Morning Brew Daily - 2024 Tech Breakthroughs: Autonomous Vehicles, Apple Hearing Aids and More

Episode Date: December 24, 2024

Episode 481: Neal and Toby recap the biggest technological breakthroughs from 2024. From Autonomous vehicles, to HIV Drugs, and even Neuralink there was not shortage of advancements this year, and the guys recap it all. Subscribe to Morning Brew Daily for more of the news you need to start your day. Share the show with a friend, and leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. Listen to Morning Brew Daily Here: https://link.chtbl.com/MBD Watch Morning Brew Daily Here: https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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at pwc.com slash US slash brew AI. That's pwc.com slash us slash brewAI. Good morning brew daily show. I'm Neil Fryman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, put on your safety goggles and hold on to your beakers because here comes the science episode. All the biggest tech breakthroughs of the year and why they matter. It's Tuesday, December 24th.

Let's ride. Good morning and Merry Christmas and Hanukkah Eve. As part of our run of special edition episodes over the holidays, Today we're going to be diving into the biggest science breakthroughs of the year. Look, it wasn't hard to find alarming things about technology in 2024. AI deep fakes, chat, GPT, taking your job, mysterious drones swarming the good folks of New Jersey. It's a little unnerving. But at the same time, technology has resulted in so much progress, helping create medicines that will save lives,

turn AirPods into hearing aids, and invent cool gadgets you didn't know you needed like a transparent TV. And that's what we want to focus on today, the positive sides of tech, because you hear plenty about the downsides. Call it Morning Brew Daily's Science Fair. So without further ado, Neil, you won the pre-show present-wrapping competition. Kick us off first. Let's do it. Well, it's been a long time coming, but after more than $100 billion invested in nearly a decade of promises, 2024 was the year that self-driving cars proved the haters wrong, leaping from niche and often despised

technology to actually shuttling people around roads. Take Waymo in California, for example. In August, Google's autonomous car division gave about 312,000 rides per month, double its ride volume only three months before. Some estimates say Waymo now accounts for 4% or more of the San Francisco rideshare market. And then over in China, Wuhan is on its way to becoming the world's first driverless city. Now, around three and every 100 taxis there are robotaxis developed by Biden. Do's autonomous car division. There have been bumps along the way. GM shut down its cruise Robotaxy Division following safety issues, saying it couldn't justify the enormous investment. But Waymo is growing like a weed. Now operating commercial robotaxies in three American cities,

SF, Phoenix, and L.A. It's going to enter Austin and Atlanta next year and then Miami after that. It's currently testing in 25 major metro areas around the country. Toby, last year we were talking about how angry San Francisco residents were setting fires to Waymos, putting coal. on their hoods to incapacitate them. There's been a distinct vibe ship this year, and there's a sense that we might be on the cuss of rapid robotaxie adoption. There were a lot of understandable naysayers, was self-driving just this pie-in-the-sky moonshot

that was the distraction from actually improving transportation. Should we have put our efforts towards micromobility or just better urban infrastructure? These were valid questions, but now you see the amount of rides increasing. You see people's attitudes have, I've totally shifted and now they start to trust these robo taxis a little bit more in the eskers of how technology is usually adopted. What we've seen is so far the like kind of the taste

making cities, the San Francisco's of the world, the Wuhan's of the world. They usually embrace these technologies a little more, but now we're seeing it rolled out across Miami, across Phoenix, across these other metro areas that aren't necessarily always on the cutting edge of tech adoption. But I do think that you are, you have seen, you use the word vibeship, a huge vibe ship vibe shift when it comes to driverless cars. Yeah, we could see some movement in D.C. as well. One of the biggest roadblocks to autonomous vehicles being more widely adopted and rolling out faster is regulations. And obviously, you want to have a lot of rules on the road literally when it comes to self-driving cars. And we have Elon Musk essentially in the White House now. He's betting his entire

company, Tesla, they're moving away from just making EVs to becoming a robotaxy company. he said he's going to work with President-elect Trump to develop federal regulations when it comes to autonomous vehicles. So I think there's generally a lot of bullishness and there's no doubt going to be more speed bumps along the way. But, you know, if you live in the United States, it's not inconceivable that in the next few years, you will be able to hail a robo taxi like you would in San Francisco in Phoenix right now. And I mean, have you met somebody who's done that? Ah, no, which maybe just reflects on where my friends live around the country. But I mean, I assume someone who lives in San Francisco. I just don't know that many people who live in the SF area right now. But absolutely, once it comes to Miami, I'm sure my tune will change. Let's keep the good science news rolling. A groundbreaking new HIV prevention drug fared well in clinical trials this year called Lena Capovir. The drug was named as the breakthrough of the year by the journal Science. Not just in pharma, but in all of science.

