It Could Happen Here - The Worst AI Products Coming This Year

Episode Date: January 16, 2024

Tech journalist Ed Zitron joins Robert, Garrison, and Tavia to discuss the AI branded products that dominated the Consumer Electronics Show.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award. Submit your podcast for nomination now

at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida.

And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home, and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami? Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh my goodness, it's It Could Happen Here, a podcast that is about things falling apart, our dystopian now and tomorrow, and for the last several days has been heavily about the Consumer Electronics Show, which is a huge event every year where 120,000 to 150,000 people flood

into Las Vegas to show off all of the new gadgets and to have big, fancy panels on the future of technology. And this has been a particularly good year for the dystopia beat part of that, because the entire industry is obsessed right now with artificial intelligence. Now, there's a couple reasons for this. Every laptop manufacturer is basically throwing out laptops with AI assistance. Microsoft is co-pilot. And they're doing this because laptop sales have stalled. A lot of people, like the pandemic, was great for laptop sales.

And then people stopped buying them because most people don't need to replace their laptops very often. So there's this desperate hope that by scaring everybody into thinking they need AI immediately, they can get folks to buy a new raft of machines.

And outside of that, it's just, as I'm sure you're aware, with interest rates where they are, companies, tech companies, particularly startups, are having trouble getting VC money, venture capital money invested in them. So there's this kind of desperate hope that by plugging AI constantly, they can fill in the gap. So today, we have probably in a week or two, we're going to be putting out a long investigation based on a number of panels we went to with executives from Google, from, weirdly enough, McDonald's, from Adobe, from NVIDIA, from the Consumer Electronics Association, and multiple government agencies, including DHS, on what they see as the future of AI. That's going to be some pretty in-depth reporting. But today, we want to talk about the ai products that we've

been seeing and as a spoiler they're basically all the dumbest shit you've ever heard of so i want to introduce our panel today uh coming back after catching a horrible horrible lung infection throat infection some kind of infection yeah garrison got strep throat um and despite the fact that we've been hanging out together i I did not, which does prove I'm genetically superior. We also have Tavia Mora coming back, our technical expert. Hello, Tavia. Howdy, everybody. And for the first time on, well, no, not for the first time, for the third time on It Could Happen Here,

the upcoming host of the Cool Zone Media tech-focused show, Better Offline, Ed Zitron. Ed! What guan? Hello. How's it going yeah sorry hi yeah hit my head on the way in yeah it's a truly awful show this year the thing that i said to robert yesterday when we were talking about the show and this really stood out to me is if you had told me this was 2021 i'd have have believed you. It doesn't feel, despite the use of the word AI, it does not feel like tech has actually moved that far. And it's very strange. Yeah, there was this period of time after the iPhone came out

where every year there would be really big leaps in the tech you saw. And this part of, I think, why they're leaning on AI so heavily is otherwise it's just the same laptop, smartphones, speakers, connected gadgets, you know, autonomous cars and shit that we've been seeing for years, and they really haven't jumped forward much. But, you know, the downside of that is a lot of things. But the upside of that is people are increasingly cramming AI into insane shit in the hopes that somebody will want to buy it. And so I want to start off, Ed, since you are not just our newest host, but also a Las Vegas native.

I think people could probably assume that from your Vegas accent. Yes, natural. Yeah. What is your favorite or the first AI product you want to get into today? I want to talk about the Rabbit. The Rabbit R1. Oh, God, yes. So this thing is a square

box and i can't tell if it acts without your phone or with your phone but it uses ai you you speak into it like a walkie talkie and it does a series of actions based on what you say so it can do all the things that siri could do five years ago like change music and start but it also has like a 360 degree camera which can based on the extremely awkward and agonizing like hour-long demo 25 minute but pardon me it felt like an hour um it can look at a picture of rick hastley and start very and after several agonizing seconds stop playing never give you up it can also it claims do a series of nuanced actions like you can say get me a cab home and also put on my tunes and also change the air conditioner to 74 degrees all in one one sentence now you may think why do i need to spend 200 on a device to do this and the answer is you don't

you do not need to this thing looks cool and on some level i'm just glad we're getting new tat yeah the design is not bad it's like a square it looks like it's maybe two two and a half inches by two and a half inches or so something like that yeah little screen it's like well designed from an industrial design standpoint and i think the big yeah it looks like it's just that it it's a it's a basically a siri that can use app it can use uber it could book a flight for you one of the things they show is it like planning a vacation in london for you which does seem to kind of go against the point of like going somewhere new and like figuring out what you want to do there as opposed it's

basically pulling from a list i'm sure an ai wrote of like top 10 things to do in london and it's just very weird because all of these tech guys who they very loudly claim they're free spirits they're independent they're not controlled by any authority they cannot be manipulated all desperately want a machine to tell them exactly what the hell to do with their lives and it's so bizarre because they i we were discussing the different articles about this and people trying to argue about this thing these three it's like oh it takes out the friction between all these apps i'm sorry i just don't think there's that much friction pull up my phone i'm on uber yes i pull out my phone i i pull up grubhub i

order food it's very simple it's remarkably easy I don't see how talking to a square is better. Like it's the same, like I could call someone on the phone and do it hands-free or I could text them. And I always text them because that's more pleasant. I mean, like I have my phone open to signal right now. I can swipe up, go to Uber in less than a second. Saying the words move from signal to the Uber app takes a whole lot longer than just doing it with my thumb i also do love the idea of like completely ruining the point of signal which is an encrypted extremely secure messaging app to be like hey random box i want to feed my private messages through you and have you read them out to me as i go about my day i don't know what your data retention policy is or what you'll be doing with it they sold out and they made two million dollars

