The Chaser Report - Targeted Missile Advertising | WELCOME TO THE FUTURE

Episode Date: March 23, 2025

Charles dives back into the world of AI products, and has noticed that everything is gearing towards military uses.Watch OPTICS on ABC iview here:https://iview.abc.net.au/show/opticsCheck out more Chaser headlines here:https://www.instagram.com/chaserwar/?hl=enGive us money:https://chaser.com.au/support/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gatigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report with Charles and Dom and welcome to the future. I'm so glad that we're resurrecting our second podcast, which I really like, which we keep forgetting to do, our dystopian tech-focused kind of vertical, as I say in the industry. So you can also subscribe to that if you want, welcome to the future. And we will try, won't we, Charles, to do more episodes over there more regularly. Because we do love just how regularly, and we're ahead of the curve on this, Charles.

This idea of Welcome to the Future is years old. The Future is proving to be just as chilling and terrifying as we had imagined back then. Yeah, although, to be honest, I think that we thought that Welcome to the Future was mainly going to be about crap Bluetooth products. That's true. And that was chilling and terrifying enough, the hilariously mediocre and misconceived Bluetooth. But as AI has rolled out, Charles, the future has changed dramatically. Yes, exactly.

So I was just Googling before crap Bluetooth products of 2025 thinking, well, this will be an easy. Go back to the world stream, sure. And I happened upon all the sort of latest reviews coming out of CES, which is, of course, the Consumer Electronics Big Expo over in Las Vegas that they hold at the beginning of each year. Yes. And what I noticed was, so there's. There's tons of AI robots coming out of there. Like, that's basically the only product that you can launch in 2020.

Fantastic. Is an AI robot. But what is sort of weird, right? And a lot of them have Bluetooth. Like, don't get me wrong. This is very Bluetooth. If I'm killed by a killer robot, Charles, let it be one with Bluetooth. Well, I think, you know, let's face that if it's using Bluetooth, it probably won't kill you.

I mean, this is trying not to. Yeah. But the thing is, what is actually chilling is that as you go through the list of, of new products coming out of CES, you're going, hmm, this seems like it wouldn't have much use for a consumer unless that consumer happened to be, say, a military organisation. Sure. Or, as we said in a recent episode, Elon Musk's private, you know, paramilitary army of goons. That might work for an individual.

So I think, Dom, we need to pivot this podcast to not so much focus on crap Bluetooth products, But crap Bluetooth weapons. Okay. Let's just take some ads while we re-pivot our entire creative direction for this podcast. Thank you for your patience. Your call is important. Can't take being on hold anymore. FIS is 100% online so you can make the switch in minutes.

Mobile plans start at $15 a month. Certain conditions apply. Details at FIS.ca. So, look, it's a bit hard to know where to start, because one of the great things about AI is it collapses the amount of time required to build the next AI weapon. Yes. So in the same way that Moore's Law allowed, so Moore's Law was the idea that every 18 months computers can double in speed because you can use the new speedier computers to help you work out how to. make an even speedier computer. Exactly.

It's a sort of virtuous cycle, right? AI can be used to help you invent the next AI weapon, right? And so a great example of this is just yesterday, Blue Halo, which is a company in the US, tested its next-gen counter-dron missile for the US Army. And guess how long it took them to develop this missile? Bearing in mind that most missile systems take like a decade to make. Oh, if it's got AI in it, I think nine months. 107 days, basically three months.

So what you're saying, Charles, is that if this sort of Moore's law continues, before long, let's say Vladimir Putin could launch a missile at, let's say, New York, and the AI could develop an entire new missile system in the time that takes for the missile to go from one continent to another, and then encounter it. But I think what will happen,

and just noting that this missile that they've developed is called the Freedom Eagle One. Of course it is. Because if you want a bit of freedom, it's a unique. And the eagle flies in the sky, guaranteeing freedom to all, except mice.

But you know in the same way how when we had the first dot-com boom, we all went, oh, wow, we'll have lots of information, we'll have a whole lot of new ways of sharing stuff with our friends and colleagues. And in actual fact, what we ended up with was just incredibly well-themed,

targeted ads. So well targeted though, Charles. Yeah. And that most of the technology was spent just working out how to individually serve you an ad that would affect you. How to get a more accurate profile of us. It's really been, I guess, when you look at the past 10 years of human achievement, that's probably top of the list. I mean, there's been to medical breakthroughs, but the ability to profile us without our consent and then use that information for advertising purposes. That is the shining achievement of the last, of this age. Well, tuberculosis has killed 100 million people since 1950, right? But there's been no new medicines developed in that time, right? Because it's been solved for the first world.

Yeah, yeah. There's a pretty big asterisk on that number of fatalities. Very few of them in rich countries. Well, I think almost none of them. Almost none of them. But in that time, we have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on ad technologies to create better targeting for, you know, singles in your area. Oh, surely billions, surely billions. And look, I should note as well, I have a genetic deficiency that I've had my whole life that makes you particularly, well, I mean, some of them I call the personality, but I have a particular deficiency, which means that I am uniquely unable to deal with particular bacteria that are covered in slime, that have got a protective layer of slime.