Lena Capavir offers six months of protection against HIV and has been shown to be remarkably effective in clinical trials so far, with a 96% reduction in HIV infections. One of its main draws, it is administered as a twice yearly injection, which is a lot easier for patients to stay on top of compared to the daily oral medications currently on the market. The drug works by targeting a specific protein to prevent the virus, from replicating and forming mature particles,

and innovation that carries implications for other viral infections as well. Neil, I feel like these trials were a little loss in all the hype around GLP1 drugs this year, but Lena Kappvier is a huge step for the nearly 1.3 million people who were infected with HIV last year. Yeah, they're saying it could end the HIV epidemic, and this is very concentrated in one region of the world's sub-Saharan Africa. This region accounts for 10% of the world's population,

but it counts for two-thirds of people living with HIV. So if you can get this injection to those people, it could go a long way because the existing treatment or preventative treatment for HIV is that pill that has a lot of stigma attached with it. People just don't take it as they need to on a daily basis. The big question for this particular drug is cost. It does exist in the United States as an HIV treatment.

In 2023, it cost $42,000 per new patient. per year here in the U.S. Meanwhile, the daily oral pill cost less than $40-504 a year. So to get this adopted at all, and they are quite bullish about what this actually can do, they're going to have to drop the price considerably to get it to the affected populations. And remember, the UN has this very ambitious goal of trying to end HIV-slage by the year 2030. And before Atlanta-Capavir kind of hit the market, that goal looked entirely unobtainable. But now, given the fact that it is easier to administer, given the fact that you don't have to take these daily tablet that does have stigma attached to it. It is looking like it could potentially be something

that's in the cards by 2030. Another reason why people are so excited about these trials that we saw is that they were replicable across geographies and sexes. You saw the study conducted in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Peru, South Africa, Thailand, the United States, and across 3200 cisgender men, transgender men, transgender women, and gender non-binary individuals. So those are some of the reasons why scientists were just so thrilled with this specific breakthrough. Let's keep it in the health world. Back in March, the world watched in astonishment as the first patient with a

neuralink brain implant used his nagon to move a cursor on a computer screen. The patient, Noland Arbaugh, lost all movement below his shoulders in a diving accident. But thanks to the implant and working with engineers, he was able to play his step in Mario Kart and multitask by talking about the operation and playing chess at the same time. It was a milestone moment for brain computer interfaces. Experimental technology that aims to put a chip inside someone's brain to help people regain their speech, sight, or movement. People have moved cursors with their neurons before, but those required a device outside

of the brain to transmit data. So you need wires coming out of your skin. Neurrelinks breakthrough is that it transmits data wirelessly. It didn't go perfectly. In the subsequent months, about 85% of the threads implanted into Arba's brain came undone, limiting his ability to move the cursor. But all in all, he said he was very grateful and lucky to have the procedure. I just want to bring everyone along this journey with me, he said. I want to show everyone how amazing this is. And it's been just so rewarding.

So I'm really excited to keep going. Neurrelink has since done an implant in a second patient and got FDA approval for more. Right. And that is the big question is where do you go from here? their second implantation, they want it to reach deeper within the brain. So the first one was around three to five millimeters in that first surgery. The second one, they want to get to a depth of eight millimeters in order to get better thread anchoring because that is the next big step here, as you said, 85% of the threads detach, which really decreases performance.

They want to boost those numbers. Another thing they want to do, too, is that they have this thing called the R1 robot. that is really crucial for getting a precise implementation, implantation, excuse me, and they need to scale that up so it can perform multiple surgeries a day. Nerleek also got FDA's breakthrough device designation for this new implant called Blindsight, which they want to try to implant to bring back eyesight for people who have lost it. So, yes, there are issues, but again, this is the optimistic science episode, and those are a lot of optimistic things. I mean, this guy could not move from his shoulders down, and now he's being able to communicate.

with his brain and move a cursor and play chess. So it's pretty cool. And he's only singing the praises of NeurLink. And we should add, this is, Neurlink's not even close to the only company operating in this space there. At least five other companies that want to do something similar and have applied from the FDA to be able to test on human patients. So then they're all doing this implant in a different way.