like 10 million of them or 10 000 sorry it's just and it's i've read i read like 11 articles about this thing because i occasionally drive myself insane with these things when i see everyone excited about something but i can't read a single article that tells me why I should buy it. Even though my rat brain says, oh, tech with screen, I want, but then I want to use it. But I'll have to explain this to the normal people in my life, why I have this, and I don't want to do that if it's useless. But on top of that, I just don't think controlling my life with voice is that useful. I don't like that. I'm already, and I think a lot of people are already kind of fed up with the extent to which my smartphone is a part of my life yeah but like

it does irreplaceable tasks at the moment for me so i have it this thing is number one adding a device because i think it does require your phone but it's also like you know in addition to the current problems i have with privacy on my smartphone, I am adding another company and another device and another set of security, potential security flaws to it. But on top of that, the thing they have failed to explain anywhere, and no journalist apparently has interrogated them about this, is they claim this thing can log onto your Uber and make a flight booking, ostensibly having your passport information, your date of birth and all this stuff. First and foremost, that's like you mentioned,

the data retention policy is very strange, but where is this crap all happening? Is it happening on my phone? Is my phone just doing all this? I refuse to believe that. So you're doing this in the kind of virtual machine environment. How is that possible? Surely these companies are going to have a problem with that. Mark Sullivan for Fast Company actually, I think, asked them this and they were like, oh yeah, they'll be fine with it. They just want people using their apps. I do not think they're going to be fine with this. Companies hate it when they hand off power from the user who will still be liable to another computer. Yeah. Well, and the other thing is just that part of me kind of suspects, and when you watch the

video, we'll play a clip from it in a second, ceo of rabbit very clearly like a lot of guys in tech wants to be steve jobs and i i will say one thing i kind of suspect that might actually be that would be a steve jobs move is he may have just been hoping that this thing coming out selling a shitload on pre-order and getting huge buzz would force these companies after the fact to allow integration like he may just be gambling like if i get enough buzz behind me uber and whatnot will come to the table and be willing to work with me because suddenly this is like the hippest new gadget except 10 000 customers is actually not that many and i actually look forward to i really can't wait for like months to pass, people to get this,

and someone to end up sending the word penis to their all-company Slack because they wanted to order pizza. And on top of that, ordering a flight, ordering an Uber, these are actually really nuanced actions. Coming to Mandalay Bay tonight, Uber took me to the wrong place because it decided it wanted to go to the convention center. I did not select that. If you go to the airport, you need to put in southwest airlines or what have you uh with grubhub you need to do little bits it's just most people don't order lunch they order something for lunch and i just don't this whole thing just feels useless yeah see for me it's the additional level of abstraction on top of these already abstracted apps that we use to order our basic like necessities

like eating and things like that it worries me in sort of like a fantasy dystopic way what happens when people suddenly don't use it after getting used to using it like what are they going to know are they going to know how to operate a door dash app are they going to know how to book a flight that kind of thing yeah it is kind of because one of the things there was a cnet review that said like well the potential of this is that it it completely removes physical use of a device so you're using these apps but they're just a part of your life uber is just a thing you talk to you never look at anything when you do it and i'm like is that better like i don't i don't like the idea that you basically have a robot that you treat as like your nanny that plans your life

for you like the the amount of hype over there will be a more concerted piece about this coming out but the first thing i thought when i looked at all these guys talking about how cool it was to be able to just tell a robot to book your flight and plan your travel and book your hotels for you that's like part of the experience of traveling and choosing things to do is one of the things that traveling is. And the desire so many people have to hand off elements of choice really reminds me of cult dynamics. And I don't think this is a consumer thing. I think this is specifically a weird subculture of tech people, of AI people, a lot of the same folks who got into NFTs. But this desire to like

life is so complex and scary I want to hand over all of my agency to a robot it's the same thing that is is behind a lot of like why people join cults and I don't think this is a societal problem but I think it is a weird problem with the group of people who are most excited to have a fucking rabbit it seems like a sad thing to me that folks might only attend bars or restaurants that are rated like 4.5 and above that's decided by something else yeah and they don't get to have this like experience of walking into like the seediest bar you've ever seen in your life and have like maybe possibly like a life-changing experience i was just in south korea and i we went to this fried chicken place that ended up being closed actually it was like we opened but nobody was there which made me just want to leave before getting killed

and so I just went to a random chicken place across the road from my hotel and I thought well it'll feed me it was wonderful it was delightful and it was I could not find any reviews for it it was just a flipping place and i don't i think these people who are desperate for a device like this this kind of weird nanny device first of all i don't think they think about the practicalities of this i don't think this is quicker or easier or better but also they're like oh i wish i could just say one thing and all of these things could happen for me same people by the way who are saying that people need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and do things for themselves it's just i don't know if they even call it dystopian it's just weird and sad yeah speaking

of weird and sad we're going to move on to the next product in a second but first i gotta play everybody in case you haven't seen it or heard it um the ceo of rabbit uh trying to rickroll the audience with his hell device have you seen this garrison oh okay eyes on the screen everybody to activate the eye just double tap the button oh funny seeing you here, Rick. Let me take a look. What? Am I getting Rick Rogue in my own keynote?

Let's move on to the next one all right i have a question real quick so what is the functionality he just activated is it that you just put you point the eye at something and it may choose as an action the eye automatically see rick astley and choose to play one specific song of his because that actually doesn't seem like a feature that seems like a bug yeah that seems like what happens if it sees certain people yeah jeffrey epstein yeah what happens if it sees jeffrey yeah place children screaming like what is how does this thing work booking trips to florida it i i maybe it's respectable that they showed how bad the lag is because that moment where there's quiet after he like clicks on it is like it's loading it's processing for

a considerable period of time and it's just also i feel for the bloke because i know he was probably so excited to do this and he was like i'm gonna be steve jobs but man when you can't perform you don't perform like yeah that's bad delivery that oh that did i just get rick rolled in my own video it was like that i forget what the movie's called oh hi mark yeah it is and obviously like english is the first language but like it's a performance you You practice, right? You get coached and stuff because you're trying to represent your company. Oh, I tell you this from experience. I've run a PR firm.