And there's a few of these around. tuberculosis is one of them. So my body is genetically unequipped to fight tuberculosis and this is unlikely ever to be a problem for me but if I grew up in a developing country I would almost definitely be dead now

as a result. So there you go. So I apologise to you Charles that I wasn't born in such a place but nevertheless it's pretty chilling thing, Dom, is that with the cuts to both USAID

but also the changes that RFK is making in the Department of Health in the US is everyone's predicting that tuberculosis will once again rear its ugly head across the US and that will make it more likely that it'll actually spread because there'll be strains that can then grow because they can incubate and spread here so you can play this podcast episode at my funeral if that's what you want to do anyway let's get back to the more interesting topic which is I am predicting personalised So in the same way, in the same way you have personalized ads now, why wouldn't you just, if you can develop a missile in 24 hours or something like that, why wouldn't you just, if you wanted to target Dom Knight, you just have your own Dominator or whatever it was going in. Yeah, and make it slime covered just as a sort of ultimate irony.

The free Dom. Yeah, the Eagle. Yeah. Yeah, you're going to liberate Dom from this Earth. Has it got a camera on it that has facial recognition? Is that how it works? Because if it does, it'll kill someone else on the way, for sure. That stuff's not accurate at all.

So that's one aspect of AI. It's going to be, this is, there's going to be lots of content here. So just to be clear, the AI is involved in developing the weapon system. It's not actually on board yet, because that's, I'm looking forward to that one. Oh, no, no, no. And the AI then can recognize the, I suppose it's the sort of fingerprint type thing of a Russian missile. You can therefore hone in on it very quickly. Do you remember when during the Gulf War

there were those smart bomb cameras on them and we saw the footage of it rushing ever closer to the target and then exploding and it cut out? I'm just looking forward to those cameras being hooked up to kind of Kmart style facial recognition. Yes, yes. At the checkout, Charles.

Oh, yeah, because if you don't pay, there's a little battalion of missiles and if you don't pay it, Coles, a missile gets launched. And once you're out of the store, and just sort of follows you to your car and then, you know, applies the penalty. And that'll be, and the only way to defeat it will be to wear a mask.

Yeah. I want to have flybys. You've got enough flybys to avoid being murdered. Fly dies. Yeah. Oh, very nice. Okay, so, so that's that. But then there's a whole range of robots at CES where you're just going,

I don't think there's a consumer use for these robots. Like they're being marketed as consumer. So, for example, the beatbox. amphibious robo turtle right that's a great name it doesn't have like a Bluetooth speaker that plays underwater while it kills you that would pretty cool well no it's it's so it it looks like a sort of shiny black turtle right basically right and it's got little lights on its limbs that what do you call turtle limbs what do they call they sort of legs flappers nice flippers yeah it's legs flipers is good and and so it can move

along land you can sort of flop along land and then into the water right and it's being touted as oh it features water environment monitoring biometric tracking wow and hazardous material sampling i.e it can go up to anything that looks like a amphibious drone and or you know an amphibious mine like a sea mine i see and and uh but it can do self-docking capability so so what it can is you can go off, look for mines in the ocean, and then come back and sit in its little charging station. Isn't that cute? Very cute. Thank you for your patience. Your call is important. Can't take being on hold anymore? FIS is 100% online so you can make the switch in minutes.

Mobile plans start at $15 a month. Certain conditions apply. Details at fizz.ca. The Chaser Report, less news, more often. And look, we could also program them, I guess, to just take out endangered species, right? Like, just imagine if these things, there must be some parts of the ocean where we haven't completely destroyed all the creatures. We could just sort of mop them up with the killer turtle. Because there's, the problem that Australia is facing is... You know how Kevin Rudd got all into, oh, we don't want to kill whales?

You know what happened? Back when that happened, there was like, I don't know, about 7,000 whales a year making the trip up to Queensland every autumn, right? And then they float down. And that's why you'd always be able to see whales going past the East Coast. Yeah, whale migration. So now it's up to like plague levels. Like we're talking like 35, 40,000 whales a year. Really?

It grows every year, right? Because no one's killing them anymore. Oh, well, that's before the underwater. water, I suppose, robo, is it the turtles as well that take out the whales? I mean, Japan would not need a whaling fleet that causes all sorts of problems on the surface and gets intercepted by, you know, Sea Shepherd and all that. If they had autonomous whaling drones under the water, they could, I guess, preserve their traditional cultural activity of using drones to murder whales without anyone noticing.

So that's one sort of thing. Then they've got, there's basically half a dozen robots that all look like they'd be, you know, I just cannot think of why you'd need them around at home. Is there a terminator yet, Charles? Have we got a terminator? Yeah, well, exactly. If you added a little gun to its arm, you suddenly go, oh, actually, that would work. And there's one company called Figure, Figure AI, who have a plan to roll out a robot army of 100,000 of these humanoid robots that look absolutely,

fucking scary over the next four years, right? This goes to the pace of change, right? So they launched their figure one humanoid robot, and it could only walk at like 1.2 miles per hour. So it was a little bit slow. It was something like one seventh. I'm just looking at these. They look so much like sci-fi renders of, like, evil robots that, like, from Star Wars.