Neurrelink has its particular way. These other companies have their own particular procedures. So it seems like there is a movement among a problem. broad swath of companies to get this going. Apple's AirPods Pro 2 are great for listening to Morning Brew Daily, but Apple wants you to hear more than just the number one business news podcast in the world. It unveiled a groundbreaking feature this year, which aims to assist people with mild to moderate hearing loss by turning the popular headphones into hearing aids. Pop in an AirPods in the feature enhances surrounding sounds

so you can hear your environment more clearly, and it's not just a marketing ploy either. The FDA approved their use as clinical grade over-the-counter hearing aids, which at just $249 means that they are one of the more affordable OTC options out there. And Neil, that is the big unlock here, the affordability of these new hearing aids. Would you say this is the coolest thing Apple did this year? I mean, probably. They've done a lot. They've been digging further into the health space. I mean, they really want their Apple Watch to become this big cohesive health unit, and now they have these AirPods that actually do function as clinical hearing aids. So yes, even though in this era of Apple intelligence, it might have been the coolest thing Apple did.

Yeah, Vision Pro sailed and flopped, and Apple Intelligence allowed people to make their own emojis. Siri got a slight upgrade, but that has yet to roll out to a lot of people. I think this was certainly the most consequential thing Apple did this year, and it was buried in a list of updates to its new mobile operating software. So it's really a big deal because so many Americans have hearing loss, but due to the cost of hearing aids, and also we've said there was a word a lot, stigma. And maybe that's what a lot of these innovations have in common is reduce the stigma around certain ways to help yourself get better. It's done, you know, it will probably lead to a lot more people getting help for hearing loss and make a lot of people's lives better. So I have the AirPods Pro too, and so I did the hearing loss test, which is essentially just pings little noises in your ears and you have to determine whether you heard in your right ear or your

left ear. And luckily, I did not have a ton of hearing loss, but people said that the test is mostly accurate. It doesn't line up perfectly with like their clinical hearing tests that they receive, but it's close enough that they do feel confident that they are diagnosing hearing loss appropriately. And then the other thing that some people who test them out said that you have the same conversation with almost everyone you miss is that, yes, these are hearing aids. No, I understand that they're AirPods. They are also hearing aids. And no, I'm not being rude. I promise you, I'm hearing you better with them in. So even though it says it's reducing that

stigma, going up and talking to someone while wearing AirPods or an AirPods, still is a little bit weird. It's confusing. Maybe they need a different color, different show. Yeah, or light to show that they're being used as a hearing aid. Have you ever wondered what's going on behind the scenes of your favorite TV show? And behind the scenes, I don't mean the bloopers. I mean literally what's going on in your living room behind the scene. Well, now you can, thanks to LG's first of its kind, transparent TV, which it revealed at the CES trade show in January. This product was the talk of the convention, a 77-inch transparent OLED TV that can either show you content on a screen or go full invisibility cloak and reveal what's behind it. It'd be perfect for the living room of a

billionaire Marvel villain when it ships because it's expected to cost in the tens of thousands of dollars and has no real practical purpose. But Toby, LG isn't the only one trying out transparency. Samsung also revealed a see-through TV of its own at CES. What do you think? Gimmick or new design aesthetic for the rich and famous? I think it's somewhere in the middle. I know that's a cop-out, but when I heard transparent TV, I thought it would be like this plastic semi-translucent thing. but when you see this, it literally goes, it is a glass box, there's nothing in it. And I think the 3D nature of it was something I didn't expect is that it's got multiple modes. One mode shows off its 3D effects, so you can turn it into an aquarium that looks

like there's fish swimming around in it because it is a box. But then you can also watch regular TV on it. I was reading some reviews again on like how did the TV actually perform, and it's not quite up to par with the top of line models from LVLW. And so that could be a point of kind of departure for these big TV nerds. They don't want to watch something that they know they could get better resolutions somewhere else out there. But I will say it was cool, especially kind of that 3D effect that we spoke about. Up next, some more science breakthroughs coming your way.

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Stuff like community involvement in specific diets were enough to produce lifespans well into the 90s and 100s in regions stretching from Okinawa, Japan to Loma Linda, California. The only issue? Some scientists think it's a bunch of hoo-ha. One post-doctoral researcher from Australia, Dr. Newman, published a paper that was recently honored at the Ig Nobel Prizes, a humorous spinoff of the Nobel Prizes. that chalked up the increased lifespans found in blue zones to shoddy record keeping. Newman found that areas with high levels of faulty records also had high levels of centrenarians living there. One especially agrees with an example is a 2010 Japanese study that found that 230,000 centenarians were actually just a result of unreported deaths.