Yeah, that guy actually did practice because all of that was his actual timing wasn't bad. He just does not have that dog in him. Yeah. Yeah, you bring in other people to do like that. Anyway, anyone's mind on the rabbit changed having seen that? have that dog in him yeah yeah you bring in other people to do like that anyway everybody anyone anyone's mind on the rabbit changed having seen that absolutely not garrison has a look on their face no it's like what i've always wanted in a tech gadget is be able to point a 365 degree camera at a picture of a musician and then wait 30 seconds and then have

an AI pick a random song of theirs. That's always what I wanted for the future. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's the dream of fucking Archimedes had when he was, when he was building his laser. That's right. That we all saw in the most recent Indiana Jones film. Speaking of the most recent Indiana Jones film, this podcast is entirely sponsored by that movie. So here's some other ads. the world of Latin culture, musica, peliculas, and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite

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That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists

to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things

that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God, things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make real people. I swear to God, things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com.

Why are we giving free advertising to disney why are we because that movie was so close to being worth it that last 20 minutes no nazis machine gunning roman legionnaires was amazing pretty funny well do you know who would have loved ces our comedians probably yes he probably would have would have had a great time um what what next yeah garrison why don't you go ai product do we want to talk about um how about the pet one garrison you saw that all right so i think i think i think me and ed both saw chat gpt for animals um which is not really what it is saying of it's like it scans a picture of your dog and then tries to tell you if it has any health problems based on

that picture you it it's it's you're not you're not actually talking to your dog or anything it just it takes pictures of animals and then it it analyzes it to tell you how the dog is feeling, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I saw a product like this earlier at CES. I saw a product like this last year. They're just calling it ChatGPT because it's an AI name. It's hip because they're hoping that that will make people spend money on it. It was every CES I see something that begins to make me disassociate and i walk i walked past there blovo the chat gpt for and my brain was just like

just like start like glitching out and then when i went to look it up as garrison did i was so disappointed because i hoped that these were just crackpots who like yep you put the microphone to your dog now you know what your dog's saying that i would respect even if it didn't work just if you're like yeah fuck it yeah your cat said he hates you your cat's been radicalized i'm afraid see there's a fun product in here which is you sell to rubes and a product that you're like it translates your dog's micro expressions into language. And then the actual paying customers are sickos like us. And you just take control of somebody's pet's voice. That'd be so cool.

You can have their like, yeah, your cat's racist now. Your dog's a Nazi. This is the perfect product for HP Lovecraft. You would have loved this. No, if you gave me like the show lie to me but for dogs on my phone i would spend whatever you want a thousand dollars and i will yeah i wouldn't pay like average west coast rent prices to be able to like gaslight some family into thinking their dog is a terrorist see a friend of mine oh what's what's wrong ed chat gpt said that i said that my dogs joined isis and

i don't know i don't know how he did it but he's been he's talking about a caliphate according to the app i don't know what this app is bankrupting me i paid four and a half thousand dollars for this app a month i don't know why i need it. So, because, so, I unfortunately had to miss yesterday, so there was probably an endless number of tech innovations that I was unable to see because I had to miss one day. But, with the help of penicillin, I was able to return today to do

one final walk. The chat GPT of antibiotics. That is exactly what my doctor said, actually. But, I did swear revenge on CES, so I just walked around, mostly the Venetian just seeing all of the worst things i could find in documenting them so i could get revenge uh from that twink poisoning me with strep throat so the the first really good thing is this i i mostly walked around the award-winning sections because that's where you find

only the best there was an award-winning uh because that's where you find only the best there was an award-winning uh speaker called audio cu that all of their marketing was built from this horrible horrible uh uh ai image generation of this like extremely busty blonde woman in a latex suit but if you zoom in onto her fingernails, her fingernails are like sticking through the wrong side of her fingers. Oh my God. Oh my God. It's the woman's from that one movie. Oh, damn it.

Not skin. That was the woman where the alien was sexy and then she killed people and she had sex with them. It's the same thing. Yes. Terrifying. Yes. Readers, call in and

say what that is yeah it looks just like that uh it says relax stick it in which is pretty funny um so that that was pretty bad um i don't know i respect that i respect that that's that's a baller move right there again this is this is for a speaker company it's like dj girlfriend in the shape oh it's a it's a speaker in the shape of a girlfriend no it's just home theater speakers it's just have a horrible ai generated woman as their spokesperson i mean i would buy it if it was dj girlfriend though dj girlfriend is a great idea for a product and might stop several mass shootings ai has brought back sexism yeah if you do DJ girlfriend right, you could stop at least one mass shooting.

Finally, we have a real solution. Now, another product that won the CES 2024 Innovation Awards is an AI-powered coffee brewer and grinder system. I'm just going to read the description. That's what coffee's been missing. That's right. I know we wake up every morning, make our little French press coffee.