Yeah, exactly. And then, but you're going, who is going to buy 100,000 of these things? And then you go, well, if you put them. Because on their website, honestly, the video on the figure AI website is of a robot pouring a lemonade. Yes, a little lemonade stand, how cute. But then you go, I don't know, I feel like that arm could easily just be, you know, replaced with a machine gun. I mean, you don't even need that, Charles. All you need is Novachok.

I mean, there'd be no problem for a robot to handle chemical weapons and put them in your drink. In your little lemonade jug, would it? They wouldn't die from the Novichok. And I reckon one of the giveaways is that if you look through their website, if you look through all their press statements and articles about them, they're not really able to tell you why they need humanoid-formed robots. Like they show a picture of them in a factory, right, all sort of, you know, being monotonous tasks. They want them in warehouses, it looks like.

Clearly, Amazon is just jonesing for this, so that there's no toilet break. But I think the point is that Amazon has robots. They don't look like humans. You don't need humans in a factory setting, right? Like, you need, like, it's far more efficient to have things on wheels if you need to move things. Yeah, and the robots that work in factories are not, they don't have to look like humans. They can just have arms and that's about it. That's true.

And in fact, if we'd be better off with wheels, I mean, if humans continue to evolve through, which you probably won't, probably won't make it. But if we were around for millions of years more, we'll definitely evolve wheels. Like, it's just a faster way to get around. Yes, yes, exactly. So the point is, the one place where you go, actually, it would be useful, is on the battlefield where you've got to climb over rocks and dales and, you know, get into tanks or whatever. I think you're not thinking big enough, Charles, because you're just, I mean, sure, you've gone to the military use and I understand what you're doing there.

But imagine if you, let's say you were a, a. a president of the United States who wanted to crack down on illegal migrants. And you were worried that maybe some of your staff members, you know, would show kind of human kindness and treat people with dignity. The person knocking on the door at 3 a.m. wanting to see your papers might not be a person before long. It might be one of these robots. Trained for facial recognition, you know, have you got a passport?

Where's your green card? And then it could simply take in or take out. the person if they could improve the immigration status. And they could just imagine them routinely patrolling around every US city, including the sanctuary cities, so-called, not sanctuaries anymore, and essentially just enforcing whatever the president wants to enforce. Who's going to be able to stop them? Well, I think not humans.

When combined with Peter Dutton's changes to citizenship law, I think this could be very good. You know, like if it identifies a dual citizen, it just sort of hashtag, you know, like quote unquote, removes that citizen from Australian citizenship. I wonder if you can give these things the vote in a referendum. That might be a way to finally get referenda up in Australia. But look, I thought that we should end, though, with a bit of good news. Oh, okay.

A non-military use. I mean, Charles, some would say that an army of humanoid robots going around and enforcing the law would be a wonderful thing. Yes, that's true. No, fair enough. But, you know, like a more humane use for these robots. Oh, if you want your soft, liberal, woke. Yeah. What would a woke humanoid robot do?

Exactly. There is also, which was premiered at the CES this year, the Hio Doll 2, the Hio Doll 2, which is the second generation. Sadly, I missed the Hio Doll 1. I can't believe I wasn't paying attention. And this is coming out of Korea, and basically, it's basically just a AI, chat GPT, bot dressed up as a doll. Oh.

So it looks like a fairly large doll. It's sort of like probably 80 centimetres tall or, you know, like the weighty things. Yeah. And the application for them is that instead of having to pay attention and talk to old people, you put these dolls in nursing homes and it keeps old people company. I can see this on their website. Yes. It's make your daily life more lively and less lonely.

Have you ever worried about your parents when you couldn't get in touch with them? Have you ever felt frustrated because you couldn't take care of their meals and medications? Imagine if Hydoll could provide 24-7 care for your parents for you. So, Charles, it's actually, it's important to understand. It's not less care from us. It's not us not giving a shit. It's us caring more. 24-7 care, just in a different way.

Yes, exactly. It has a charm and compliment function, Charles. How wonderful and see that will be. Oh, you're looking very well today, Mr. Firth. Parents, this is from the website, parents love filial piety, respect the elderly, get rid of needing to talk to them using this doll. No, Charles, it's not that you're getting rid of it. It's that you're working so hard to afford the robots.

None of us have time. We'd love to talk to the elderly. It's just that there's no time because we have to work so hard, doing money to pay for all this. Relentness technology we've got to buy all the time. I'm just looking forward to when I can chat with a robot for this podcast. How do you know you're not already? If anyone, if any AI robot company can develop a robot that is as given to wild theories as you,

I will lift my hat to them and record as many podcasts with them as is needed. We're part of the Iconiclast network. Catch you sometime in the future, future, future. Thank you for your patience. Your call is important. Can't take being on hold anymore? FIS is 100% online, so you can make the switch in minutes. Mobile plans start at $15 a month.

Certain conditions apply. Details at fizz.ca.