only two that were out there. Ancient times. I also worked on a flight simulator back to what you were saying, Roger, saying it had to move. It was a flight simulator for the F-18 and it was a 40 foot diameter sphere that we wheeled an F-18 cockpit out into the middle of it and then projected the imagery on the inside. And so it was a real cockpit and you had this fake imagery. And there was some bigfalutin customer who said, oh, I don't believe in this. This is going to fake the the pilots out at all. And so they put them in the simulator and it wasn't finished yet. And he's flying along and the software crashed and it crashed when his plane was at a 45 degree angle to the ground. And he got out of the cockpit and he fell flat on his face. So the reality was there. It was very believable, even though it wasn't moving. They didn't also have a G suit that would that would add compression and to you when you were pulling a lot of G's. So they said that was part of it. So again, they put some R in the VR. Yeah, the one of the things that I used really early that was running off an Onyx and that wasn't the 92. I think it was 94 that I did this thing. This woman named was Canadian artist named Charlotte or Charlize or something like that. She had been married to the founder or one of the founders of Softimage. And I think that, you know, she had done all their demos in the early days. And this was after Microsoft had bought them. And I think maybe they were no longer married, but she she was. She'd always been Softimage's and they were major, major force in 3D software that post production houses used in gaming companies used and so forth. And so she made this thing called Osmos, O-S-M-O-S-E. And you probably still find stuff online about it. It was this really, really cool, very, very artsy VR experience beginning to your compression suits. The way you navigated Osmos was like you were scuba diver and she put this sort of strap around your chest. And so if you inhaled and held your breath like you're filling your lungs up with air in scuba, you start to float upward. And if you exhale and really dump all the oxygen out of your lungs and you're well balanced, you'll start sinking. And so you can navigate with balance and breath and scuba. And she did that with Osmos, which was pretty cool. That is cool. Yeah. I don't think that is a, this is her final title. Yes, Be My Bits is what I went with. OK, just Be My Bits. I know it wasn't what any of you liked, but that's it just was nice and compact and it related to the main topic. And you've just got Idi Amin like power. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm not afraid to use it. Forest Whitaker is going to portray you in a movie. It also was getting a lot of votes out there, too. So, you know, I like to have the simulation of democracy to lend greetings to my addicted. You want to give the appearance, but not necessarily. Be My Bits one with ninety nine point three percent of the battles. Once we did the recount. Yes. What did it end up with? It was six. It was number four. Yeah. Below sign up today may be broken. Google 50 fun and Twitter reaccommodating tweets about United Airlines. Well, luckily, I don't fly as much anymore. So I'm in the middle of breaking my update to my website. So I think I will go continue wrecking that. All right. Thanks, Allison. All right. I look forward to when Bart is available again. Yeah, me too. Yeah. Thanks, everybody, for watching. We'll talk to you later. Bye. Nice to meet you, Rob. Bye. I look forward to watching that.