That's fine. But do you know what could be better? An AI system that does it for you. I'm going to read the award description for this product. Okay. Introducing Barista Brew Coffee Brewer and Grinder System, a smart coffee system that tailors your brew to perfection. and grinder system a smart coffee system that tailors your brew to perfection with ai guided personalization easily adjust brewing parameters for a custom cup no expertise needed rate track

and refine your brews brew iq ai suggestions for your ideal taste simplify with one touch favorites elevate your coffee experience yeah when i hear all that the one thing i think is simplify that's that simple the movie was species by the way so i love that movie one of one of one of the best hr geiger uh art utilizations yeah yeah and easily the horniest movie of the 1990s like there's not a lot of which is which is a high high bar um. So on this AI Coffee Maker, on the front, there's a little control panel with nine different settings that you can change because they're all on a graph. We have citrus, spice, nutty, fruity, balanced, cocoa, floral, herbal, and honey. So you can, with the ease of a touchpad, start to customize your own AI coffee. So that is revolutionary. I'm going to be getting one for Robert this Christmas.

Thank you, Garrison. I know. I've always thought, you know what I hate is the experience of exploring new flavors on my own and learning new ways of brewing coffee, a beverage I consume every day. So I'm glad to be handing that whole experience off to a machine that's right and i know a lot of people used tavia just brought something up that i think is relevant here it's a guardian article about an ai smoothie shop that opened in san francisco well before ces um that is a combination of uh it's being driven forward

with ai technology as well as 5g stuff that I think had opened up and then like three weeks later had shut down. Oh, that's too bad. They were like, a robot will pick the perfect smoothie for you. Well, I actually want to bring something else. So I love smoking meat. I have pellet smokers at home. And I saw a few times on this show, AI grills. And I just looked up one called a brisket smart grill.

And I was like, how could you possibly make a thing, which is basically maintaining hot air in a tube long enough until the food's done. And what it is, is it has a thing. You can ask the grill, what seasoning should I add to make my chicken skewers spicy?

Or how do I sear a medium rare steak? I don't fucking know. Why don't you learn to cook, you twat? It's just like the enjoyable part of cooking is the experimentation and learning taste. But no, thank you. Just like that goddamn coffee thing. Oh, I don't want to learn anything. I don't want to have a human experience.

That's the thing with a lot of these AI solutions, we'll call them, is I feel like they're robbing people of real experiences. Yeah, for like, no benefit. Like there's some stuff that like, you know, the ability of a smartphone to, once you had to be like in a building in order to like access a phone or like use a pay phone,

now you can connect with people everywhere. That's a clear benefit, right? There's downsides connect with people everywhere that's that's a clear benefit right there's downsides to it obviously but it's a clear benefit but like now you don't have to learn now you don't have to cook you can let a robot do it for you it's like well but why cooking is pleasurable and if i don't want to cook i will go to a restaurant or order food and it's cheaper than buying several thousand dollar ai device i mean some things are hard to learn uh which brings me to the next product smoking me but kind of like like uh like parenting right oh good okay nice you know what garrison i'm proud of you that was a good segue so ai parenting especially with your infant

child this was also in the ces awards section so you know it's going to be legit i was able to see a demonstration of an ai baby crib that will shake your baby up and down based on facial expression analysis done by an ai and yeah that's what you do i'm going to show uh you show it here so here is here's the cutting edge facial expressions. We have anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. And that basically that data will go into this little crib, which will start shaking and moving up and down based on what they scan on your baby's face. To be clear, there is a product called the SNU that exists where

there's a product called the SNU that exists where it... Drop my phone there. There's a product called the SNU, which is like a... For infants. And it notices when they're fussing and it kind of like lightly rocks them. But the way it rocks them is so very light. It is very much a... This is what a mother would do with a brand new baby, freshly baked. You don't want to move into it much.

That one has like six pictures from the intro of lie to me and a heart rate monitor and it's like yeah yeah hand over your baby to ai great yeah this product looks like a baby maraca the pace that you shake it which is dependent on what pretty much you make pretty much well i love it also because like a a real scandal i think from the i think it was in the 80s is like nannies shaking babies to death like the idea that like again a machine that can only go at a certain pace that's very light um you know i get that's a labor save especially for like a single parent or whatnot like you know some some people will need that but um it i i just worry i i worry that we're not all that far from our first and ai killed my baby you know i i think i think that i i think the real beauty of this product is

usually when you have a newborn baby you have to like watch it all night because it'll wake up you have to like pick it up pat it make sure it gets back to sleep you can just leave that baby in the bed you can like you can like go to the club yeah just leave the baby in the bed if it starts crying don't worry the ai will take the ai will take over we are on the verge of beds that can raise our children just like the bencher brothers that's right and and those and those kids turned out fine they turned out great perfect specimens really but i think luckily luckily for you because i know none of us are babies anymore but we are all you, eventually going to get old, hopefully. That's a big if.

Hopefully. And there is AI products that will also assist us as we get older using the same AI baby tech here. One of the places that me and Robert stopped by was called Blue Sky AI. It's spelled ridiculously offensively and they refused to do an interview they were not happy but i was able to get a pamphlet and they have an ai that i think they're mostly targeting at like older people but quote by comparing the way your facial and vocal behavior changes over time using your facial expressions, facial muscle actions, as well as where you are looking, your body pose, and the tone of your voice, we have the potential to identify and monitor all kinds of medical conditions that manifest in the face or voice. So it's a facial scanning and voice scanning that uses AI to try to diagnose you with medical conditions.

scanning that uses AI to try to diagnose you with medical conditions. Specifically, the guy told us that it's useful for Alzheimer's and he realized we were journalists and then asked us to go away. It also says... Yeah, that's how you know you've got a good medical device. A good

product at CES. Blue Sky uses a continuous approach, apparent valiance, and arousal to measure to measure expressed emotion this better fits the real human experience of emotional states this approach allows emotion regions to be defined and to measure the transitions away from and towards these regions this continuous approach where appropriate can be mapped back to a much less exact categorical representation. For example, excited, calm, or angry.

