 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including James C. Smith, Miranda Janell, Justin Zellers, and our new patron, Adam. Everybody welcome in, Adam. Good job. On this episode of DTNS, more evidence that AI might not take as many jobs as we fear, and Dr. Nikki tells us some of the science being done on the International Space Station thanks to the AXION 3 mission. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, January 22nd, 2024 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. From T-Town in Alabama, I'm Dr. Nikki Ackermanns. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. T-Town, where it's always T-Time. Yes. But not drinking tea. Well, actually, they drink a lot of tea. I am drinking tea currently. What kind of tea are you drinking? It is English breakfast, even if it's simple. Very classic. From my DTNS mug, see the store for more information now. I'm just kidding. Beautiful. Yes, go check it out. All right, we got a lot of sciencey goodness thanks to Dr. Nikki being with us today. Let's start with the quick hits. Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo estimates that Apple has sold between 160,000 and 180,000 Apple Vision Pro units. Initial sales were fast. Shipping times quickly slipped from launch day, February 2nd, to mid to late February. But Kuo notes that those shipping times have remained pretty steady since that first 48 hours, implying that sales have slowed. No one expects high sales or profitability from the first generation of a headset. But Morgan Stanley was projecting 300 to 400,000 should ship this year. And so falling short of that would indicate that Apple overestimated its demand. Apple Vision Pro costs $3,500. And if you don't pay $499 for Apple Care, making it a smooth $4,000, you might have to pay $799 if you crack the front screen. Even with Apple Care, you're going to pay $299 for each incident of repair. Meanwhile, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman believes new iPads will arrive in March or April, surprising no one. Starting in March in compliance with the Digital Markets Act, users of metaproducts in the EU will be able to unlink some accounts, particularly Instagram, Messenger, and Facebook. You will also be able to unlink your Facebook gaming and Facebook marketplace accounts. However, gaming will then be limited to single-player games if it's unlinked. Makes sense, and marketplace users who will unlink will not be able to use Messenger to communicate with buyers and sellers through Marketplace. These changes apply in the European economic area and as well as Switzerland. Got to include the Swiss. Yeah, they jumped in on this one. Good for them. PocketPair's PAL world is described by many, including IGN, as Pokemon with guns. You may have seen this going around. It looks like a Nintendo game, but it's not. It's from PocketPair. And it's got cute little fuzzy characters like Pokemon, but they sometimes pull out really big guns and shoot each other. It launched in early access on Friday, January 19th, and everybody thought it was a funny meme, but it surprised the world by passing Cyberpunk 2077 to set the mark for the fifth highest peak number of players, 1,291,967 players at its peak. It is the most played game on Steam right at the moment, and PocketPair estimates more than five million copies of PAL world were sold in its first three days. This is really, even the gaming world was not expecting this one. We're going to ask Scott Johnson more about this on Wednesday's show, but does this look fun to you, Nikki? I'm 100% would play this if my computer hadn't died. And also I feel like they hit the internet niche of like weird random thing, cute little toy with a gun. Like that's perfect. Yes, of course, this is making numbers that make sense. Yeah, and made it playable. Apparently it's a decent game too. Yeah, that's important. Sure. So after that, Ford is showing off a 48-inch curved dashboard display in its 2020 Ford Lincoln Nautilus. This car, not submarine, also runs Android and has a 5G network connection. Nearly three years ago, Ford had announced it would forgo its BlackBerry QNX-powered version of Ford sync with Android's version of sync. But the switch took a little bit longer than they anticipated. And now Ford is joining Tesla, Cadillac, Mercedes-Benz, and BMW in putting larger screens on the dash. I, for one, am excited about that, although it does tend to distract me. But Ford is also adding customization features like recognizing the driver and adjusting default settings accordingly. I'm in for this. Yeah, yeah. I do like physical buttons, though, for some things when you're driving. You just need to do it by feel. So we'll see. Chinese state newspapers and Bloomberg report that Nvidia co-founder Jensen Huang visited Nvidia's offices in Shenzhen, Shanghai, and Beijing earlier this month. Nvidia is barred