So, Neil, there's been some pushback to Newman's work and his paper is not peer reviewed yet, but it certainly cast blue zones in a different light. And it made a lot of waves because the Blue Zones brand has quietly become huge. There's Blue Zones iced tea. There's Blue Zones Bean Soups. There's eight books and Netflix series. Partnerships. A million dollar program for other cities to become part of Blue Zones. We even talked about real estate developments, getting a Blue Zone designation, which probably

cost money that they had to play Blue Zones for. So it was maybe a direct threat to the global Blue Zones brand. and the Blue Zones guy, who's a National Geographic reporter who turned Blue Zones from just a concept into this global brand, certainly pushed back on the research from the Dr. Newman. Dr. Newman, sorry, Dr. Newman, and said, look, we cross-check everything. Like, you think we just go and take everybody, take these cities, you know, word for the fact that how many people live over 100? And, like, we did our research.

So there was certainly a debate over that. but I think it knocked down Blue Zones a little bit from its perch. One thing that is for sure, though, longevity is becoming much more in vogue these days. Remember, there's Brian Johnson, the former tech founder who now has devoted all his time and money and dignity to try to slow aging. You also see a rise in people trying out these different protocols to live longer.

Drinking is going down. There is definitely a vibe shift in our society towards longevity. So even if Blue Zones, the brand, might have taken a hit, I do think this is a trend that is, moving towards longevity being more popular. And also, you know, the stuff that he says people in blue zones do is kind of universal and seems good for lack of a better word.

I mean, it's like eat nutritious diet, fruits and vegetables, get plenty of physical activity, build physical activity into your daily life, prioritize family and community, don't smoke, drink in moderation. I mean, even if blue zones are bunk or a bunch of hoo-ha, as you say, I mean, those seem to be like some worthwhile principles to follow. What's the trickiest thing to move in the world? My mind goes straight to carrying a very full beer from the bar to the table without any spillage. But no, there's something far more dicey, and scientists have finally cracked how to do it.

Researchers at the CERN particle physics lab in Switzerland have learned how to move antimatter and are preparing to take it on a truck to other labs the first time anyone has ever moved antimatter. Antimatter is the most expensive material on Earth, requiring several trillion dollars just to make a single gram. And transporting it is not easy. The only time it's ever been done is in fiction. Dan Brown's novel Angels and Demons when terrorists steal a quarter gram from CERN and plan to use it to blow up the Vatican. And that's kind of the problem with shuttling antimatter around. If it comes into contact with matter, both get annihilated instantly.

The scientists say it won't result in any significant explosion. it rubs elbows with matter, but it would mean a lot of work and money will have gone down the drain. So they're taking remarkable precautions to make sure the antimatter stays isolated in a vacuum when it is moved. Toby, I can't wait for this. I can't wait for it either, but my first question was, why the heck are we moving it at all? And part of the reason is that antimatter can tell us a lot about just the origins of the universe, because technically when the big brain happened, equal amounts of matter and antimatter were created. But if you look out in the known universe, There's a lot of matter out there, so why did the balance shift so heavily in favor of matter?

These are the fundamental questions of our universe, and so in order to study them, they want to compare matter with antimatter very closely to see where the differences are. And the reason why they can't do it is the current positioning of antimatter is affected by some magnetic fields of the earth, so they need to bring it to a place where it's less affected by that so they can more efficiently measure it. But yeah, I'm excited, too. They're doing it on trucks, too. You said that they're putting them in vacuums so they don't come in contact with antimatter. But what about, or come in contact with matter, but what about a little bump in the road or something like that? They're putting them on seven-ton trucks and actually driving them through the countryside.

So that would be quite the nervy piloting job of trying to drive. 10-2, Toby. Yeah, 10-2. Eyes on the road. We need a helicopter police cam. of this like the OJ Bronco chase. Yeah, it probably won't be quite as fast-paced, but it will be fun to watch.