Do they have horny? They do not have horny. Not that I can see. Look, if you know old people, one thing they never stop doing is fucking. They do have a list of all human emotions here charted on a map. Finally. That using

AI, we can finally figure out what emotions you're feeling based on your face so you can use this just with your with your phone camera with your uh with your ipad camera they do data collection data analysis one of the weird use cases that we saw was uh i know we saw something similar to this already uh but just scanning your face when driving to tell you how you're feeling which which is just quite funny. It's a, I could talk about that a second. What this reminds me of,

there was a product a few years ago. It was like a robot for the military. And the idea was this robot can run in dangerous situations and pick up troops that have been injured and run them out, which is probably a thing that will exist at some point and might even save lives, right? I can see how that would be a useful thing in the military. It can be very dangerous to retrieve people much better for a robot to get shot or blown up in that

situation than another person but to try and comfort the soldiers they gave the robot the head of a teddy bear like a metal teddy bear head it looked like a fucking nightmare it was just like what what are you think did you talk to There's all sorts of guys who have been shot in combat. Did you talk to one of them? Did you go, would the experience of having your arm blown off, Corporal, have been more pleasurable if a giant metal teddy bear had entered? So my first job was working on the characters in Twisted Metal, but then I moved into robotics.

It's so cool that how many of these products are very clearly made funded prototyped r and d hired pr teams everyone's done these big presentations without talking to a single fucking human being it's so cool it's so cool how much waste there is at this show where not a single human soul there is a completely different subject i realized there was like an ai powered um nail salon thing as well i saw i'm like that's definitely one where you didn't talk to talk to any woman though because first and foremost in my experience a lot of women are scared of a new nail place for fucking up their hands. So are they going to spend $800 goddamn dollars on this thing to maybe get burned? And I saw in this article about it just now that their thing they said was, oh, yeah, it's like a Nespresso at home.

I've had Nespresso's break multiple times. And I realize it may sound weird. How can you break a Nespresso? I'm just built different. But if I can break it, just like me and strep throat. Unbelievable. an espresso i'm just built different but if i can break it just like me and strep throat unbelievable so i i do have one more product and then i'm and well first garrison i know you have one more product but we also have one more ad break the 2025 iheart podcast Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award.

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and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHot Radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check better offline.com ah we're back garrison what's your next product so i we already talked about uh the handy which is you know i sure did which is by by all accounts actually like works as intended it's a good product the people the pr people and we talked to the CEO, were not just knowledgeable, but remarkably good at keeping a straight face while talking about their jack off. That's professionalism.

You have to respect it. Honestly, that was the most professional booth I saw the entirety of CES. They were really on point. Yeah, if you are looking for a jack off machine, I can't recommend anything more highly well robert except for our next product which is an ai powered jack-off machine thank god so this is called my hixel it is the first it's the first app that's an appealing name

that's a name that sounds like sex it is the first app for climax control to incorporate ai now i'm i'm gonna i'm gonna read through their really redefines edge technology huh i want to make a note before you get into it the thing that they're claiming this is useful for there are devices for and it is a real use case which is that like premature ejaculation is a serious problem for a lot of men. It's like a quality of life issue, right? It stops people from feeling confident. It's a serious problem.

There are prosthetic devices people can use to train themselves. That's fine. They already exist. This is basically like, what if an AI could teach you how to come slower? Yes. and AI could teach you how to come slower. Yes. And we have a six-step layout here describing why MyHixel is right for you.

The first step is secure and anonymized data collection. So you can get all of your coming data stored, but don't worry, it's secure. See, my first question to that is, why is data on me masturbating being collected at all well it could be because they're putting it towards an eight-week training program so first and foremost one of the first things on the website for this is just the words happy sex year save 60 dollars and my hicks all control but happy sex year is going to be something I think about for a while,

but also it says it has my Hicks or care and my Hicks or control two different things. And then my Hicks or Academy. And sadly you can't click on that because I've never wanted to know more about what, how much material could there be? Unless a masturbation Academy. Yeah.

I thought they just called that eaten. That was a British public school joke. It's okay. I made an edging joke earlier and nobody caught it yeah i there's one thing the eaten boys do and they don't have sex no masturbation oh yeah i'm sorry part of what i hate about this is its name is so clearly like trying to be respectful and like respectable and a tech product name, as opposed to one of the things that I respect about the Handy people is they just went ahead and called it Handy. I mean, it's weird because

some of their free merch were labeled with stuff like, Download the app to control your loads. We bring the game, you bring the joystick. The first day you went for a run you couldn't last more than three minutes either so it's weird how they yeah had this very like sanitized branding except for their like free merch but yeah it has it has bluetooth connection interactive and personalized settings you can monitor your user evolution and it is it is marked as a medical device

but on their brochure there's just two really good sentences there's video feedback from our sexual health professionals so after you come you can get on a video chat and talk about it there we go

looking good it's the pillow talking add-on I'd love to be one of those people as a guy man three minutes you can do better than that come on are you meant to encourage them yeah yeah are you meant to commiserate with them yeah what is the goal here yeah but also i cannot think of a single person i'd want to talk about that with yeah i'm just imagining like the guy on the other and be like no no no zoom in the camera a little more i want to see those ropes that's not bad that's not bad good consistency okay let's move that over let's see his oh face again wow you replay that

my friend that your load management is very consistent and i think i think we're really missing is how much AI will assist in this because they claim that using cutting-edge technology, my Hixel control is the first solution to include AI and machine learning for climax control treatment, which is just really, really reassuring. So, yeah, it basically looks like a flashlight that connects to your phone and it's an app with anatomical realistic interior design and AI and security and anonymized data.