from selling its most advanced AI chips to Chinese companies, but it's trying to maintain sales in that market by designing AI chips that get around US restrictions. Actually, I keep hearing it saying get around. It's not get around US restrictions. It's complying with US restrictions. What's the most powerful chip we can sell to China without violating the US restrictions, but still something that's useful for Chinese companies? However, Chinese companies are turning more frequently to domestic companies like Huawei as they get better at designing chips. China bought a near record $40 billion of chip gear as they try to be able to build all this stuff domestically. And that is a look at the quick hits. Scientists at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, AKA CSAIL, conducted a study to estimate what impact artificial intelligence, you know, machine learning, large language models, the whole MOLLAWACS, will have on jobs. Automation may be a better way of saying this. What impact it is automation by software are going to have on jobs. So they asked workers what these kinds of automated tools would have to be able to do to replace their job, to replace the tasks that they do. Then they modeled what tasks were possible to replace with existing technology and how much it would cost to develop and maintain that. They limited this to jobs requiring visual analysis. So this isn't every single job. If you're looking at different jobs, you might get a different result, but things like quality control, visual inspection, parts inspection, things like that is what they focused on just to see. Can you get it just to see what this would do? Keeping all of that in mind, the study found that there's a lot of potential to automate these kinds of tasks, but it wouldn't be economic to do so, at least not for a while. So, Nicky, let me give you an example here, okay? You're a baker now. Yeah, told me my backup plan, yes. Do you ever bake? I've actually, I've never talked about it. Yeah, I made a banana bread yesterday. Well, there you go. So Nicky's banana bread bakery pays five bakers. You got five different bakers, $48,000 a year, and 6% of their time is spent looking at the banana bread to make sure it's okay, right? Quality control, just visual inspection, everything looks right before we put it out for sale. You can automate that. You can have computer vision, inspect banana bread and do it as well as a human would, catch the problems as often as a human would, and save the bakery $14,000 a year. That's usually what we hear. That's usually what we hear. It's like, oh, they can automate this task. It'll save a company $14,000, okay? So, that sounds pretty good if you're the baker. Like, oh, okay, I can save some money. You maybe even lower the prices of my food or increase the output or something like that, right? Yeah, that's what I'd be doing so far, so good. Great, it's just gonna cost you $165,000 to develop the system from scratch. And I assume we don't have numbers for buying a pre-made bakery analysis system, but. Okay, okay, no, that's a good question. Like, sure, it'd be $165,000 to buy it from scratch, but hasn't somebody done this at another bakery or some companies like, will develop it and sell it to lots of bakeries and pay for that $165,000 in no time? Well, let's just jump past that. Let's just say like, all right, let's say it's not gonna cost you $165,000 because somebody has sunk that cost, it's only gonna cost you $122,840 a year to maintain it. And can I ask, what are we maintaining? Is it engineers programming it, checking for bugs and things like that? It's some of that, but I think a lot of it, and I need to dig in more in this study to find out just how much, but a lot of it is running the data. Running the data stuff. Oh, yeah, sure, yeah. You know, just being able to have the model do this well enough. Now, that's why we pointed out, this is about computer vision, this is about in visual inspection, certain other kinds of automation could be done locally and wouldn't have the high maintenance costs that this would have. And I guess servers play into this as well. Yeah, exactly. So it is too costly, according to this study, for most uses of computer vision to economically replace people. And they pointed out that even if the cost got cheaper by 20% a year, it would take more than a decade for it to become cost efficient to save that $14,000. Now, the study didn't consider systems that just augment visual inspection and speed it up versus replacing it. That would have a different impact. It did not consider new tasks and jobs, like what if you have the AI maintain the AI system? Does that help save you any money with the engineering side of thing and the software side of thing? So there's still some questions here, but I think this is just a good example of when you're thinking about this