Tech Brew Ride Home - (Bonus) Brian On The Newsworthy Podcast

Episode Date: December 23, 2023

Me on The Newsworthy Podcast talking the tech trends of 2023. Alliterative! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Again, this is me on the Newsworthy podcast, a daily news podcast, 15 minutes, sort of like this one, but all the news. My thanks to Erica Mandy for having me on to ask about the year in tech and also for allowing me to share this audio. Look up the Newsworthy wherever you get your podcasts.

Today is Saturday, December 16th. With only a couple weeks left of 2023, it is that time to take a look back at some of the biggest headlines of the year. And for today, we're specifically talking all things tech. To do that, I'm joined by Brian McCullough, the host of the podcast TechMeme Ride Home, a daily show that covers what's happening in technology. He's also the author of how the internet happened from Netscape to the iPhone. So from ChatGBT and the Impact of AI to Elon Musk and X to crypto controversies and more, we're reviewing what happened, the impact, and what to expect in 2024. Welcome, welcome to The Newsworthy Special Edition Saturday when we sit down with a different expert or celebrity every Saturday to talk about something in the news. Don't forget to tune in every Monday through Friday for our regular episodes where we provide all the day's news in 10 minutes.

I'm Erica Mandy. It's now time for today's special edition Saturday. Brian, thank you for joining us here on The Newsworthy. I'm glad you reached out. I do a daily show like you. So I've done 250 episodes on Tech News this year. So I've got trends galore for you. Yes, you've seen it all from 2023. So let's talk about what's happened. We obviously have to talk about artificial intelligence with a lot of the headlines obviously focusing on things like chat GPT and other similar chat bots. So take us through a few of those biggest AI headlines from the year. 2020 was definitely the year of AI for tech. Chat GPT only debuted in November 30th of 2022. So we're just a year into this whole new paradigm. But it has shifted everything in Silicon. Valley. There's two things that you should understand about this. Number one, on the one hand, potentially this is a new type of computing that could do insane things like cure cancer, solve climate change. Obviously, you've seen the things that it can do. Like, you type in a few

words and it can make a better picture than you could ever take with a camera or something like that. But the second way to look at it is that this is maybe the sort of computing that we were sold from the invention of computers. Like remember that Jetson's 1950s, style, like, hey, computer, do this thing for me, and it just does it. Well, we've had computers in our lives for 70 years, but it's not just do it. You have to use this app, that app, you have to understand the file menu. If you're old enough, you remember the command line, you had to type in things to get the computer to do it. So potentially, this is a new technology that will unlock lots of innovations, but also fundamentally, this is a new type of compute. When you see

Captain Picard on Star Trek, say, computer do X, Y, or Z, and that's it. Like, that's potentially what we're seeing, which is why we're seeing this AI flood into every sort of program, every sort of thing that you might use, because in a way, it's a new interface with how computing works. And we're obviously going to see that in the good fun ways like you're talking about, as well as some ways that people maybe aren't so thrilled about. And one of those things that I know people are watching as we look ahead to 2024 is how AI is going to impact the elections. What are you foreseeing good or bad? when it comes to AI impacting the 2024 elections?

I would argue that AI is not going to change things. We've already been seeing people concerned about misinformation and bot networks of sock puppets doing things that aren't true or that confuse people. AI is just going to be an accelerant to that because now, again, AI can within five seconds of an event happening create a picture that is false, as opposed to people going online and saying things that are false.

It can do the disinformation at scale. So that might make it worse by an order of magnitude, but I don't see it as fundamentally changing sort of the problems that we've already been dealing with. And companies have been, you know, like meta, have been putting in place some new AI and election-related policies. Do you think that'll be enough? Probably not. Everything is so fractured now that I don't think that there's any real way for even the

biggest platforms to sort of put their thumbs on the scale, as it were, things are going to bubble up from places beyond the platforms or even on the platforms in little nooks and crannies of the major platforms that maybe they're not even aware of in real time. And speaking of the major platforms like meta, we used to hear a lot about metaverse and how it would expand our ability to interact in virtual realities. Does the metaverse still have a future or is it all about AI now? At the moment, if you are an investor, if you're a VC, if you're founding a company, it is all about AI. However, the true believers have not gone away. Like, Mark Zuckerberg doesn't talk about the Metaverse very much on the earnings calls anymore. That doesn't mean that he's

spending less money on Metaverse development. It's just that by not shouting it from the rooftops, investors treat meta stock better. So my answer is sort of nuance, which is to say, yeah, the hype got ahead of the reality, but that doesn't mean that this is over and done. In the same way that, you know, when the dot-com bubble burst in the late 90s, there were people that literally thought that the internet was a fad and the web was a fad, but it didn't prove to be true because, you know, within three or four years, you had things like Facebook being founded. Any thoughts on regulations that could be coming our way because governments are racing to keep up with tech and AI specifically?