I think this is really going to open up some avenues for sex workers. Yeah. Hopefully, hopefully, Taffia. It's also like the design. The Handy is very clearly a robot. You stick your dick inside and it jacks you off. This looks like a fleshlight, except the back end, like the front end where you unscrew the top,

and it's like a fake vagina, looks like a fleshlight. The back end looks like an incense diffuser. Like someone decided these two products needed to be. What if you could fuck your uh your aromatherapy bot finally so that that is that is most of the the the just the groundbreaking ai products that i was able to see today does anyone else have any ai products they would love to talk about it's time to talk about gnerd i okay gnerd you want to start us off about gnerd okay uh i guess we attended a panel which panel was it y'all i don't that was the dhsai panel yeah that was that was the ai panel

with one of the heads of the department of homeland security who i can confirm because he turned around to take a selfie has a hank hill ass he's very insistent on that no but absolutely no but and i'm saying this not to shame him but because there are orthotics for that you can get help sir that's even in a whole episode of king of the hill one of the better episodes good times so good nerd ai was announced before this talk that we had, and it was, I think the guy announcing both this event as well as the panel had taken some time to really focus on the fact that this was his quote-unquote opus. His opus. His opus. He said the word opus like five times.

Gnert's what I'll be remembered by. This is my legacy. And then I guess two of the designers had come up who stuck out like a sore thumb compared to like the sea of khaki and blazers and things like that. Yeah. They had clearly never ordered a drone

strike unlike our hero in Homeland Security. One of them had a wide brimmed hat that was color matched to the Gnett logo which is pretty cool what does gannett stand for gannett stands for generate um so i think it's actually just called generate they just took out the vowels um but this is going to be a three-day event or a conference held in arlington virginia it's it's they are they're claiming that's gonna have like 200 speakers 150 ai sessions more than 500 startups 150 partners 100 investors and around

5 000 attendees they're trying to target enterprise governments platforms ai tools ai builders services investors startups and media that it's these three events held simultaneously. One's just called Gnert, or Generation AI, which is about just AI tech. It's about AI companies, classes, keynotes,

funding, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There's then Voice and AI, which is about AI language services, and there's also one for Gov AI, which is about ai language services and uh there's also one for gov ai which is about public sector and how the government's going to start integrating ai or regulating ai and they also have one for coding called code forward and it's it's a bummer we can't just play the opening video because the opening video had no like like voice here but there's yeah there's no voice i can read it though 97 million new jobs in ai 500 billion in annual ai spend by 2027 250 billion in vc funding by 2025 genert generate for

a new world and a new market genert connects informs elevates inspires. It all happens at Gnert. And we cannot emphasize enough how they hyped up VC Cash. There was so much buildup for VC Cash. I have watched people who are dope sick buy heroin with less jittery excitement in their hands and eyes. All right, so not a bit about shit like this. So I just did a brief cursory look up

Gannett and it's and it's it's connected conferences VoiceEye and GovEye and CodeForward and all of them are claiming the following. They're featuring GitHub, Microsoft OpenAI, Codium

Tab9. Their thing on linkedin has 28 followers and their engagement is like when i post the word twitter on twitter it's not very good at all i can get more than that doing any punch picture of my arsehole and get more than that but also i cannot find a single person claiming to attend this despite them claiming 200 plus speakers, 150 plus sessions, 500 startups, 150 partners, 100 investors, 5,000 attendees. I can't find a single bit of evidence that anyone is gnerting around at all.

And also, they claim to have three different conferences, CodeForward, GovAI, VoiceAI, and of course, GnertAI. And of course, all of these are part of the Gnert AI beta experience. I don't know why you'd put beta on a… Oh, these people are beta as hell.

But also, why have you got beta on a conference? What are you doing? But also, featuring OpenAI, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Google, and Veritone, I'm going to guess that they've got, like, a chat GPT open on a computer, an NVIDIA GPU and something, Microsoft Word, and they've got like a chat gpt open on a computer an nvidia pro uh gpu and something microsoft word and they've used google and it's very strange because i don't know what this thing is yeah you know i i think what it is is some guys who have a degree of like like like some guys who are are hoping that they don't have any actual ideas for what to do with AI.

So they're hoping that if they create a conference and make that be like the CES of AI, they can kind of force a place for themselves and also attract a bunch of suction up a bunch of money. I also found some, I found some of the speakers. You've got a fellow called Adam Goldberg, who's an account director and head of Azure OpenAI enablement on the go-to-market team at OpenAI. They found a sales guy from OpenAI and then said they got someone from OpenAI. They got someone from JP Morgan. She leads data and AI design. These are all fake jobs. These aren't real jobs. And I think that these conferences are amazing as well because all people do at them

is they go, they watch these things where people go up on stage and go, you know, generative AI is going to create maybe even trillions of dollars of value at some point. And you know, the synergy between generative AI and data collection, but also data silos is going to be truly, truly innovative. And everyone's like, holy fucking shit whoa holy shit piss i have no and then they all post it on twitter and they all forget it ever happened immediately yeah we call that the dividend we do call that the dividend so good art's being put on by this guy who runs this like panel collection called brands gpt at ces with a z, it's not. No, no, no. Garrison, Garrison. With a Z. It should be. I think me and Robert both went to one or two of these brands GPT panels. This is the one where Robert got to yell at Google and Microsoft and get them mad.