stuff, if you wanna think about it fairly, to remember that like, okay, saves me $14,000 a year, but how much does it cost to run? Cause if it's more than $14,000, it's not worth doing. Yeah, I actually love this study because I run into this all the time with just like my family, honestly, who are like, AI, you know, it's gonna take all our jobs and no one really has the analysis to back them up in their back pocket. And so things like this are great. It kind of brings back this like, why are we making AI do all the art? Why can't we make it like check our emails? And like probably cause right now it's cost prohibitive, but sometimes I wanna pay $122,000 a year to make it check my emails. I cannot afford that, but I do like the breakdown that they did and I wanna see more of this for more job types. And I'm sure it's gonna get better, you know, as AI becomes more omnipresent. Yeah, and this isn't me trying to say like, don't worry, there'll be no problems from AI because they're definitely will. But this gives me hope that it will disrupt things slower, which is good. The slower it disrupts things, the better it is because it gives us a chance to get used to it to find new things to do with the excess capacity that humans do and continue. Well, adaptation period. Yeah, yeah, adaptation, continue to identify what it is that we can do best and do that. And that's what happened with computer revolution and we didn't see people thrown out of work by computers. It's somewhat happened with the internet revolution too, where the internet created jobs rather than replacing jobs, so. Yeah, I like this study as far as it goes. It is not the last word though, so as always. Excited for more. Yeah, the slim moon lander. We talked about this quickly on Friday, made Japan the fifth country to successfully land a spacecraft on the moon intact, but the orientation was off. I don't know if we actually talked about this much on Friday. Despite slim being nicknamed the moon sniper because of its precision landing capabilities, it didn't land as precise as they wanted. The solar panels are pointed west and the sun on the moon right now where they landed is to the east. So they're not getting the sun on the solar panels, which means the batteries aren't charging. So they turned off the battery in order to make sure that there's still some battery left for them to try some other things later. They operated for about three hours collecting, some details and some images and other data. And the battery was at 12%. That gave me panic when I saw that was like 12%. Go plug in. Yeah, so that's kind of what they did. But based on what they were able to gather, they think that the sun will move into a position over the next two weeks where it will be in the west and therefore shining on the solar panels. They don't know exact position. They don't know how much sun it will get, but they're hoping that it'll get enough to charge that battery back up and they'll be able to do a little more with it than they could in the three hours that they had before. Yeah, from what I heard, they were pretty happy with the data that they collected, but the mission, whoever was in charge of the mission was frowning during his interview. And he said, like, I'm not completely satisfied with what they did and he was all frustrated. I could understand this is probably a many years in the making project and to have it not go perfectly. I mean, it happens a lot with the space stuff because there's only so much you can predict, but it's good that they got data anyway. I'm sure they had a lot of backups planned into this to make sure that that happened, including leaving those 12% for it to hopefully maybe catch something else on the way back out, but interesting start for the, for JAXA. I feel like space travel is a lot harder than we got used to. Yeah, we got really lucky in the beginning. Uh-huh, we put a lot of effort, right? Because we only had a few shots and so we were very focused on not killing astronauts and doing things successfully. But as things become more common and as things are uncrewed, which means you're not risking human lives, I'm not saying the focus is lost, but you just run into the law of average is more. And it could be that the, maybe we're a lot more open about communication about what's going on right now, could be that if this was the first robot moon landing, we would have been like, this is a massive success. And I'm like, maybe we wouldn't have talked about it shutting off early, but this is so in quotes common now that we get all the details. And we're like, oh, another moon landing. You know, it shut off a bit early, not great. 