Of all the uses of AI that have arisen over the past year, I think this one is my favorite. When Mount Vesuvius erupted over 2,000 years ago, some papyrus scrolls actually ended up surviving. But the carbonized scrolls are incredibly delicate to handle and crumble if you try to unroll them. Enter the Vesuvius Challenge, a competition funded by some Silicon Valley and entrepreneurs that promised to reward a cash price to

anyone who could find a way to peer inside the scrolls without actually unrolling them. Back in February of this year, a team of three students won the $700,000 grand prize using AI to decipher the scroll's hidden secrets. Despite the contest organizers estimating a less than 30% probability of anyone actually meeting the contest criteria, the three students machine learning algorithm deciphered more than 2,000 characters in the scrolls, exceeding the grand prizes requirements. This was definitely one of my favorite stories of the year, Neil, because it is using AI to do something extremely practical, actually. Extremely practical, extremely cool, and the people who won it show the global nature of this and how competitions like this can actually be really effective. I mean, the three, the guys who won the $700,000 prize were an Egyptian PhD student in German.

a robotic student in Switzerland, and that a computer science student in Nebraska, all young, all in it just to, they said it was like the most pure form of playing a video game. So I think this is cool, and we'll probably see similar competitions to accomplish different things that, you know, machine learning can do.

And I think we bury the lead here, too, because what did the passages say? First, the first word that was deciphered was just the word for purple, actually, but the passage in general, they think it is a kind of philosophical discussion of life's pleasures. So talking about music and food, a lot of people likened it to reading a 2,000-year-old blog post about just how to enjoy life. So it shows you self-health books or self-reflection books do go back to the very, you know, beginning of Western civilization. Okay, let's close out the show with perhaps the most important scientific discovery of the year.

Monkeys cannot type out the complete works of William Shakespeare given infinite time. because the universe will run out before then. I'll back up. There's a famous mathematical concept called the infinite monkey theory, which suggests that a monkey press random keys on a typewriter would eventually write out the complete works of Shakespeare with an infinite amount of time

because anything is possible over an infinite time horizon. However, two Australian researchers rejected the theory in a peer-reviewed study. They claimed that the amount of time it would take for a monkey typing to write out the complete works of Shakespeare would be far longer than the lifespan of our universe, one Google years, so they rejected the infinite monkey theory as misleading. Even getting the monkeys to write out a single word would be a challenge. If all 200,000 chimpanzees were recruited and typed at a rate of one key per second

until the universe ended, there would only be a 5% chance a single one would type out the word bananas. The probability of one writing a coherent sentence would be one in 10 million billion billion. Toby, are you buying this? Well, I'm buying it, but I feel like they are not jiving with the concept of infinity here. Whenever you put a time horizon on infinity, it ceases to become infinity. So yes, technically all the knowing monkeys in the universe couldn't type Shakespeare in the given before the heat death of our universe. But that's the key word here. It's an infinite monkey theorem.

They need infinite time to do it. So they were just saying it's not practical in our knowing universe. still think the Infinite Monkey theorem does hold true because that's the whole concept of infinity right there. I think I could be a published scientist if I said that this is not practical. Right. Yeah. I could have told you that. Maybe it would have won some awards. It was fun, though, to hear that there would be a 5% chance that they would be able to successfully type the word bananas in its own lifetime. So it is a fun, you know, kind of rabbit hole to go down. I actually do love the Infinite Monkey theorem, too, because I wrote a paper.

back in high school that was basically asking if it was a philosophical discussion really, but if someone recreated a text word for word, but in a different time period under different historical and environmental circumstances, is it still the same piece of work? So if I wrote Shakespeare today, would it still be considered the same piece of work given our current modern formatting? And so it is just a fun thing to think about. Like if a monkey wrote Shakespeare, is it still Shakespeare at that point or is it become something else. So it's fun

to think about beyond just the mathematical ideas behind. What if you just reduce the amount of keys? Like how much would you have to reduce the amount of keys for a monkey to be able to possibly type out Shakespeare by the end of the universe? You know, if we got rid of the return, the shift,

I'm looking at my keyboard now. There's a lot of extraneous keys, so if we just narrowed it to the... Well, it is a typewriter. A typewriter, so none of that has it anyway. Right. I think it just has, you know... I just wonder what the minimum amount of keys You know, I guess then you couldn't, you would miss some letters in Shakespeare. Anyway, wow. I'm getting deep into the infinite monkey theorem.

But Christmas is tomorrow, Hanukkah is tomorrow. So we need to wrap up. Hope you are all filled with a little more optimism about the world, a little more understanding of how monkeys type on a typewriter. For any questions, comments, or feedback, send an email to Morningbrewdaily at morningbrew.com. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our executive producer. Raymond Lou is our producer.

Olivia Graham is our associate producer. Euchenua Ogu is our technical director. Billy Minino is on audio. Haram makeup's Paper Meshay Volcano did not make the final cut for the show. Devin Emery is our chief content officer and our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great show today, Neil.

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