No, Google and McDonald's. McDonald's, sorry. McDonald's is ahead of AI. Yes. Which is a thing. So they look to basically just focus on convention programming. So now they're trying to put on their own convention that they're

calling Gnert, instead of just running this brand's GPT at CES. So, that's the background. It's done by ModeV Events. That's mode and the letter V, but one word. That's like the parent company for this i'll be

interested once we get closer to october i'll be interested to see if this is looking more like a real event it's it's not going to be that far for me to travel um but no they're promising uh 500 billion dollars in annual ai spending with 250 billion new vc cash investments uh which is which is quite promising yeah so hopefully this beta test goes like the last video game beta test that i went to and everybody clips through the floor and disappears into a void well i think that's gonna do it for us in this episode and i want to leave you all with um well before we've got one more thing but before we get into into that, which will be fun, I want to talk about something sobering, which is that, as you may get from this, nearly 100% of the AI use cases that we saw presented were either nonsense or incredibly vague. At these different, where you had people from like NVIDIA and Adobe and whatnot, they wouldn't say like, we're going to use AI for this specific task. They would say, we're going to use AI to get more nimble, which I think means firing people. Outside of that, the only real specific use cases that were not clearly nonsense were stuff like replacing customer service workers with of machine learning in order to like clean up images so that you can get better, better images and whatnot. When you're in an area with a lot of

light pollution, there was some stuff like that, but usually very vague. The use cases for AI, what was always extremely clear were the harms. And the very first panel we attended, there's a company called Deloitte. They're a huge consulting firm. If you know about McKinsey, because they're currently somewhat rightfully so a bit of a bugbear on the left, um, Deloitte. They're a huge consulting firm. If you know about McKinsey, because they're currently, somewhat rightfully so, a bit of a bugbear on the left, Deloitte is a similar kind of organization, right? I think they're a bit less toxic, but to a marginal degree. They're like a massive consulting firm. Companies bring them in in order to help them streamline and make processes more efficient and stuff. And one of their people said that according to their internal metrics, they expected half a trillion dollars in fraud

this year in one year due just to voice cloning AI. And that was a more specific statement of what AI is going to do to change people's lives than absolutely any positive use case I heard presented at this conference. Could you explain what you mean by voice cloning? So AI, we did a couple of Bastards episodes talking about scams and how they've contributed

to the decline of trust in our society. One of the things that has in the last year or so become a massive problem is there are now AI things that can generate a human voice near perfectly to the point where, especially if it is a voice of, say, your kid calls you and they're telling you that they have been fucking kidnapped or, you know, something else has happened and they need you to wire them money desperately and you send them the money. It's a fucking scam, right? That is, we had a person from Deloitte and I think

it was a person from Adobe, say that they had been called by a colleague who had gotten a call thinking it was, that seemed to be them asking them to buy a bunch of Apple gift cards. Shit like this is extreme, and it's only going to get more common. You can automate, too, the writing of the scams and the sending of the scams using these AI tools. the scams and the sending of the scams using these AI tools. And that is absolutely, in my opinion, much more of a direct way in which AI is going to affect people than any single product or even cumulatively all of the AI products we saw at CES. On that uplifting note... Yeah, yeah. So that's a bummer. And we will be going into more depth about that but i wanted to

end tavia took notes at all of the buzzwords particularly the ai buzzwords that we heard during the convention and she's going to read that to us now you gotta tell you this list is incredible i've worked in and out of corporate america and much like a cult they have their own internal uh vocabulary that they use and this um convention we went to was just filthy with these buzzwords so i'm just going to dig in uh the ones that i've written down are double down love that one that one comes up a lot versioning versioning versioning which is like a legitimate term in software but i was hearing it used in places where it didn't make much sense to do it um then our favorite liar's dividend by by far by far the best term that we've heard at the at the conference so flexible yeah i'm using versions of that and everything you know it

makes me think a lot about the murderer's dividend which is when you no longer have to deal with an annoying person we got content credential which is coming up a lot, especially around the topic of AI. We have data rich, and it's sister term problem rich, core values, which I heard in every single panel that we were in. Yeah, usually the context of this was

we don't need regulations around how AI can be made and put together. The core values of the companies is what will make sure that AI isn't used in a harmful way. Great. That's going to happen. Very trustworthy.

Very trustworthy groups. We got risk model. And then my next term is a favorite one. It's so good. I think I'm going to give this one to you, Robert. Yeah, because I don't think we talked about this. Guardian MM or something like that. What was the name? MM Guardian. MM mm guardian which is an app you put on it's not

it used to be an app now it is a phone you buy for your child it's a modified samsung galaxy something or other that it's not a galaxy note 7 it gives your it gives you as the parent complete access to your kid's phone and everything they're doing, and it automatically monitors all of their, not just their conversations, but their browsing history and sends you alerts. So if someone sends your kid a text that says you should KYS, kill yourself, this is the example he showed us, you get a message that there's this suicidal discussion or whatnot going on um we asked them you know hey garrison particularly was like what if uh this is a situation where a parent is abusive

um and like using this in order to uh keep tabs on their kids or like hates you know is like a child is gay or trans and their parents um are not accepting of that like does this still can parents still like spy on them over that stuff are there any limitations are there any sort of safeguards built in in case a parent is being abusive right to like monitor or send to the authorities if a parent is using this in an abusive way and their answer was no we're purely about giving parents more power and that yeah the term that they used was tech contracts with children. I can't think of anything more dismal. Yeah, that is one of the most dystopian

assemblies of words I've ever heard. You should never say the phrase contracts with children. That's just like, if you find yourself ever hearing the phrase contracts with children spoken's just that's just like if you find yourself ever ever hearing the phrase contracts with children spoken by anyone run away from that person as fast as you can maybe maybe maybe punch them in the face first yeah and then run away as fast as you can so um that's a good one that's that's some shit you just keep in florida i guess now

or indiana is it's a super flor Florida app. That is the center of this business. Moving on, we've got other terms like visionary and thought leaders, which comes up a lot in these types of conferences. The PR shit. People love saying thought leader. They love it. Thing doer.

They eat it up. We also have edge computing. I know. Yeah, again, handy. Great company. Incredible know. Yeah, again, handy. Great company. Incredible company. Very, very excellent product. We have Digital Twin.