50-50, you know? And this one did better than many in that it actually landed successfully. It didn't crash into the moon and destroy itself. And maybe next time don't have as much of a cocky nickname that might help. The moon sniper, I know. I think that's probably the reason that guy was so upset. He's like, oh, why did we embrace that nickname? But yeah, it's really difficult to do this stuff. So I try to remind myself that it's not that somebody screwed up, although maybe it's more likely there's just unanticipated variables that they can learn from. Yeah, there's so many variables that you can't calculate. Like the moon dust is going the different direction with this propulsion jet that you just can't simulate that on a computer or on earth. So maybe they'll learn from their mistakes. Yes, that's the thing. We always learn from the mistakes. They were able to collect data even in that three hours. Hopefully they'll be able to collect more data. The two rovers properly deployed, they were able to find that out. So if they can get the battery charged back up, they can operate those rovers and do some more of the mission. And so good luck, little moon sniper. Good luck, Slim. May the sun be in your favor. Yes, may the sun be on your west side soon. May Slim not be shady. Okay. Oh, that's perfect. Yes, how did we miss that one till now? Good job. May Slim not be shady in this case. Folks, we have a lot of good stuff going on at youtube.com slash Daily Tech News Show. Yesterday I did a stream with Eileen Rivera called What We're Streaming. We've got the Apple Vision Show coming up. If you haven't looked around for that, Sarah and Eileen are gonna be hosting that as well. And we also have top five at youtube.com slash Daily Tech News Show where I break down five things to know about technology this week. I looked back at my five favorite pieces of software from the 1990s, some of which I still keep right here with me all the time. You can catch it. Is that Windows 97, Tom? No, it's WordPerfect. Corel Suite 7, yeah. As featured in the top five, go check it out. It's top five software from the 1990s. At youtube.com slash Daily Tech News Show. Last week, NASA launched the Axiom 3 mission from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and successfully docked with the International Space Station. It's the third private astronaut mission to the International Space Center. The four European member crew was aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft. You hear a lot about things not working. But when they work, you don't hear about it. This is a SpaceX rocket, a SpaceX capsule, and they all docked and made it on and everything's good. Now the crew is scheduled to conduct 30 different experiments while aboard the ISS. So we thought we'd look at some of these experiments because, Nicky, you're a working scientist. You do experiments all the time. So it's kind of fun to look at what astronauts are doing as far as science up on the International Space Station. Yeah, and there's some exciting ones in here that actually line up with my research and that's part of why I got wind of this. They're always doing a ton of experiments up on the ISS, but this had like a new cluster of them. So I figured we'd check them out. And I'm starting with a selection. I'm not covering all 30 of them, but here's a selection of ones that I was interested in. Okay, cool, yeah, I like this. Hint, excuse towards biology. That makes sense. If you don't know, Dr. and Cream studies, you study skulls, right? I study brains and all that. Brains and skulls and stuff. Lots of biology stuff, yeah. But so starting with the Italian space agency, they're planning on investigating the molecular signatures of certain biomarkers, so markers that you can find in substances, in humans. I believe it's humans to understand how space missions affect, yes, the human body. One of their targets of interest is also a target of my interest, which is the beta amyloid protein. You may have heard of this in the media. This is related to Alzheimer's disease. If it misfolds or accumulates in your brain, it basically clogs off your brain and is a biomarker for Alzheimer's disease. And they're studying this in two parts. One of them is to understand how it acts in microgravity, and if it's maybe folding weirdly, and that's kind of just an experiment to better understand the protein itself. We don't know too much about it. And the other is potentially for the long-term to see if there are long-term effects of spaceflight. So potentially Alzheimer's in space, question mark. Maybe more Alzheimer's, maybe less Alzheimer's. I think this is really cool, but mostly because I study this. So yeah, I mean, that makes sense that this one would catch your eye. And certainly something that studies like, oh, are you at elevated risk for anything if you travel through space? If we're gonna be doing extended trips to the moon and Mars, the more we know about that, the better. I mean, also, I think it's interesting to just see like, oh, how does it fold in space? Does going to space unfold them? Like what if it reduced them? I'm not saying it will, but like that would be amazing to know and then send all the old people into orbit so that they get over their Alzheimer's. They could colonize Mars, that's fine. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, who knows? I'm really curious. There's so many unknowns with stuff like this. We don't have a lot of long-term, in terms of Alzheimer's long-term astronauts. I mean, I think, I don't know what the longest flight has been, but it's a few years, I assume. So not enough to develop Alzheimer's, so interesting. They have other medical experiments that the Italian group is doing. They're doing a study on the effects of microgravity on ovarian cells. This is another kind of long-term study. First, they want to see how the hormone production works and how it's regulated in space, but they're thinking about research for, on one hand, improving fertility treatments on Earth, but also beginning to research and understand reproduction off Earth. So space X, really. That that's really cool. Space X, but yeah. This is important, especially because it's a combined benefit. It can help on Earth now. So for the people who are like, well, I don't care about going to Mars. What's it going to do for me? It can help people now. And all of these experiments are like that. Yeah, if we do want to go to Mars, then people are going to want to reproduce, so, you know. I'm also glad that they went with ovarian cells instead of sperm cells, just because it always tends to be the male cell first. And so, you know, slight pride on my end for that. Yeah, and I, you know, I hope I'm not betraying my perceived gender when I say this, but I feel like the egg is more important. Yeah, a little bit. There's lots of sperms out there. It's a bit more complex. Harder to get the egg going, so, yeah. All right, how about the non-biology slash physics experiments? Yeah, so I include a few of those just for the non-biology fans that we have, and I'm going to gloss over them because I am not a physicist. But the Italian team is also testing radiation shield materials that were developed in race cars originally, because how Italian of them. And the Turkish team is testing metal alloys for use in space, potentially looking at even creating new alloys from the conditions that would be in space, like microgravity, and they're also testing more microgravity experiments on fluid dynamics. I'm not going to develop further on that. The Swedish team is analyzing thunderstorm clouds from space. They named this the Thor Davis project, which I thought was great. And also properties of plasma, the gas slash liquid, not the blood. All three groups are also testing the use of AI because of course there's an AI story. They have a sort of a crew companion who's going to help with various tasks and mission efficiency and crew support very vague. Reminds me of a certain 2001 space odyssey. I'm sorry, Nikki. I can't look at your thunder clouds right now. I have disconnected the airlock. Okay, those are good. And little forts in space, always a good thing. Thunderstorm clouds particularly I think is interesting. The better we get at weather information, the better not only for predicting the rain, but predicting the climate and seeing where it's going. I'm just understanding it. Yeah, this launch also included the first Turkish astronaut, Alper Gezeravca. What is the Turkish space agency sending to the ISS? I like some of their projects because we get some good SCICOM, speaking of SCICOM on DTNS, a little bit inception here. They're also doing a bit of CRISPR. So the Turkish space agency is testing CRISPR gene edited plants. Aridopsis is kind of the rat of the plant world for experiments. It's part of the mustard family. They're testing stress, microgravity and salt tolerances on the ISS. They're also going to be analyzing their astronauts' T-cells to see if there's any upregulation of specific genes during space travel. He'll be irradiated a little bit more than usual, so I'd assume there'll be some genetic changes. There's also a really cool project developed by 13-year-old STEM students, and it focuses on propolis, which is the glue that they used to build their hives. And they want to see if they can use it in space. It also has antimicrobial and entry inflammatory properties. And the students also came up with testing the use of algae as a life support form. It could potentially help regulate temperature, recycle waste, and even act as a source of fuel. So kind of cool nature-slash-space things going on. And finally, for the Turkish SCICOM example, there's also an amateur radio program that is connecting STEM students to astronauts during their entire stay and teaching them about space. And I thought that was great. Yeah, no, that's great. That's really cool. And the algae stuff is very ripped from the pages