It is interesting. for at least 40 years, governments in the West have taken a hands-off sort of approach to technology development in terms of regulation because, well, this is innovation, this is where the new jobs are going to come from. AI is the first time in 40 years that governments are stepping in ahead of time to say we should have rules around this, we should think this through before we, you know, move fast and break things. What I would say is, as of right now in 2023, all of the talk about regulation has been just that. It's sort of been window dressing of, we need to be thoughtful about this. There hasn't been any sort of thing that has like actual teeth. There's regulatory frameworks,

but they're all voluntary. I would be surprised if any of those, at least in the West, come to pass at least in 2024, but maybe even at all. Because for all of the talk, I don't know that governments really want to, you know, you could use the term stifle innovation. but also one of the things about AI is governments in the West feel like that this is the next big technology paradigm. And if they put the reins on what is being developed in the West, they could lose to competitors like China. So one of the main reasons why I think Western governments at least may not eventually regulate as thoroughly as they might sound like they're going to do is because they're afraid that they would fall behind the Chinese and others. Let's talk a little bit about Elon Musk. He took over what was Twitter in 2022, but he's continued to evolve the platform. Now it's called X. And one of the more recent headlines is that major companies like Apple and Disney and Walmart have actually stopped advertising on the platform due to some controversies. So what's your takeaway from Elon Musk's impact on tech this year? And do you think X will ultimately survive? I do think it will survive. But my theory, and I'm not the first to say that, is that he doesn't, it's not that he doesn't care to turn it around as a profitable entity,

but he might have decided that it's not possible. However, it still serves his aims if what he enjoys about owning X slash Twitter is that it is a platform that allows him to amplify his voice and voices of people that he agrees with. Essentially, it is a very powerful media platform. And, you know, he is the richest man in the world. So as opposed to, okay, we're going to turn this around in a year, 18 months. Maybe he's like, listen, this is going to bleed money for me for the foreseeable future, but I still like what the power that it accrues to me, and I still like what it can do for my various causes and things I believe in. So my theory is, whether he'll ever publicly announce this or not, I don't think he wants to turn Twitter around,

but he still wants to run Twitter and enjoys running Twitter. And as we think about some controversies, I would say cryptos, has dealt with a lot of scandals this year, a lot of talk about fraud and there's been court cases. And yet the price of Bitcoin has surged recently. What's going on in the crypto market in 2023? So a lot of the energy from two years ago in crypto was like these new sort of defy's decentralized finance, these new sort of like ways to do finance on the blockchain. Those are all sort of discredited and a lot of them defunct. The NFT craze, there are still true believers, but that seems to be defunct or whatever.

There's a certain segment of people that believe that Bitcoin exists in its own realm in the sense that Bitcoin was the first and it's the only one that has never blown up and it still kind of works. So there's a scenario where Bitcoin as a store of value, as a replacement for gold, whatever your theory of why Bitcoin can still rise and stick around, there's a case to be made that Bitcoin can rise even as the rest of crypto is sort of in an actual nuclear winter. Electric vehicles also used to be all in the headlines where everybody's switching over,

but now there does seem to be at least a bit of a pullback. What's been going on with EVs in 20203? And what do you expect in the new year? I have to be a little nuanced on this. EV adoption is still continuing a pace and probably best estimates are, you know, within the end of the decade, EV sales will be perhaps more than 50% of new car sales. It's just that they're not rising as quickly as people expected. And I think the answer for that is because low-hanging fruit theory,

most of the people that were interested in going over to the EV lifestyle, if you will, they have done it. There's plenty of EV vehicles for sale now, but the potential customer of those vehicles is not the easy sale, is not the low-hanging fruit. You have to do more to convince a customer now. buying a new car that, hey, an electric vehicle is the way to go. So the nuance would be, this is not a turnaround. It's not that EV sales as a percentage of new car sales is dropping.

It's just not rising as rapidly as it was. And that impacts the investment that some of these automakers are making an EV, especially after we saw the auto strike. So the nuance to the nuance would be, well, but this could put a serious damper on the EV revolution if you're a Ford and you're a GM and you've invested all of these billions of dollars and you're not getting the return as quickly on that investment as you wanted. And so they would pull back in order to preserve capital and preserve profitability and things like that. So what we saw as two years ago, not only is Tesla doing great, but every vehicle maker in the world is also jumping on the bandwagon. Well, all of the bandwagon jumpers might be pulling back a bit. And so

that might also, it might cause sort of a snowball effect that also slows the speed with which the EV revolution happens. Any other top tech stories from 2023 that you think we haven't touched on, or any other predictions or stories that you're watching for 2024? So the prediction for 2024 kind of comes back to the metaverse in the sense that Apple's Vision Pro, that sort of $3,000 AR VR-VR mask is going to be released. Now, no one expects a three-th century. thousand-dollar mask that covers your entire face is going to be a huge consumer breakthrough. Or if it is, listen, even I who cover trends all the time will be incredibly shocked. But what Apple does have a tendency to do is prove the market.

Simple earbud sales are a $30 billion a year business now, and that didn't exist before Apple did it. You go back to the iPhone. So Apple is coming in at the high end of the market, like they say they are. 2024 will be the year of will AR and VR not take over? I'm not suggesting that, but will the foundation be laid for what Apple expects it to be, which is the replacement of the smartphone? It might not replace the smartphone even by the end of this decade, but we will know by the end of 2024 whether Apple has done what they have done many times in the past, which is prove a market and allow it to gain enough credibility that then it can grow and then go mainstream. final thoughts about tech in 2023? It's been a wild year. Like I said, I've been doing my show six years about the same amount of time you've been doing yours. And this has been the craziest year, even during the COVID years. But I still love tech and I still think that it's the most

exciting area of news to cover. Well, thank you so much to Brian McCola for joining us today. Stay up to date with all things tech with his podcast, TechMeme Right Home. And of course, don't forget to join us again for our 10-minute news roundups every Monday through Friday. Thank you so much for being here. We'll be back on Monday. Until then, have a great weekend.