Horizon Scan. So Digital Twin's really good because it means like eight different things. It can mean literally a copy of something or it can mean a digital version of something. It can mean like a metaverse thing. And these are all different industries using it and no one can agree on the meaning yeah that's just tradition that's just like what they do uh they have horizon scan i i actually kind of like

that one that's the first time i'd heard that one when they're just like looking into the future i think they're calling that horizon scan uh use case which came up a lot because everyone was groping for use cases for their technology and didn't seem to have any that they could bring up the the next one i heard way more than i wanted to hear which was accelerate which is always always a great term to hear in tech uh there there was there was so much accelerate and accelerating relating to their tech development and their tech use cases for another one of those terms that Javier just read off. Now, this next term is a real thing and an important thing and not a thing that anyone in the tech industry wants or cares about. The right to be forgotten.

This has actually been legislated. The reason they have to care about this to some extent is it's been legislated in in the eu right and it should be everywhere i actually think this is an incredibly important concept um and it's basically the you know you have we have people go viral good become a main character on whatever app for being a piece of shit sometimes or sometimes doing something stupid or sometimes doing something innocuous that for no reason at all makes a huge number he's actually a really good example there was a kid who posted a video of himself and it was like 4.0 gpa had a job raised money didn't get into harvard or something he didn't mean it in this way but someone took it and then turned it into a why kids are being kept out of harvard thing and he dm them was like you're

ruining my fucking life yeah this is how this like the right to be forgotten should be everywhere yeah is not it is a hugely important thing and you know i i actually give the eu a lot of credit for the fact that that has to some extent been legislated all of that needs to be more common in other countries and more uh vigorously enforced i i don't i say that i have no idea how you do it with the internet working the way it does some of this I actually do think is a values thing where we all need to be more okay with the fact that people, even people who can do something shitty online, deserve to not have that necessarily define the rest of their lives, especially, you know, teenagers. And the next one is one that I like to associate with my posts uh data poisoning i believe

every time i interact with twitter or blue sky that is what i am doing i have some data poisoning yeah or i am data poisoning as a verb or i am data poisoning myself yeah uh and then we've got uh oh garrison you wanted to do this one sure these these are the last three that i got from an ai ethics panel uh we have data silos how data is all separated uh we have data harmonization kind of the opposite of data silos yeah that's basically using ai to generate pictures of dan harman right yes um then we have the the last term which i will i will describe for you the speed capacity gap so the speed capacity gap no i can answer that for you so sometimes when i'm doing a shitload of amphetamines that i purchased from some turkish website via the dark

web you know i'm doing them with a friend and they od because there's a day there's a speed capacity gap between the two of us yeah that's what that uh that's what that dhs guy was talking about for using ai to monitor dark web purchases he's gonna really get on that one um no speed capacity gap the gap between tech acceleration and the capacity of society to keep up and make informed decisions about the technology, which is actually kind of a useful term. It's just one of those, you know, it sounds like a silly tech term. But when it's actually explained, like, oh, that's actually a really good way to think about the way AI is being pushed in all of these new ways. way ai is being pushed in all of these new ways and are we actually as a society whether that's like as a government or just like culturally able to actually make informed decisions about how we

want this tech to be integrated into our lives and now the dark side of this term the speed capacity gap for the to to kind of solve this gap we can either slow down a development or we can speed up our capacity and the panelists obviously preferred the latter and so we should just speed up our capacity. And the panelists obviously preferred the latter. So we should just speed up our cultural capacity. Did they propose a solution for that? Well, kind of, but it's a little unclear. We can go through my recording at a later date once we do our full AI episode.

But their rationale for why we should, instead of slowing down tech development, instead speed up our cultural capacity is because of the many benefits that tech improvements can be made via tech iterations. The more iterations you get of technology, the more benefits you're able

to get from said technology. Versioning, yes. Exactly, which brings us all the way back to versioning. There we Exactly. Which brings us all the way back to versioning. There we go. Yeah, which brings us all the way back to Turkish amphetamines, because I have been, for the last 20 years, trying different versions of Turkish amphetamines.

And the blue pills, man, normally you don't hallucinate on speed, but when you take enough, it turns out you can. And so I think what I'd like to leave everyone with is the knowledge that turkish amphetamines are a thing you can purchase on the dark web and should there's no health consequences to it at all not i'm not part of this bear offline does not support illegal drug purchases for respect for podcast they're not illegal if they're so new that the DEA hasn't banned them yet. That's innovation. Exactly.

Exactly. That's versioning. And that is the speed capacity gap, folks. The DEA can't keep up with the tech improvements. All right, everybody. That's going to do it for us here at Cool Zone. Before we leave, I want to give Tavia and Ed both chances to plug their pluggables. Ed, people are going to be hearing from you every week on your new show, Better Offline,

which is launching in what I'm sure you'll agree is a frighteningly short time. Very soon. It is going to be the best weekly tech show. It is going to do the job that no one is strong enough to do, which is ask questions, listen to the answers, then actually make a question that follows them. I am very much looking forward to this and very excited to work with the Cool Zone team. And Tavia? Oh, you can find me on Twitter at CUTMora. And if you want to learn a little bit more about my interactive and immersive work, you can see that at tabimora.com. Now, you may wonder why I didn't give you any links to anything.

And that was a deliberate thing called subterfuge. But you can find me at where's your ed dot at your at ed zitron on Twitter x rate my nudes dot biz. And of course, blue sky zitron dot b sky dot social. Yeah. And you can find my profile on here. All right, we're fucking done here. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com

or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award. Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards.

That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy, Elian Gonzalez, was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami? Imagine that your mother died

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