of sci-fi to see what actually works. That's very exciting. Yes, I'm excited for the algae. What about when the astronauts come back to Earth? What happens then? Sure. So as usual, the astronauts will usually undergo a lot of tests when they come back. These are some specific ones, but they'll have, in this case, MRIs to check whether their brain expression has changed in any way. They're going to look at their vascular health because microgravity probably affects vasculature, doing DNA analysis again for potentially radiation or any kind of gene expression that has changed. Neural stem cell analysis to see if that changes them developing into different kinds of brain cells. And sleep pattern tests to check for space flight sleep changes. Also, I just wanted to add my... Oh, sorry, that's it. That's it for the tests. I had little surprise, but I'm gonna let you ask me about it. Oh, okay. No, no, you can go ahead and say that because I know that we've talked about the scientific things that catch your eye and that's legitimate. But was there anything as a non-scientist that caught your eye? Yeah, so this was perfect because it was just slipped into the list of experiments as a very fancily written way, but the Italian space agency is sending up ready-made Barilla pasta to be heated up and tasted in microgravity because of course they're doing that and they have to keep a diary about their eating style and taste and preferences for the pasta in space. So that kind of makes me want to be an astronaut. It's not the first pasta to be eaten in space, by any stretch, right? Oh, dang it. I wasn't sure if it was. Yeah, I can't have been because there's so many freeze-dried spaghetti and pastas. There must be something specific about this Barilla pasta. It's ready-made. I don't know if that does anything, but... Very cool. Well, thank you, Dr. Nicky. Let's take a look real quickly at the mail bag. We got one from Andrew, one of our longtime bosses. Thank you, Andrew. Andrew says, Once Netflix stopped shipping DVD and Blu-rays, I looked for a while for an adequate replacement. He tried Gamefly. He tried Scarecrow. Wasn't really happy with the selection at either. It felt like Netflix had almost everything and it was hard to find older, less popular titles on these new services. Then I turned to my local library and it's awesome. I live in the suburbs of a large city so maybe other libraries aren't as good, but I can get everything from my library. They have programs where they pull movies from neighboring cities if my local library doesn't have it. They've even purchased titles I've requested if they could not find them at another library. TLDR, your local library, might be the best place to get DVDs and Blu-rays these days. You're patron Andrew. I'm always here to promote the local library. You can get so much stuff at a library. Not only books, but e-books, sewing machines and apparently DVDs. And I've just been complaining about how I'm kind of missing solid media I've assigned my students to watch the movie Alien. If that's not streaming anywhere, where are they gonna find it? Vintage movie according to them. Vintage movie. You could even stream movies from your library. You can log into apps with your library card. Yeah, exactly. Go libraries. Indeed. All right, we've got one little note here. What do we get from Katie? Well, Katie on Patreon in response to the latest top five we did about softwares in the 1990, she says, ICQ gives me mega nostalgia. Though I do remember getting up in the university computer lab before class in 2000 and loading it up on AIM, A-I-M. I could definitely add cats, dogs and pets with Zs to the list as well, since that was absolutely my childhood. And after dark, just because let's be honest, we all had it in one way or another. Yeah, that was a really good point. It was kind of hard to avoid after dark being on some machine. Thank you, Katie, for posting that on the Patreon. Really appreciate that. And thank you, Dr. Nicky. Before we get out of here, where should people go to find more of what you do? Well, my info is on my website at nickolackermanswithaness.com. I'm also at my name, Akraman-Sikol on X and at Nickol Akraman's on Blue Sky. If you guys want to chat with me there. Patrons. We're talking about pasta. Yeah, pasta and goat heads. Go check it out. Patrons, stick around for the extended show, Dr. Nicky and I are going to keep talking. So if you want more, become a patron. And we're going to talk about sci-fi, particularly Apple TV's upcoming sci-fi show, Constellation. Because it reminded me of something. You can also catch the show live Monday through Friday, 4 p.m. Eastern, 2100 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live back tomorrow. Talk to you then. The DTNS family of podcasts. Helping each other understand. Simon Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.